Acolyte of the Butterfly
Posts: 104 from 2009/3/20
Quote:
I don't cling to any processor family really, but neither do I agree with those who think that "Power PC is out of the picture" or others who seem to *want* it gone.
I seem to have been misunderstood. I used to be *extremely* fond of PowerPC and esp. AltiVec. I really think that it's probably one of the best designed CPUs. But would I advise anyone to spend their money on the CPU now? No, not a chance! Not unless IBM and Freescale decide to actually spend some real money to extend/update/promote the architecture. IBM is not interested in anything but the mainframe (and services), and Freescale is mostly focused in the automotive/embedded industry. AltiVec is pretty much dead, the e600 is also dead, there is no e700 coming, 512x CPUs most probably won't have updates, Cell R&D has stopped (and PS3 will probably be the last PPC-powered Sony console, dunno about Xbox yet), only QorIQ and Power7, which are extremely more expensive than a similarly specced x86 or ARM CPU. So, please tell me again, why should I advise someone to spend $300-400 for a ppc-based limebook, when he could spend less money on an Atom netbook and even less money for an ARM netbook?
Believe me, I'd *love* a 8610-based netbook, in fact I have such a CPU already and it absolutely rocks! But if the big players decide to ditch the technology -which is theirs- what can we do? It's not really open "hardware" and even it were, how would one produce it without huge pockets? I'm just being realistic here.
