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PPC SMP Boxes
Luke A. Kanies writes "This company is working on building an SMP PowerPC box that conforms to the open CHRP spec, which was abandoned by Apple. It would definitely run linux, and it is very modular and is being designed by Dave Haynie, the hardware engineer who designed some of the Amigas (3K and 4K, I think).
Unfortunately, according to this page, the company is in danger of not making the machine if it has no market--PIOS is not convinced that enough linux people will buy it to justify making the box.
So write these guys at domeyer@metabox.de and let them know that your would buy their cheap SMP PPC box and would run linux on it. (Can you say 4-way for under $4K?) "
You bet, I wonder what kind of beowulf cluster I
could build with a half dozen of these?
PeterT
Wht the PII? The k6-3 article left me wondering why anyone buys PIIs--- Celerons are a fraction of the cost, from the same manufacturer and with identical performance. Is this just marketing? Are there no board that support SMP Celerons?
If I could make payments. I want an SMP box so bad I can taste it!
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
I dare say 75% of Slashdot readers couldn't figure out how to make use of more than one processor at all.
:)
[Clears throat]
make -j bzImage
rc5
povray
trueSpace4 (non-Linux *gasp*, but quite fun)
lcdproc (ran several thousand times at once
Guess I must be part of that 25%, or perhaps you're generalizing a *bit* too much.
Read my stuff.
Not that I wouldn't want it, but I couldn't afford $4K for a home machine. It would be cool if it were cheap to buy a 1 CPU box that you could then add more PUs when they became cheaper.
A single CPU + an upgrade socket (g3 cpu style) is going to be the base system, and it should be available for less than $1500 (complete system, no monitor)
Bob Black
4 Way SMP usually suffers on beowulfs because the memory bandwidth in the machine is not high enough to feed the processors. In addition, it becomes very easy to saturate the I/O bus if you have to do a lot of communication.
-Erik
Hmmm, good point there. It's been quite some time since I looked at PC specs, especially new stuff. I've had my head in RISC world the past bunch of months.
It would be fairly simple for them to build SMP machines that support pretty much any processor. The OpenPIC technology supported by AMD, Cyrix (and PPC?) supports multiple CPUs with no modifications. The problems lie in the bus, but even those can be worked out.
The big problem is that there is no OS that supports x86 OpenPIC. Although Linux could be modified, it would dramatically decrease the potential market. Windroids couldn't run NT (the whole reason for x86, right?), and the Mac people wouldn't be able to run SheepShaver, so they'd be left out, too.
CHRP was the reason why it would take 'an afternoon' to port BeOS.
if it runs linux I am all for it, cluster discussion whatever. Unicos is like propietary...ewwww, but it really makes the cray shine.
I concur - we run stuff on Origin 2000s and PCAs that could be easily (I won't say trivially) ported to MPI and run on Beowulf clusters - Image processing, neural net classification, atmospheric radiative transfer (RT) codes, canopy RT codes. Canopy ray tracing simulations...
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Sure, as long as everyone stops talking about Linux until it's ready for the corporate desktop.
I use the BeOS almost exclusively at home and I really enjoy it. Shouldn't I be allowed to express my wish that more hardware vendors would consider working with Be to improve the os' hardware support? I didn't realize I had to run everything past you before posting it.
Open mind==happy mind.
order them from www.bemachines.com
If it isn't even close to usable why do I stay in it all day every day?
Oh, I forgot, If I am using Be every day, I must not do anything on my machine.... Wrong, I do all my schoolwork, papers, software, and research in Be. I do all my 'internet crap' from Be. I feel BAD when I have to write software for other platforms, because I have never seen an API as comfortable as Be's.
What makes Be not usable? What is missing that keeps it from being usable?
Chime in when you have a clue, ok?
seanf();
A month ago they weren't going to build the box unless Be allowed them to port the OS. Supposedly it was going to take "an afternoon" (according to Haynie and associates) to port BeOS to this thing - and Be was stalling (probably because of their relationship with Intel). I guess they didn't get enough feedback on THAT front, so they're going through the list of OSes.
