Re: ppc64el porter situation
On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 09:01:26PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> Are they developing new powerpc products?
AMCC? I have no idea. Maybe not. Freescale certainly seems to be.
> Their latest products are also pretty ARM.
That they are.
> Are you talking about new e6500 SoCs, or are you only talking about
> support for existing products?
New ones.
> I have no doubt they will continue to provide support for e6500 for
> several years, just like they supported SoCs with SPE cpus in their
> SDK until December 2015.
>
> They released only two e6500 based SoCs for QorIQ (T2080 and T4240),[1]
> and for one of them samples of ARM replacements are already available.
They are not intended as replacements, just alternatives. Some people
have powerpc code and see no reason to port to a little endian platform
(which can be a pain in the rear). Some would rather have more options
for CPUs and would like ARM. The IO bits seem to be identical between the
powerpc and arm chips, so at least that only needs to be developed once.
Now I suppose if demand disappears they will change their plans, but at
least the place I was working until a few months ago, we were told that
they were going to continue designing new powerpc and arm chips.
We explicitly asked if powerpc was a dead end going forward (we were
already using freescale ppc chips in some designs, and arm chips in
other designs, so either was an option for us).
> These are anyway big endian, but the general situation is that there
> is not much powerpc development left that does not depend on IBM.
I do agree that people are not running little endian on the freescale
chips.
--
Len Sorensen
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