Linux PPC build?

[richmond62]

I can see perfectly viable reasons for making a Linux PPC build.

But NOT for PPC Macintoshes.

A PPC Mac running any type of Linux rather misses the point that PPC versions
of Mac OS (10.4 & 10.5) are still perfectly good operating systems for 90% of
things, and are better, frankly, than PPC Linux for day-to-day desktop stuff.

This was shown to me recently by my younger son being extremely happy that I had got a G5 iMac
running Mac OS 10.5.8, and is now pumping out his House Music like nobody's business using
the version of Logic (version 8 ) we bought quite a few years ago for my Mirror door G4 (sadly
now a thing of the past). He is also working on some stuff using the version of Photoshop
(CS2) that Adobe are giving away free.

What is needed are the following:

1. The ability to go on producing PPC Mac standalones.

2. The ability to produce Linux PPC standalones.

3. A Linux PPC build of Livecode.

#1 is pretty marginal IFF Livecode are prepared to offer "No Guarantees, No Comebacks"
versions of the most recent versions of LC Commercial for anybody who wants to develop
commercial stuff either ON or FOR PPC Mac.

I have found a shop where the owner has about 10 G5 iMacs lurking in his back room, and he is quite happy to
let me have them at 50 Euros a go. I am quite seriously thinking of buying the lot for my school and
chucking out [or, giving them away to less well-off kids that I teach]
all the Pentium 4 machines I have in there at the moment, as well as all the cathode ray tubes!

[FourthWorld]

Oh yes, they do. One of the reasons I can not use liveCode server for one of my bigger projects.

Give it another week and whomever owns that server will likely replace it with something more standard.

With so much of the world's sofrware designed and compiled for x86 and ARM, I can't imagine PPC will remain viable even on servers much longer.

On the desktop, Wikipedia notes only two Amigas as current PPC deployments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Desktop_Computers

[richmond62]

"Give it another week and whomever owns that server will likely replace it with something more standard. "

Somebody I know has got it in for PPC processors. I wonder why?

Now, let's suppose someone wishes to use Livecode for more than "Richmond's widgets" and do something rather clever:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/?ln ... -psys-usen

Saying PPC is about to vanish sounds very like what a lot of people were saying about Apple when that chap Amelio
made a Horlicks of things before Steve Jobs was brought back from Siberia!

[FourthWorld]

"Give it another week and whomever owns that server will likely replace it with something more standard. "

Somebody I know has got it in for PPC processors. I wonder why?

Don't shoot the messenger. The dominant architectures today are x86 and ARM. I had no hand in making things that way, i just note that's what happened.

IBM has one segment of its server division using PPC for probably the same reason Apple abandonded it: microchip architectures are expensive to produce, and require broad-scale amortization to see a positive ROI. Now that the other two players in the AIM consortium left long ago (Apple and Motorola), IBM is left holding the amortization bag, and apparently they're determined to hit break-even some day no matter what it takes to get there.

In the meantime, ask yourself: if IBM really believes PPC is the future, why do most of their machines run x86? Why aren't we seeing droves of other OEMs - or really, any at all - lining up to launch new products using PPC?

Right now PPC use appears to be limited to companies with an unusual degree of legacy commitment to it: IBM and Amiga. Neither is in the top-10 OEMs. Most of IBM's hardware moved out to Lenovo many years ago (who, ironically enough, have been doing very well with it, enjoying fastest-in-the-industry growth rates for the last two years running). As for Amiga, how many people do you know who purchased an Amiga any time within the last decade?

I believe there are many fine things about PPC, but Apple didn't ask my opinion when they dropped it, nor did the other 99.9% of OEMs when they decided to standardze around x86 and ARM.

in your case, I'm not sure I follow the IBM angle at all. Are you using a current IBM PPC server, or a consumer PC from Apple that the vendor stoppd supporting long ago?

Saying PPC is about to vanish sounds very like what a lot of people were saying about Apple when that chap Amelio
made a Horlicks of things before Steve Jobs was brought back from Siberia!

"Vanish" implies a level of absoluteness unlikely to happen, which is why I didn't use rhat word. While the PPC model you're using is from Apple and indeed very unlikely to ever come back, given the breadth of computing solutions in the world I think we can rest assured there will be a small number of PPC machines in use for some time.

But it seems equally likely the number will only continue to get ever smaller every year forward as it has for the last several years prior, even if it never reaches absolute zero.

Besidies, none of this has anything to do with Mark Shuttleworth, except perhaps to demonstrate his generosity in helping to support the community-driven Ubuntu PPC project, which was really my own point here.

[Peter Wood]

Richard

I think that you seriously under-estimate the revenue and profit related to its Power system products. IBM's major customers such as the US Government and the world's top banks and insurance companies buy them and services related to them. They spend many, many times more than small and medium enterprises.

What you say about the demise of PPC is most probably true in the telephone, desktop and commodity server market which could be why IBM refers to them as Power processors rather than PowerPC processors.

Peter

[richmond62]

Anybody looking for any type of personal computer running an ARM processor 10 years ago would have felt that
ARM had had it, just like Richard feels about PCC at the moment.

[malte]

Richard

I think that you seriously under-estimate the revenue and profit related to its Power system products. IBM's major customers such as the US Government and the world's top banks and insurance companies buy them and services related to them. They spend many, many times more than small and medium enterprises.

What you say about the demise of PPC is most probably true in the telephone, desktop and commodity server market which could be why IBM refers to them as Power processors rather than PowerPC processors.

Peter

Cannot agree more... AS/400 / i-Series and their heirs will not die anytime soon. One of the reasons being they support the DB2 best. You will see many government institutions along with larger corporates using those systems. And "you do not get fired for buying IBM" still applies also.

Best,

Malte

[FourthWorld]

Richard

I think that you seriously under-estimate the revenue and profit related to its Power system products. IBM's major customers such as the US Government and the world's top banks and insurance companies buy them and services related to them. They spend many, many times more than small and medium enterprises.

And one of the more noteworthy use cases is NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, which runs on a PowerPC RAD750.

What you say about the demise of PPC is most probably true in the telephone, desktop and commodity server market..

Exactly. Call it myopia, but I tend to focus on my time on systems I deploy to. If I were competing for contracts for building interplanetary robots for NASA or A/R systems for the world's largest insurance companies I might have more recent experience with IBM's Power chips.

But as it is, I write apps for consumers and small businesses, and though I have delivered software to Fortune 500 companies it tends to be for relatively small work groups in specific divisions. In the consumer/SOHO space, it's all x86 for the desktop and ARM for mobile (though the 14 nm Broadwells may upset that balance; we'll see), so for now I just happily type away on commodity hardware and enjoy the ROI that comes along with R&D costs amortized across 99% of the market.