Kinda depressing, really - Dave builds good boxes.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
What are the kosh people doing now, if anything -
their website's gone non-interactive
http://www.kosh.net/
Apple did SMP? When? I thought all their multi-processor systems were master/slave-type setups.
Look around, and choose your own ground. -PF
You mean the median person. ;-)
"Average" is not well-defined, in that it can denote the arithmetic mean, the median, the mode, the root-mean-square, the geometric mean, etc.
Given a Gaussian distribution (which is the case with IQ), the arithmetic mean, the median and the mode are identical and Mr. Dobbs statement is correct.
(Just another pointless AC comment.)
Just another pointless math geek comment.
Yeah, but can you totally rid your box of MacOS altogether on those? That's something I've never quite figured out.
PCI bus != front system bus, folks.
BeOS has better threading and cleaner APIs than any other OS opn this planet. Bar none. It isn't an expensive upgrade either like you get with every commercial UNIX out there. The entire OS can be had for about $50 (what I paid for my copy).
BeOS has a great GUI that ranks with the best of them. What version of UNIX has a real GUI?
BeOS has a 64-bit journaled file system with rich attributes. Sure there are 64-bit journaled files systems out there (AIX).
BeOS h a completely free and completely functional C/C++ compiler and has software support of OpenGL.
Now true, there is nothing (save pervasive threading) in BeOS that isn't somewhere else on the planet but there is no other OS out there that has all these features in one package and at such a low price. That's the beauty of Be.
I shopped long and hard for my next OS. I looked at everything from SCO, IBM, Sun, and the free UNIX flavors (and of course Linux). I wanted it all. No sacrifices. I found an OS that gave me what I was looking for. It's named BeOS.
Doesn't seem right to me. If it's really a 33MHz bus, that would make this thing a pig... Unless I'm missing something. Wintel is up to 100MHz and it ain't all that, either.
This is great news, especially considering that if they can really do it for $4k, it won't be much more than a high-end, single CPU Mac.
I'm in.
"Folks, it's great technology, but pretty much useless to the average guy."
1. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
2. You can say the EXACT same thing about Linux. Go back 10 years and you can say the same thing about VGA. Go back 10 years more and you can say the same thing about microprocessors.
3. The point is NOT that it's useful to do but that it's kind of fun to learn, and it might be useful someday. Someday a "computer" will be a box that contains multiple independent computers (to use today's meaning of "computer").
A beowulf cluster is good and cool for what it does because it has a good bang for buck ratio. Now these may have a fairly good dollar/spec(int/fp) ratio, but stupid things like Imacs don't. Get real people.
Did anyone else notice that the PIOS website hadn't been updated since May 1998? Are these guys still actively developing these systems?
Steve M
don't laugh too hard. os x isn't going to be a world-beating performer (it's a microkernel). but the thing you really shouldn't be laughing about is the fact that os x won't be released for intel. that's the policy that is really going to sink apple.
I see a problem here. The board uses an Aureal Vortex sound chip. This sound chip isn't currently supported by Linux (and as far as I know, there are no plans to support it because of licensing, non-disclosure agreements, proprietary designs, etc).
a second hand AMD x86 at that... interesting that someone from the AMD corner is taunting a processor that can actually handle SMP.
which is the alternative for communication
Although I doubt most script kiddies here even use ONE CPU let alone multiple.
My friend, had I gotten around to composing my reply, it would have matched yours verbatim. Thank you.
sKroz
Okay, I posted this earlier, but the thread I posted it under got a negative score. (Not mine, the "first post"er above mine.) Are we sure this is a real campaign? The last time this sort of thing was posted, some dude got his email account slashdotted.
Great news and considering the other SMP PPC options available ...the ones from Motorola were like $3000 just for the board and Apple..well...there are very few (if any left) SMP PPC boxes from them and only the MAC OS would run on them without SMP support until OSX, this is an excellent new alternative at a decent price. I'm impressed.
I'd love to have that kind of power, and I know that the ppc is a superior chip to x86, but I simply can't afford to get a box like that - I need something that I can build myself and scavenge parts for. I don't know how many other Slashdot readers are similar to me, but I'm a college student low on resources, and I would think that a number of you are in the same boat.
