Re: future of debian-ppc
On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 02:20:55AM -0700, brian wrote:
>
>
> > > Personally, to keep it straight, I differentiate
> > between the more recent
> > > IBM as pSeries and the older as RS/6000. I can't
> > afford a pSeries but I
> > > can afford a 7026-H50 (dual 604e 332, expandable
> > to 4-way), 256 MB
> > > expandable to 3GB, three PCI busses over 9 slots.
> >
>
> wow, cool... sounds like a nice machine to me.
>
> > >
> > > As far as d-i, I've never been able to get d-i x86
> > to boot on anything
> > > I've got (I guess its too old, the most recent
> > being a Pentium II) and
> > > end up using 3.0 boot-floppies then either CD,
> > floppies, or the
> > > basedebs.gz on a Zip, followed by an update.
> > >
> > > Do you know how the performance of dual 604e
> > compares with Pentium 4 from
> > > a user perspective? I haven't found benchmark
> > comparisions. I'm
> >
> > It will be abysmally slow, but usable, it depends
> > what you want to do with it.
> > it is something like almost 10 years old technology
> > after all.
>
> just for the record, 604s were use in mars rovers and
> have proven amazeing hardy and durable and dependable.
> (i believe they did some work on that but they were
> suprise). now are used, finally 10 years old in
> automotive products, now they are proven reliable
> enough. it seemed that they were to the original
> powerpc as the g4&5 to the g3, they had potential.
The g3 is of the 603e heritage, while the g4 is of the 604e heritage.
The G5, aka ppc970, is in fact a power4 variant, and thus of the 64bit ibm
power variant, heritage of the power3, and maybe the orginal power cpus. Not
sure how much of the 603 and 604 is in it.
But, the 604e remains a last deceny cpu, and it maxes out at around 350 or so
Mhz, has a rather slow front side bus (66 or 100 mhz max), no backside or
otherwise l2 cache, and so on.
There is no way you can compare it with a 3ghz pentium 4 or stuff like that.
> imho, the performance has a lot to do with
> model the programming to fit the machine. new
> compilers should be making a difference, for g4/5,
> but what about these older machines ?
>
> would this new unified architecture actually make
> use of multiprocessor since they are in the g5s ?
See above, the g5 is a totally different architecture, i believe, but the 604e
indeed did have the multiprocessing enhancement that the 603e (and thus the
g3) lacked.
> if i work right it could be making video and all.
> especially with double bus structure there would
> be the throughput there to have it go in the
> background. of course, it would still far slower
> than a g5, but if you are only working at video tape
> resolutions, maybe 16 bit color, not at film
> resolution, that like maybe only 10% of the data size.
> especially if you can find a compressor input card.
>
>
>
> >
> > it will beat the pants off x86 hardware from the
> > same era though.
> >
>
> > Seriously, you would be better off getting an used
> > powermac of some sort, with
> > 1ghz-ish cpu, or one of the genesi pegasos machines.
> >
>
> i hope enough people buy the ODW that genesi can stay
> in business and put out their "g5" model,
Oh, that is right, there is the upcoming OSW, which is a dual 970MP BTX
motherboard. Quite nice, but definitively more power consuming than the
current pegasos/ODW board, which has a much cooler G4 cpu.
> but as it is i am really much excited about the
> efika board.why, because they took a processor core
> even older than the 604 and speeded it up to like
> a later g3 (ddr ram, 133mhz bus). i wonder how fast
> this thing really is. if a person were handy enough
> they could put together a custom notebook with spare
> parts probably (some crazy sculptor in my neighborhood
> did this from a mac mini - says he saved himself $500)
Well, the efika/mpc5200 is indeed a 603e core (basically the same as the g3),
but it is a system on a chip, and thus has an integrated memory controller,
like the amd64 machines, and thus latency is very good. Also, using a 1W class
cpu is rather nice for a variety of reasons.
> for those less handy or experience, you can get a
> more recent laptop and rebuild your desktop and get
> along pretty well that way, maybe.
>
>
> > > In general, what is your wisdom of using an older
> > (though still PCI)
> > > RS/6000 for usual desktop stuff? (please ignore
> > the physical box size
> > > issue).
>
> an issue for me as a visual artist (which i have
> really
> lost track of lately) is how well could g4 be coerced
> into acting like g5, ie simulating 64 bit via altivec.
> because 24/32 bit color ends up looking like 15 or
> less
> once i am done with a picture, all too often, yet my
> ancient scanner does do 48 or better, i can process
> only limited ways,especially without altivec support.
euh, i don't think the g5 altivec does have 64bit values support, it is the
same as the g4 uses.
> or else multiprocessing could do the trick. i know
> this has been sort of a pipe dream for a long time,
>
> however that is to me sort of the story with
> GNU/Linux,
> how here things can be work out over the long haul,
> and i mean like a decade time frame.
> >
> > I hope the above will give some replies.
> >
> > Friendly,
> >
> > Sven Luther
> >
> hope i am not intruding. i do like the spirit of
> old computers continuing potential. and i like the
> idea of building more effective software for them,
> that is some sort of stable development space.
Well, i do like them myself, having a variety of PReP boxes and oldworld macs
and even an (no really working anymore) powerup amiga.
But you shouldn't compare them with 3+ghz x86/amd64 models in desktop
performance levels.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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