Re: future of debian-ppc
> > 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.
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 ?
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,
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)
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.
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.
brian
>
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