I wish I could mail them and tell them to support the PIOS boxes, and I hope they do - when I get out of this school hopefully I'll have the money to get one, or something like it. It's definitely time to ditch x86.
-lx
The fact that BeOS for PPC will probably go away at some point, demonstrates the greatest danger of using a proprietary operating system; you are at the mercy of the OS vendor.
yeah like xwindows has really good threading. As long as unix desktops use xwindows, it's gonna suck
yeah but a quad G4 is much cheaper ($4k vs over $10k) and faster than quad-xeon. Plus no irq's to deal with. Also who wants a screwdriver shop when you can get someone who makes their own motherboards
Why must so many people argue about which OS is better. I use FreeBSD, Linux and BeOS. They each have their strengths and weaknesses.
Do any of you realize how hard it is to convince someone that their OS choice is a bad one? Especially using a very impersonal platform like this.
Even if Linus himself came up to me and said "David, stop using FreeBSD, it sucks.", I wouldn't listen to him. I have my reasons, you have yours. The options are out there. It's pointless to drag a "this OS owns that OS" thread when I can't recall even one time when it ended up with someone changing their mind.
yes. I am a geek.
xeons do 8-way. and linux works with them in 8-way. i think intel loaned someone a box to develop it on.
i'm glad be said no to apple and the g3's. steve jobs is an idiot and apple deserves to be unsupported for being unwilling to give be and others information on the g3's. i will never buy another thing from apple as long as they continue their proprietary(sp) practices. apple doesn't deserve my money or money from anyone else with a clue.
What am I missing? Doesn't this seem kind of pokey? Also, it looks like video is handled via the PCI bus.
I do like the modular concept.
"Well, engineers and physists read slashdot, do they not?"
Yeah, for about as long as they can stand the vast flood of asinine, juvenile, and just plain misinformed posts.
Be would have bigger problems if they didn't go x86. Apple dumped them and the clones-where else could they go?
I used to be on the PIOS mailing list, from what I remember the PIOS 1 project was put on the back burner about a year ago, for a number of reasons, some of them financial. The company was (last time i checked) working on some set top box units that were going to be used in germany for some funky data over TV spectrum thing (I forget the details) ;)
:)
IIRC they ran linux
The main problems were that
a) Apple dumped CHRP
b) At this point the future of BeOS PPC started looking a bit iffy
c) money
Their current project is paying them, working out the problems in the PIOS system wasn't, and without the prospect of MacOS (at least officially) and with doubts being thrown on BeOS PPC either continuing or having an official port, it left Linux as the only real OS that would run, which still isn't such a smart idea to bet on for a small company that's short on cash.
Forgive the vagueness, as I said, it has been a while since I checked, and my memory is shite at the best of times
according to my information, Be wanted a port but they never got any replies from Pios, certainly no machine....and BTW, how long is Pios saying they are gonna build a machine, has anybody seen them...ever?
-eek
Look at the processor card block diagram. All four PPCs share the same bus.
if not linux, try, another OS:
h tml
ofppc - Open Firmware PowerPC computers
macppc - PowerMac
http://netbsd.fi.gw.com/Changes/source-changes.
K6-3 does not support SMP configurations
Yeah, I'll be migrating from Linux real fast.
Yes, it is very much true that Be could make a hostile port. The PowerMac G3 (both the beige and blue versions) is actually a lot closer to being CHRP than past PowerMac designs were, which helps a great deal.
For example, consider this text from the Be FAQ about why they can't do a port:
>This information, concerning the design of the
>logicboard (including information about address
>spaces, custom logic chips, etc.), is available
>only from Apple. It is available only under
>non-disclosure, and only to "Mac OS licensees."
