Personally I'd have to say that Power PC is a compromise architecture,
and not a great one at that. It's not quite CISC and not quite RISC.
But rather something in between. The Specs aren't very good for
embedded work either. (Sorry Ben!) Generally when doing an embedded
design, the features required are better served by a true RISC part.
Power is holding on in this market, but the vast majority of embedded
products that require 16bit or better processors are either ARM or MIPS.
ARM has pretty much ALL the low power mobile stuff (cell phones etc.)
and MIPS pretty much owns the Network routing market for anything higher
end than your average cable modem (though many of these are MIPS based
as well, if they aren't ARM.) Do a quick search on www.linuxdevices.com
to see for yourself. Not much there is POWERPC based.
I gotta agree with you about the INTEL vs AMD thing though. I'll be
waiting for AMD to leapfrog again before I upgrade my box I think. I'll
avoid Intel chips if possible. Bad experiences every time I've ever
used one. Starting with the 80486SX33 and continuing to the present.
I've just had better luck with AMD.
-Mike
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and
wrong. ---H L Mencken
On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 19:46 -0800, Ben Barrett wrote:
> POWER is a great platform though, and there are a bunch of non-IBM
> vendors making nice boards for the chipset. I also remember drooling,
> some years ago, when I found out that Xilinx had an FPGA that could
> run 4x PowerPC cores at 400MHz... Their specs look *great* on embedded
> platforms too (temperature & power in particular).
> Watch out for the limited video support on earlier macs -- I think
> that was back in the 68000-68020 series, like the LC, though.
> Amiga fans use an 800Mhz G4 on the top end, from what I've seen,
> although there is a lot of overclocking I'm missing...
> Check out this, from April 14 earlier this year:
> http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS6404482880.html
>
> Aimless rants aside, I have a lot of respect for the chip family. I
> am a bit sad with AMD's current slip in the race as I've sided with
> their design choices, but Intel is just kicking right now with an easy
> jump to core quad, sigh...
>
> Ben
>
>
> On 11/13/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:
> I thought now that everyone is going over to Intel-style chip
> sets that the PowerPC archetecture was as you put
> it....dead??? I recall back in the high glory days of
> mac-insider leaks that they had scheduled the G's on through a
> G7. think it was MacUser mag back in 96'-the same source that
> had ACCURATELY...up to date.... mapped the evolution of MacOS
> (including their migration to a kernel based on Next and/or
> Unix) through MacOS 12! What they never counted on was the
> return of Steve Jobs, and Apple's subsequent regression back
> to the stone-age point-and-click-dependant section of their
> R&D dept. If memory serves, we are about 2 or so years behind
> their predictions. I attribute the lag to Mac hanging on to
> the iMac too long. Of all of the systems I've seen at the
> CRRC, 90% of them are iCraps.
>
> -E
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> EUGLUG mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
_______________________________________________
EUGLUG mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
