| rokken Member  Jul's resident PowerPC userLevel: 38      Posts: 156/634 EXP: 348477 For next: 21970 Since: 01-02-21 Pronouns: they/she From: Swapstone Hollow Since last post: 18 days Last activity: 9 hours  |
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| It's pretty cool, and so are the companies who support it (besides IBM, that is, but...) So, for those who are unaware, here's a quick history lesson: Apple, Motorola, and IBM teamed up to modify the latter's RS/6000 architecture from 1990 with a little bit of Motorola's 68k and 88k architecture to make porting the Mac OS over to it easier and emulation of 68k binaries faster. It was rolled out in Macintosh computers starting 1994 and IBM and Motorola both made their own servers and workstations, with a few companies like Power Computing joining in on the fun by making Macintosh computers out-of-house. Apple would continue to use it until 2006, when they realized IBM really stopped caring that much about anything but servers due to them shipping essentially a server processor (POWER4, including a whole separate PowerPC 405 processor core just there to boot it) for their desktops, and the previous-gen processor was starting to look a little bit dated. However, IBM continued to make them, and Motorola's successor in the POWER ISA world, Freescale, did as well, and around 2018, there was a big bang of sorts when Raptor Computing Systems set out to make a blob-free desktop workstation and found that POWER9, the most recent generation, was the best choice of what was available. So they made one, and every active chip in it that can have firmware has firmware that can be flashed by the user to an open-source firmware, making auditing easy (after all, even if it does ship with compromised firmware, you can audit the code yourself and compile the clean open-source version). There are two boards that they make -- Talos II (and II Lite), their E-ATX server board, and Blackbird, their mATX desktop, which I personally consider a modern day heir to the Power Mac G4 throne in how expandable and future-proofed it can be, with up to 256GB RAM, PCIe 4.0, and other nice features that were just emerging technologies when it was first out on the market. Following that, the libre-SOC project switched from RISC-V to working on their own POWER ISA 3.0 SOC, and the Power Progress Community started work on a laptop using the QoriQ T2080 processor, which are roughly POWER8 compatible, but low-powered (and vector math doesn't work in little endian, only big endian), running at 1.8GHz per core. They've already gotten so far as to have a fully designed prototype PCB, and are in the testing stages at the moment, giving another more-free option for a laptop on top of Framework, Core/Libreboot, and System 76. And then, you can always use a PowerPC Macintosh -- PPC32 and PPC64BE Linux and BSDs are still available and still have software support from a dedicated community; Firefox 95, for instance, will run on an iMac G5 just fine. And the Mac OS isn't left too far in the dust either -- I'm writing this on a backport of Safari 11.0.4 for Leopard on my iBook G4, and on my Dock are clients for Discord, YouTube, and the GIMP. Honestly... I love these machines and can't imagine myself going back to the Intel world. My other thread, about the boring thing, just feels... not true on these computers for whatever reason. I can't really describe why, it just feels freeing to me personally. I guess because I know that stuff like the Intel Management Engine just doesn't exist, and I'm not even really missing any of the performance of recent x64 offerings because I just don't need that power for what I use a laptop for. I will be installing an SSD and dual booting BSD on this laptop eventually just because there are some gnu utils that I need and more recent software isn't a bad thing, but I honestly don't think that Mac OS X is that bad yet, even a version from 13 years ago that's widely considered the heaviest and has left some people swearing by its predecessor religiously. Helps that it's been hacked to the core since then to get performance on par with (and some features brought over from thanks to them being universal binaries still) Snow Leopard. Do you have POWER ISA machines (Apple, Raptor, or otherwise)? If you do, do you use them as your daily drivers like I do, or just fun computing toys? If you don't, are you curious about getting one? ____________________  |
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Web browsing kinda clobbers even my beefiest G4, but this thing handles it like a champ, no noticeable dropped frames anywhere! At least, with Safari, I haven't tried Firefox yet. Only issue is that it didn't come with a hard drive, so I'm using a USB stick to boot off until my screws come in the mail for me to take the top cover off and install my IDE SSD kit. I'm definitely gonna be playing with Linux on this thing, though I'll have the obligatory Leopard/Tiger dual boots as well. I'm starting to really get annoyed with Mac OS X though, so I'll be pretty happy to have Linux up and running since it's more familiar and has a larger software library than even Leopard does.