This statement is partially false. For example, information about address spaces is incredibly easy to determine, and requires no NDA at all -- just turn the machine on, hold down Command-Option-OF to drop into Open Firmware instead of booting, and do a "dev / ls". The Open Firmware device tree will tell you the memory locations of everything in the machine. What's more, it shows you what their names are, and it turns out that there's really only one major custom chip in the machine, the Mac I/O ASIC. Since the devices in this ASIC haven't changed very much during the evolution of PCI PowerMacs, Be would not have a lot of work to do to adapt their existing drivers. Outside of the I/O ASIC, practically everything is off-the-shelf chips which you can get docs for (the only exception I can think of offhand is the sound chip). Even the I/O ASIC is not entirely undocumented; it bears a lot of similarity to the MacIO chip which was used for Mac style I/O in CHRP.
1 person-week might be a bit optimistic, but it wouldn't be a monumental job either. LinuxPPC managed to do it, and I don't think the changes were sweeping changes, just evolution of the PPC port. Be has mumbled some things along the line of wanting to do a port right if they're to do one at all, which I can see being a valid concern. For example, Apple could tell them about bugs specific to particular chip versions so they would know they had to do a workaround... the kind of stuff which can be missed when reverse engineering a couple machine samples.
These guys have been promising this box, or some version of it, at their website for at least 2 years(!) and they still have nothing for sale. I got tired of waiting and bought Intel. Funny way to run a business - maybe they don't need the money?
I would use the cpu power for 60 fps raytrace/radiosity rendered 3D graphics.
read about em a few days ago on BeNews.com and BeOSCentral.com ...support them, they are the best hope of BeOS staying alive on PPC and are superior architecture to x86 boxen
cheers
Not that I wouldn't want it, but I couldn't afford $4K for a home machine. It would be cool if it were cheap to buy a 1 CPU box that you could then add more PUs when they became cheaper
Ditto
Hell, I'd even get one of the girls in the office to take you out to dinner with half of that $1000 to spend, just so long as we get to keep that 64 node cluster after you leave. That would be cool, a 400%(or so) performance boost in our sims.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Check out this article at CPU Central. More relevant considering a lot of Celerons produced these days are Socket 370.
Dr. Peter Kittel, Andy Finkel, Dave Haynie...
It's like a reunion =:)
This reminds me of the BeBox that Be used to make.. I really wish they still made them those computers were soo cool
When I first started using linux back in 0.9.18 the big slam against linux was how difficult it was to use and the lack of hardware support. I didn't mind the pain in getting it to work becuase when I did, it worked properly which is more than you could say for windows 3.1 (which didn't work at all)
Remember BeOS for intel has been publicly available for less than a year.. they're doing a pretty good job so far IMO and its not even based on 25 years old technology!
A company that is uncertain about whether a particular product is worthwhile needs to rethink its strategy. Especially if 1000s of e-mails from people who "would like one" but wouldn't actually buy such a system could influence their decisions.
Dave builds good boxes.
He sure does.
The Amiga 3000 was a very good design. Too bad the A4K got crippled, and that C= went belly-up before they could finish AAA and A5K.
Yup. Remember, this is news for nerds. We nerds work in jobs where we run calculation intensive programs for which multiprocessing is quite applicable. Our simulation and analysis programs regularly run on several computers at once.
Lighten up, you sound like somebody's boss. Beowulfs are to nerds what monster trucks are to rednecks: they give us a woody.
I can tell you one thing I would do with a Beowulf cluster: find out what can be done with a Beowulf cluster! There are some things I'd like to try, such as parallel database apps, but mostly I just want to see what I can do with it.
It's a learning experience, career growth, personal development, 7 deadly sins of highly effective nerds kinda thing. All "average guys" (of both genders) have hobbies and interests. Ours just happens to generate an income.
somehow they need to license that bad boy to a taiwan mobo manufacturer and get it done cheap.
they are going to have a very tough time due to the commoditization of pc mobos and the resultant dependency on volume sales.
if nothing else, it would be nice if they would open source their design -- i imagine there are a lot of EE's around who would like to kick this around.
---
John
Just for the record:
Every one of you that claims that they will buy one better fucking buy one. Don't waste this guy's time just so you can promote your pet OS no matter how cool, free, fast, or nifty it is.
"a T3E or an O2K would easily blow away your cluster simply due to RPC overhead."
You are probably right. However, with SMP, the overhead due to RPC would be drastically reduced. Would you not agree?
