UX, AIX, FLAYX...

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Monday 03 September 2007 17:41, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 03/09/07, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I have a number of PowerMacs for that side of things. :¬)
> >
> > The PowerPCs in Macs are the retarded little brothers of the real
> > POWER processors.
>
> Arguably, this may be so, but I'd submit two rather important riders
> on to that.
>
> [1] Whereas this was the case with the 601/603/604 and so on, I'm not
> sure it's really true any more. The "G5" is pretty much a 2-core
> POWER4, AIUI

As I've read, the 601 is more POWER than the rest of the PPC chips.  
Still much slower and dumbed down than the proper POWER (non-PC) 
versions.

And you have that backwards, the G5 is 1/2 of a POWER4 chip.  I guess a 
dual-core G5 is close to a POWER4, but it's still lacking some things, 
like cache.  And, the G5 has VMX/Altivec, which the POWER4 doesn't.  
Mostly, the POWER4 was designed to be a enterprise server grade CPU, 
and the G5 is designed to be a consumer-grade CPU.  There's a lot of 
trade-offs that they made when designing one vs the other.

I guess that a POWER3 is technically also a "PowerPC 630", but no 
resemblance to the PPC60x series of chips.

The POWER5 and POWER6 are quite a bit more interesting than any PowerPC 
chip.

> [2] All the interesting apps and the desktop-relevant stuff is on
> PowerPC. Specifically, on OS X. Even a 10y old G3 Mac with OSX makes
> a pleasant and usable machine for the Web today and for day-to-day
> use. I can't think of a lot of use for a 10yo RS/6000 except as a
> server - as a workstation running Motif or something, it wouldn't be
> much use on the desktop today.

Interesting depends on what you mean by it.

POWER has AIX and i5/OS / OS/400.  by themselves, much more interesting 
to me than anything that runs on MacOSX.  Of course, I'm "one of those 
people" who runs Linux on their work-provided PowerMac G5.  I just 
can't seem to get my boss to want to pay $10k for a proper POWER5 
workstation from IBM. ;)

Pat
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