Re: Debian/ppc64el feasiability to become an official architecture
On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 12:14:08AM +0100, peter green wrote:
> Another question the ftpmasters will likely have is what is the
> relationship between ppc64 and ppc64el. Is there hardware that will
> run ppc64 but not ppc64el? is there hardware that will run ppc64el
> but not ppc64? is there hardware that will run both? what is the
> relative prevalance of each of these. If most hardware that can run
> ppc64el can also run ppc64 then are there significant technical
> advantages other than compatibility with badly written software of
> going little endian?
There is no ppc64 in Debian. There is powerpc which is 32bit (although
it does have 64bit kernels available as well as some 64bit libraries
similar to i386).
My understanding of the reason for ppc64el is that when you work with
video cards and use things like CUDA, the fact that the video cards are
designed for little endian x86 machines means that the data structures
they expect are little endian. Hence when doing high performance
clusters, having your host running little endian makes it vastly more
efficient to work with video cards as accalerators since you don't have
to do a ton of work to endian convert all the data before sending it to
the video card and when receiving it back.
--
Len Sorensen
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