I don't have millions of dollars to spend on a Cray. But, I may be able to spend $10,000USD on hardware to build a Beowulf system. And the fact that SMP boards for PPC's are becoming available means that I get more power per watt than if I used x86.
Beowulf brings SuperComputing into the realm of possibility for the average Joe/Jane. What a wonderful thing it is to have such power available to you. Makes basement experimentation and research possible in this highly technical, expensive and fast moving world!
That's the real point isn't it?
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
$2049 for a machine with a 250MHz PPC604, 16M RAM and a 2.1G disk (the PIOS Magna 250? I don't fscking think so! Not when I could get a 400MHz K6-2 with 64M RAM, 8.4G disk, DVD-ROM (w/MPEG decoder), 56K modem & a (wimpy 15") monitor (the Boldata Challeng er II DVD). Not that I'm buying one of those, either, but I'd pick it over the PIOS in a heartbeat! I like the PPC & all (esp. the 604e), but I want one that can compete, price/performance-wise.
Just junk food for thought...
I think BEOS signed some deals with the PPC clone makers to distribute their OS. As the PPC group moved to CHRP Apple pulled the plug to save its own ass (I looked like Motorola and PowerComputing would be months ahead of apple with G3 CHRP Designs) because Apple bet on the 604e for the high end. the G3 was for consumer machines.
Be Could have got technical information from the clone makers who licensed the motherboard design and OS. Without the clones it becomes alot harder.
yes -- gather input from the customer.
What's up with this knee-jerk reflex? Oh, that hardware is sooo cool, I want one or ten or five thousand. I'll beowulf it. What the hell are you gonna run on it? POV-Ray? Come on...
I also like the typical response when any product containing a microprocessor or microcontroller in some form is mentioned. I bet if Rob posted "I got a new watch, it's pretty cool" as part of a quickie listing, at least five ACs (not me) would immediately post, "will it run Linux?"
Sure.
A) A "hostile" port to the a single Mac motherboard could probably be done in week (ie, hacked enough to get running.) - but Apple likes to change its designs with some frequency, meaning Be has to continouslly be creating "hostile" ports.
B) Say Be really _does_ start to get some market share. Apple decides that this is dangerous (never mind why, they would) and figures its time to cut Be off a the knees. They stick some funky stuff in the hardware and break Be's compatability permanently - and end a market they had come to depend on for revenue. For Be's investors this would be an unacceptable risk.
C) Apple could also simply haul Be into court. All it would take to put Be out of business would be tying up their key engineers and managament for 6 months with depositions, court dates, summonses etc etc. Apple wouldn't need to win, or even have a chance of winning - just making life miserable for Be would be enough. Remember Old Steve doesn't like people playing in his sandbox, especially not that funny French guy.
I think what Be has been pretty clear about is that they can't port to the Mac _platform_ without Apple's support. Could they port to a given machine without support? Sure. But thats not worth the investment - its only once they are sure that they have a platform to run on for succesive generations that they would do the port.
-N
I think the Pios One is a way cool idea, but it's a way cool idea that I have serious doubts will go anywhere. The PowerPC is effectively a dead-end for future BeOS and p.OS (an AmigaDOS workalike) use.
Yes, that leaves PPC Linux, and yes, you can obviously sell boxes that are "Linux only." But the economic argument is still weak, and it's weak for the same reason that it's weak for people to make non-Macintosh BeOS PPC boxes. As elegant as the architecture may be, one of the "Ming Specials" specced out on Be's web pages is better on a price-to-performance basis -- and it'd be better for Linux, too.
By going with PPC specifically to run either of those "alternative" operating systems, your primary benefit is intangible, and that only if you believe you need to strike a blow against the evil Intel empire. Most of the best arguments for the Macintosh platform over the PC platform aren't related to speed, they're related to ease-of-use; those arguments are irrelevant when you're not using MacOS. (BeOS is almost as easy to use as MacOS, but it's almost as easy to use on PC hardware, too. If you're using Linux, ease-of-use probably isn't the argument that's floating your boat anyway.)
Check out www.be.com
They've got quite a bit of info about what makes this OS unique.
