Re: Let's start a survey on our userbase
On Sun, 2025-09-21 at 17:11 +0200, Linux User #330250 wrote:
> IMHO the biggest issue for POWER4 and PowerPC 970 (G5) is it's
> Endinanness. Most modern software no longer gets tested or Big Endian,
> and Power/PowerPC transisioned to Little Endian as well, so those old
> PPC machines were additionally left behind on this front.
IBM's own Unix, AIX, still defaults to big-endian on POWER as far as I know and
on Linux, they're still default to big-endian on z-Series mainframes (s390x).
So, despite what some people may think, support for big-endian targets is still
going to stay relevant. At least as long as IBM exists. I don't think they're
going to switch their high-end systems over to little-endian anytime soon.
> Additionally, e.g. the PowerPC 74xx (G4) is left behind as it's 32-Bit only.
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. Are we arguing that a 20-year-old
CPU can't compete with modern designs? Does anyone really question that?
> Could be that some software won't work because it expects SIMD
> extensions as well, but AFAIK at least for the G4/G5 AltiVec/VMX was
> never as well established as was SSE on x86.
At least ffmpeg and VLC support AltiVec and I'm sure that compilers can optimize
certain code to use AltiVec extensions when even when the developers of a certain
software package did not explicitly add support for it.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer
`. `' Physicist
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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