Yet Another G5 Roundup

Lawrence Person writes "This article on Low End Mac talks about why the PowerPC 970 is so fast, covering its superiority to Intel chips in Multiply Accumulate, double precision arithmetic, and Fast Fourier Transforms, among other operations. A short, clear article for those who don't have the time to wade through Parts 1 and 2 of Ars Technica's exceptionally detailed dissection of the 970/G5." Trollaxor writes "IBM has a neat two-page history of the PowerPC architecture, detailing its evolution from the first RS/6000 chipsets in 1990, through the POWER ISA, and into the processors that we know and use today. A very interesting read."

Comments

FFT is a good mesure

[Baikala]

Fast Fourier Transform is bread and butter for the scientific comunity. This is a good news for sys admins at research centers like me.
Maybe I have a chance at getting one or two of these babies for the next year budget.

Re:Yea, but does it run Linux?

[dhovis]

I think the tech documents say that if the OS does not provide thermal management, the fans will run at full speed. So it will be interesting to see if the thermal management will be provided under Linux.

Terrasoft (makers of Yellow Dog Linux) has said that they will support Linux on the G5, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to provide thermal management that won't void the warrenty. Terrasoft is an offical Apple Value Added Reseller, and they sell dual boot MacOS X/Linux systems that carry the full Apple warranty, so Apple may provide them with the info they need or else a binary driver that they can use.

It may also be that Apple will make the thermal management code open source as part of Darwin. If that is the case, then it can probably be converted into a kernel module without violating either the GPL or APSL.