> What they can't tell you is what they would do with said Beowulf cluster.
Maybe they think it would be fun to play with?
Is a computer only useful to you if it has a
word processor on it?
How boring.
Dave Haynie made great HW designs. Commodore Management made a pastime of squashing them.
He also wrote some great software...
The amiga custom chipsets were really quite nice,
for their time ( Ever used the copper to program
the blitter??? - great fun)
The unreleased triple A chipset would have
kicked near enough any mass market machine's
butt, at the time, and it's thanks to
Commodore Management and Medhi Ali that computing
seems to be stuck in an x86 rut....
I often see people in the Linux community
coming up with things the Amiga community did years ago (and don't forget, an awful lot of the Free Amiga stuff is done in the amiga GNU/GeekGadgets dev. environment...) GNOME even
cites MUI on the Amiga...
Ive been following the PIOS stuff since they started it and have to say this machine is VERY nice!
:) has the best design of all of them
Cool modular design, and lots of functionality... Would be a shame if it didnt come out... Ive had a lot of Amiga's in the past and the 3000 Tower (one of dave's machines
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
If the guy wants an Alpha, x86 or PPC SMP Beowulf cluster then let him. He might want to use it for Distributed.net or something, he may want to solve the Towers of Hanoi, maybe calculate PI to the next level of precision, maybe delve deeper into physics, perfect a virtual reality system. The point is that with SMP systems, it makes Beowulf even more powerful. Four processors in one machine are faster than four processors on separate motherboards (especially when running a *nix variant.) Couple SMP systems together in a Beowulf cluster and you have a substantial increase in power.
So, go back to perfecting Wolfpack - Bill.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Folks, it's great technology, but pretty much useless to the average guy.
This is news for nerds, who cares what the average people want? Let them be happy with their average little lives, while we quitely take over the WORLD! Hahahhahahahhaahahahahahaha, ha... um...
er.
Sorry.
Got a little maniacal for a second there. It's
been a long day.
-Lungo
"You know how dumb the average person is? Well, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that."
J.R."Bob" Dobbs
Becuase BeOS just screams on multiple cpus.. most apps written for be are multi-threaded so one app can be distributed across the cpus.. for computationly intense tasks, an app can simply spawn as many calulation/rendering threads as there are cpus and let the scheduler take care of the rest.
Read that one more time: "Folks, it's great technology, but pretty much useless to the average guy."
We are talking about the average guy here. The average guy has no use for beowulf, hasn't enough money for it, yet so many of them drool and moan and lust for a Beowulf cluster.
I could drop a 64 node alpha cluster in a room and I dare say over 90% of Slashdot readers couldn't do more than peg ONE processor if you gave them $1,000 to try to work the thing.
I dare say 75% of Slashdot readers couldn't figure out how to make use of more than one processor at all.
For the few true engineers and physicists that are here, Beowulf is indeed drool & lust material I am sure. But for the rest of us, it is no more useful than a wooden nickle.
most likely everyone will laugh at you. MacOSX won't support SMP (and this thread is all about SMP boxen)
I'm sure BeOS on 2 P3's will smoke anything by Apple and cheaper too
I cab explain a bit, this is what I have heard anyway.
Apple won't tell BeOS the information on their G3 computers, not just the processer. So Because this company is using apples clones, they can. However the systemboard probably won't take use of the G3 the way the apple board does. BeOS can port them selves to other clone apple boards.
It like why one a apple clone the computer can boot straight into be with out having that damn smiling mac. But on real apples, non-clones that is you have to have boot loader for the OS.
I thought that the reason that Be didn't support the G3 was that they claimed they couldn't technically do so w/o Apple's support. But according to the page referred to in this article, sources in the know estimate that it would take 1 person 1 week at BeOS to make a "hostile" port to the new PowerMacs. And the writer makes a reference to how unlikely it is that Apple will change its stance regarding letting BeOS run on its systems.
