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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.
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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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...