PowerPC Open Platform Motherboards Finally Here

Cajal writes: "IBM's POP (PowerPC Open Platform) is a standard for making PowerPC-based motherboards. It's been out for years, but no one did anything with it. That's now changed. According to a story on PenguinPPC, Mai Logic is finally making POP motherboards. Finally, we can buy PowerPC motherboards without dealing with Apple."

Comments

Price!

[jweatherley]

One board costs $3,900 - I think I'll still be dealing with Apple for my PPC needs - get a dual CPU and a GeForce 4 included for that price!

Yellow Dog

[SlamMan]

You alreayd could get PowerPcs without dealing with apple. Terra soft [terrasoft.com] makes the iBriq. Adimitidly, its not designed for desktop use, as its about the size of a cdrom drive, and needs an adaptor to use a pci slot, but if you really don't want to deal wwith apple....

Re:Only part of Mac OS X is open source

[Nerant]

Only the core layer of OS X is open sourced: it's what we know as Darwin..
What makes Mac OS X really attractive on the surface is it's GUI, which is not open source. Check out a nifty diagram here to see how it all stacks up.
The answer is yes: Darwin will probably run easily on one of these boards, (there is an intel port of darwin). It is unlikely you'll get Aqua and the other supporting layers to run though, bearing in mind that it is unlikely Mac OS X "as is" will run on one of these boards without significant code surgery.

Re:Apple Proprietary ROMs still an issue?

[demon]

No, not really. The Classic Mac OS (with the 9.x line) no longer actually uses a hardware ROM. The way it works with the modern (aka NewWorld) systems is that the Mac OS ROM is stored in a file on disk, as an ELF executable wrapped in an OF Forth script, which the OpenFirmware loads at boot and invokes. Apple has actually gone a long way in terms of separating the hardware and the software in their newer systems.

The main thing is that the OpenFirmware has to have support for (a) HFS/HFS+ filesystems, and (b) loading monolithic ELF binaries. Shouldn't be too hard to duplicate that kind of stuff without stepping on Apple copyrights.

Re:Only part of Mac OS X is open source

[Matthias Wiesmann]

Wrong, if Darwin runs on those board and the processor on those board are PPC processors, then the higher levels of OS X will run. Only the Darwin layer interacts with the hardware, all the other layers interact with the Darwin kernel (that's one point of having a kernel). So Aqua cannot "know" if the motherboard is genuine Apple or not.

This is one reason people were able torun OS X on unsupported machines.

The high-level components like Cocoa and Carbon don't run on Darwin/Intel because the available binary code is PPC code.

Teron PX Board supports PPC, MIPS, and X86

[paladino]

I think it would be great to have one motherboard that supported processors from multiple vendors. Mai's web site says that the Teron PX board will support PPC, MIPS, and X86 processors.

Brings a whole new meaning to "Dual Boot".

You could develop in X86 Linux, shutdown swap processors, reboot in PPC Linux recompile and test.

Re:Teron PX Board supports PPC, MIPS, and X86

[MrResistor]

I think it's much more interesting to have them running in parallel. I'm envisioning a system where you have a "master" CPU, perhaps chosen at boot, and the other 2 running as slaves. That way you can run binary-only apps on their native hardware and without hurting your uptime. IIRC, the Amiga did something like this, though you couldn't choose the "master" at boot, obviously.

Seems to me this would make for an incredible cross-platform developement tool.

Re:Sorta

[Matthias Wiesmann]

• Carbon and Cocoa do not rely on ROMs
• Classic relies on a ROM file in the OS9 system folder
• The real ROM is used only for booting

price factor

[moosesocks]

Quite a few people here aren't really clued in on the facts. First, the $3900 price tag is for an evaluation model. Intel and AMD do the same thing to vendors... nothing new. And, yes, there have been many $4000 PPC motherboards around.

Second, if you read the PR on MAI's site, you can see that they plan to release the boards for SIGNIFIGANTLY less then $3900. The bigger flipside to this is that they also plan to produce (or license to produce) PCI cards and embedded g4 devices from $300-$600 with SMP capabiliy. (cool.. i can dual boot now.) similar cards sell now for $2000+

Third, nobody seems to mention this chipset's ability to use PC hardware. I suppose this would be pretty easy to accomplish, but it's still a cool feature. The only limitation here would be driver support (not a HUGE issue. i dobut many people will be playing quake on this anytime soon. the first boards would sell to developers).

Fifth, as a small sidenote, microcode solutions (http://www.microcode-solutions.com) plans to relesae a suite of ppc emulation products this spring. They plan on offering a hardware board, as well as a software based product. Of course, many are skeptical and believe it is vaporware. They currently offer a ppc amiga based macos emulator. (there are tons of amiga ppc motherboards out there. there are still a disturbing number of amiga users (shame gateway cut off their funding, right when they were about to make a comeback.)

Finally, the chipset itself sells for $20. This is comprable to what chipset vendors such as VIA charge for their hardware. I would expect to see other companies support this sometime.

Another issue is legality. It's perfectly legal to run LinuxPPC and beos. NOT macos. Sure, OS9 doens't need a hardware rom to run, but it is written specifically in the EULA that macos may ONLY RUN ON APPLE HARDWARE (yeah... it's in caps in the EULA... lawyers really abuse their shift keys!). Another project, MOL (mac-on-linux) which hopes to produce a mac compatibility layer (what wine is to windows, mol is to macos). Supposedly, it works well.