On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 1:27 AM, Alex Perez <aperez at alexperez.com> wrote: > Folks, > > Sorry for diving in here, but at present there have been essentially > three/four suggestions offered for what hardware might be used: > > 1) Legacy Apple PowerMac G3/G4 hardware. Someone pointed out the price > of > Pros: -Least expensive hardware by significant margin. Cheap and > plentiful, and likely to only become cheaper. > -Apple no longer cares about PPC hardware. > -"Sawtooth" G4 desktops are plentiful and were manufactured > for > many, many years, due to limitations of clock speed. This is good for > us. > -Motherboard chipset supports up to 2GB RAM. > -OpenFirmware based already. No hackery required. I can > only see > this as a major plus. > -Most-closely resembles modern PowerPC CPU architecture, > supports > AltiVec SIMD extensions. > -Relatively easy availability. I've offered to help > facilitate > anyone on earth to get a used unit who would like one. PowerMac G4's > routinely sell for under $300, often for as little as $85 (see San > Francisco Bay Area Craigslist postings if you don't believe me). > -Despite claims to the contrary, good reference code is > available > for the hardware from other license-compatible sources, namely NetBSD. > Cons: -Various hardware/chipset configurations, although most/all of > these seem to be covered/supported by NetBSD > -Slower, older hardware. > > The AGP G4 PowerMac is quickly becoming obsolete in the eyes of most > mac users. Speeds for this line of Macs range from 350MHz up to > 450MHz, with third-party drop-in PPC CPU upgrades also available used > at a low cost. > > The AGP G4 Tower (of?) PowerMac is based on/uses the PowerPC 7400. For > an architectural overview of some of the specifics of the 7400, visit > http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/ppc-2.ars/2 > . Here's a brief excerpt: > > "The new AltiVec instructions, which I've covered in detail in > elsewhere, were first introduced in the 7400. The 7400 executes these > instructions in its vector unit, which consists of two vector > execution units: the vector ALU (VALU) and the vector permute unit > (VPU). The VALU performs vector arithmetic and logical operations, > while the VPU performs permute and shift operations on vectors. To > support the AltiVec instructions, which can operate on up to 128 bits > of data at a time, 32 new 128-bit vector registers were added to the > PowerPC ISA." > > > The final PPC product apple ever sold, the G4-based Mac Mini, still > costs a fair bit, around $499. The Tower G4's, however, can be had for > a song: MegaMacs.com sells 30-day-warranty, refurbished PowerMac G4 > 450 Mhz 256MB/20GB/DVD boxes for $180 USD + $50 USD for shipping to > the US48. http://tinyurl.com/3bbq2q > > For more detailed technical information on this line of CPUs, please > visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_G4 > > > 2) Playstation3 -Cell Broadband Engine based PPC. > Pros: -Lots of bang for the buck, horsepower wise. > -Has embedded gigabit ethernet. > Cons: -Not a ton of RAM (256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz ), non-user > upgradable. > -Not OpenFirmware based > -Hypervisor would take lots of coding man-hours to > program around/ > with, and would be non-portable. > -Sony not likely to support this endeavour > wholeheartedly > -Lack of some hardware documentation, although IBM > provides some > -No NetBSD port to borrow code from, Linux port works > (I have it > installed on mine) but code is off-limits. > > 3) Dedicated POWER6 hardware and/or Freescale-type PPC devkit: > Not sure what a POWER6 machine would cost, but I know the Freescale > PPC eval board is $4,000 USD. > -So expensive it would likely require corporate > backing > -Severely limits ability of potential contributors to > test on local > hardware > -IBMs lowest-end 1-way POWER5-based server costs > $7,995.00 for > 1.9GHz with 1GB RAM, although it's amazing that the CPU on the POWER5 > line has a whopping 36MB L3 cache.
Alex, what would be #4 ? -- Regards, Cyril
