Slashdot Mirror
Will Darwin be Ported to the IBM Power 4?
eadint asks: "I have heard rumors thorough the net that Apple plans to port Darwin to the Power
4, 64 bit chip. Currently I work for a university. We are using Apple
computers and are considering the platform for our number crunching capabilities. According
to this Motorola has
no plans on producing a 64-bit chip. Does anyone know if Darwin can or will
be ported to a true 64 bit platform."
These are just roumors but I heared this from several sources that apple are talking to AMD about a 64bit only OS.
Apple might need to get faster chips to compete but making something so close to a PC will allow clones.
Alternatively apple could just port their OS to the hammer PCs and keep making their own PPC machines.
The OS is sexy enough to make a large wodge of money.
Especially if it comes with M$ office which is the only reason a lot of people dont wish to use anything other than windows.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Itanium 2 faster then Power4? I doubt it. Again, this is apples to oranges comparisons. Also, has ANYONE ever seen a Itanium system? I thought not. I work on RS/6000 machines and I really doubt an Itantium 2 system could even compare to a IBM RS/6000 (Power4 Based). First off, most RS/6000 machines come equpied with SMP (sometime only having one chip installed, but most are complete). Also, the Regatta p690 machine is THE BEST in my opinion. Only thing that comes close might be the top level Sun machines. Also, this same technology was used in Deep Blue (the machine that beat Gary Kasparov many years ago). All that Deep Blue was was a specially programmed SP system (RS/6000 Super Parallel). Comparing Intel's yet to be produced Itanium 2 which is an evolutionary step of the Itanium which did not really sell all that well. Point is....POINT ME TO THE BENCHMARKS! Since you can't(no silicon kind of stops that), well we shall see. Personally, I would rather run AIX on it. It's proven at least.
Gorkman
There are some benchmars out actually. Make of them what you like.
This is the sheet for itanic2 1GHz.
And you can compare it to the others
Its still too early to see what effect the itanics will have but they look quite respectable, if they havent priced them selves out of the parket
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I was working on a project designing a board that used Motorola's 64bit PPC. They canned the chip in October 2001. They annonuced the cancelation in private meetings to their customers that even knew about it at the first Smart Networks forum in New Orleans. It was NEVER going to be the G5. It wasn't even going to be one of their desktop processors. It was going to be built using their "Book-E" embedded processor spec, and the MMU architecture for it was completely different from the one in the green book. I think that The "we make shit up" Register started the G5 64bit rumour.
Even when the 64bit chip was still in the plans, the G5 was going to come way before it, and was always going to be an evolution of the G4 core. So, the rumors have taken us from the begining, back to the truth, with a whole lot of made up plot in between that never happened.
The quickest way to determine if this is a live product would be to start the port using opendarwin.org and see what happens. If you start to get odd or wierd static from Apple, you probably tripped across a secret Apple project and you'll know. If not, then you might just turn it into a live product anyway.
It would certainly be smart both for IBM and Apple to support this as a first step to Mac OS X on RS/6000. Apple could use the increase in its upper end and it would help IBM push some more boxes.