Slashdot Mirror
Yellow Dog Linux Finds New PPC Hardware Vendor
inditek writes "C|Net's News.com reports that Terrasoft Solutions, the vendor that sells and contributes to the development of Yellow Dog Linux has found, and continues to look for, some hardware alternatives based around the PowerPC now that Apple is moving to Intel chips. They say Apple's move makes for a good opportunity and more open space for a chip they think has a lot of life left in it." team99parody also writes "This is great news for customers like the US Navy who rely on Linux-on-PowerPC for important tasks like sonar imaging systems."
Pegasos sells non macintosh, linux-based PPC machines. At least, they would if they weren't currently out of stock.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
AltiVec is big in military applications. Sonar, radar and such are imaging problems at heart.
So was Apples move speculative or desperate?
Probably more on the desperate side. Laptops are now slightly more than 50% of the market. I don't have any numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more for Macs, where you don't get people buying big gaming desktops and the cheapest desktop isn't less than half the price of the cheapest laptop.
The G5 is power-hungry, hot, and decidedly not suitable for mobile and low-power applications. It probably never will be, given how little pull Apple has with CPU manufacturers. And the G4 is more than ready for retirement.
Academic arguments on the relative advantages of PPC and x86 just don't play into the issue. If Apple wants to continue to sell computers, they really have no choice but to jump ship on PPC.
We finally get on Slashdot and nobody mentions the bloody company name!
:)
ARGH!
http://www.genesi.lu/
Neko
In addition, the radar set they ended up using (because of the required output) put out so much waste heat into the radio room that a bigger AC unit had to be installed in that space than initially designed, but there wasn't anywhere to put it so they stole ceiling space and made the room 5 feet tall.
It could have easilly gone the other way and they could have searched out a better radio from an obscure manufacturer (Transmeta, if they made radios...)
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I would say that it has more to do with the fact that the system designers looked at the availiable COTS CPUs and decided that the PowerPC was better suited to the task. Most likely the PowerPC's SIMD/vector unit (AltiVec) was superior to the offerings of other similar processors namely Intel's SSEn on the Pentium IV.
After the choice was made to go with the PowerPC/AltiVec processor piles and piles of hand optimized ASM code was created by some very well funded geeks to perform what I'm sure is an ultra high bandwidth and sample rate siganl processing system.
I couldn't find solid numbers.
o /powerpc2.htm
e rPC_microcontrollers
But I went hunting for the types of systems that Power chips are being used in.
From http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/p/p
"Design win summaryPowerPC processors are used in many products, among which are the following: Apple Macintosh post-68k models (called PowerMacs), IBM RS/6000 UNIX workstations, Cisco routers, Pegasos (a Commodore Amiga spin off), Amiga acceleration boards, the Nintendo GameCube video game console, and many embedded systems such as the TiVo personal video recorder. Sonnet Technologies and Daystar manufacture PowerPC-based CPU upgrades for use in Macintosh systems. Microsoft's Xbox 360 game console, to be available from the 2005 holiday season, includes a 3.2 GHz custom IBM PowerPC chip with three symmetrical cores."
There's some more on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Embedded_Pow
Considering that the embedded market is many times larger than the desktop market, I'd be surprised if there weren't more Power ships than x86 out there.
Also PPC chips in the F/A-18E/F for a variety of systems, I think they are 200-400 MHz models if I remember correctly, my manual on it is...in a pile of books somewhere.
Part of a huge flamewar between Linus, AST and a number of other people on microkernel vs monolithic kernel design. Here's the entire original thread if you're looking for some good Sunday reading.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
even the macos9/10 still have/had segmented memory.
the "64bit" osx also is segmented but you won't run into that limit for quite a while. windows 32bit and 64bit face the same limitations.
there is no such thing as flat addressing, because costs keep it out of the picture. current end-user 64bit cpus use 48bit virtual memory addressing and 40bit physical, including x86-64.
in a way manufacturers have a point... most cpus won't last more than 5-10 years... i just wonder though how much die space and costs are saved through this kind of corner cutting.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
No.
Yellow Dog is based on Redhat. Debian is... Debian. Score one for Debian.
Yellow Dog comes from a single company that will sell you a support contract. Debian is an open standard, if you need a support contract you can choose from several competitors, and if the one you choose initially gives you any problems, you can dump them and move to another without having to change your software. Score two for Debian.
Debian supports nearly as many platforms as NetBSD, meaning that you can run a very heterogenous environment, PPC here, X86 there, ARM over in that corner, SPARC behind that wall there... and have the same tools, use the same methods to administer each one, regardless of platform. Yellow Dog runs on PPC, so if you have anything else in your environment, you'll have to learn to admin Yellow Dog, plus something else. Score three for Debian.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Look here
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
A lot of flight control systems were PPC for this reason, but last I heard, there was a strong resistance to Linux, I think in part due to perception, and the rest due to the cost of validating / certifying it as a flight control operating system.
I don't know if the perception is warranted or not, I know it's a pretty tough set of shoes to sell. The Aerospace industry is very conservative, not wanting their products to crash and burn (literally of course), so it takes a decade or so to make changes.
Try a bit harder... Refer to http://www.tundra.com/NewsRoom/PressReleases/2005/ pr_03_01_05.cfm
When the rumor mill first started going about the recent change to x86, I read somewhere that Apple's orders for PPC chips amounted to 5% of the annual capacity for 1 of IBM's PPC factories.
This system may be using a PPC and running Linux, but that does not mean that it is a simple PC. More likely than not, this is a very complex real-time system with many processors. The Linux is probably only used for the user interface area to give the user a somewhat familiar interface to the system. The software that the user commands is probably highly specialized to run on the particular hardware it is built on. Redesigning systems like this is not as trivial as being able to "just change processors, recompile, and you are back in business". Especially with a government contract, you will probably find it easier to pay a premium on buying end-of-life parts rather than designing a new system.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
"If the average geek AND the average developer can't have easy access to PPC machines then Linux will stop being cross platform in a few years."
You are overlooking the veritable army of linux developers being paid by the embedded guys to make linux run on ppc. These guys will still be there long after Apple stops using the architecture.
There are literally *dozens* of ppc varents supported by linux. The PC-style ppc systems are by far in the minority.
You can get the numbers from the Apple 10-Q fillings (page 26). The sales ($$) and units shipped numbers are close with laptops trailing slightly in 2004. In June of 2005 the laptop numbers have slipped. This is probably due to the age of the Mac Laptops. (No processor upgrades.) In the same time period sales of Mac desktops and servers have grown 50% while laptops sales have grown by less then 10% (comparing 3 months in 2005 and 2004). Meanwhile other manufacturers have enjoyed tremendous growth in laptop sales.
Apple switched to Intel because Apple needed a strong laptop processor. It is a desperate move after waiting too long for a competative laptop PPC chip.
The company I work for builds instrumentation -- we use PIC or ARM for the low end; and, PowerPC for the high end. It's anecdotal, but representative...