My question is this: Why does Be need Apple's permission? If it would really take a week w/o info from Apple, why not do it? Is there really some legal reason why Apple could deny an alternative OS on its hardware if Apple's intellectual property wasn't used in developing it?
linux hardware support isn't great either. I have a TNT card and sblive. Will linux support my stuff? Probably not
Um, ah... *whisper* "what does IMHO mean?"
Hail to the Sun God! He is the Fun God! Ra! Ra! Ra!
I think it depends on what you mean by 'support'. I wish I was at home so I could provide more info, but on one of the Be mailing lists recently, an engineer at Be explained some things a bit more than just "Apple won't let us." I think it had something to do with some of the fancier features of the architecture, and some deal about possibly getting in hot water if they tried to reverse-engineer those features. I could be _way_ off, though. Personally, I think there might have been a little bit of "You don't want our OS on your hardware? Well screw you, then!" That's just my opinion, though. It's too bad; I'm all for diversity...even to the point of confusion. I don't like being told to conform, even if I was going to conform anyway. Just the way I am :)
My point is not that Linux is dated, but that becasue unix has beeen around for a long time the the rough edges have been knocked off, its well understood, and, as you point out, good.
Therefore there was plenty of knowledge and willing participants around when linux was first developed, making the development and hardware support easier. Calling linux 25yr old technology was not really meant as a slam, but one of the things I do like about BeOS is that it is a fresh approach and builds on what CS has learnt over the last 25 years.
Having worked on single-CPU computers for years I :-(
changed to a 2-CPU SGI system. Suddenly you don't
notice that a compile is going on, or you are running
something CPU-demanding in the background.. or somebody else is.. the whole
thing feels much smoother. Now, when I compile Mozilla
on my single-CPU Intel box I can as well go home.
Well, later I got two more CPUs installed in that
SGI box (for a total of 4), and this is just great.. Compiling XEmacs
in two minutes flat and the system *still* feels
smooth. I'm in for a new Linux box now and I really don't want a 1-CPU box
otherwise im more likely to get an alpha, or
a VPC depending on its graphics support when the time comes.
And how do you propose to do 4 way or 8 way SMP with a PII?? They can only do 2 way and even with a Xeon, they are limited to 4 way. And forget AMD SMP....
For low cost SMP that does not require NT, PPC is the only way to go. Look at the RS/6000's and AS/400's or Bull computing in france.
--
Corruption breeds insanity.
Insanity breeds power.
Power breeds curruption...
--
Now we're nothing.
It's far easier to forgive your enemy after you get even with him.
I'm sure Rob must be very embarassed to have posted a story that isn't directly relevent to you.
True, but what i meant was, if YOU need to run NT, not the machine.
--
Corruption breeds insanity.
Insanity breeds power.
Power breeds curruption...
--
Now we're nothing.
It's far easier to forgive your enemy after you get even with him.
Be has a really nice interface which is *much*
better than KDE or GNOME or in fact anything that
runs on X will ever be. If you have used Be,
you'll know what I mean.
p233 processors are under $60 now, a nice Tyan motherboard with 8 SIMM slots, 4 PCI, 5 ISA is under $130. Whats stopping you?
All this rambling about BeOS PPC is not going to help. Face it, Be has migrated to the x86 world. And you will see more and more applications coming out for x86 only. Not every developer has a PPC box handy and just recompiling apps on PPC is going to get more difficult (x86 is ELF while ppc is PEF). And AFAIK there are no plans to convert the PPC version to ELF. Oh well, maybe a good reason to finally spend the time and help a bit more with the LinuxPPC port to my beloved BeBox!
He also designed the Amiga 2000 and is responsible unless memory serves me wrong, for the original design of the Zorro3 slot on the Amiga. Not that many people even remember the Amiga or care to but hey.. remember your roots right?. Anyway.. The boxes look fun. Too bad they aren't that nice blue Be colour like the original BeBox was.... End of line.
there are embedded ppc boards that are little endian. little endian is better for programming, but big is better for reading dumps, hex editing, ie. more human readable.
We do parallel scientific computing, and regularly use Cray T3E's with 500 processors. While I agree that ordinary end-users don't benefit from this kind of parallelism, there are lots of important applications that do.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
yeah but at least I have 2X AGP