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A laptop is much more difficult to work on. If the motherboard itself is successful and sales are good, we could easily -at least in the case of MPC8610 and P1022- move it back to a netbook form factor. But make no mistake, while an Atom netbook costs ~300-400$, and an ARM can cost $100 less, a PowerPC netbook, at least in small scales that we're after, should cost much more than that. Probably more than $600. On the other hand, it would be really cool to have a modern PowerPC laptop again -I'm writing this now on a Powerbook G4 12", the closest thing to a PowerPC "netbook".

For now I think the best bet in terms of price, time-to-deliver and features would be going forward with the 8610. The P1022 is a sweet CPU even without Altivec, but it will just take too long -Q4/2010- plus it just occured to me, that binaries with FPU code, will not be able to run on the e500 cores without some kind of real-time FPU code translation, with performance loss.

Btw, here are some early stats:

http://www.codex.gr/index.php?pageID=&blogItem=60

[ Edited by feanor on 2009/9/26 10:57 ]

> a PowerPC netbook, at least in small scales that we're after, should
> cost much more than that. Probably more than $600. On the other hand,
> it would be really cool to have a modern PowerPC laptop again -I'm
> writing this now on a Powerbook G4 12", the closest thing to a
> PowerPC "netbook".

There is already one, albeit with a CPU that's surely not in the class of the CPUs proposed by you:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6436&forum=11

But then, you probably already know that one at least since your thread at the Haiku forum.

> it just occured to me, that binaries with FPU code, will not be
> able to run on the e500 cores without some kind of real-time FPU
> code translation, with performance loss.

Exactly, though only true for e500v2 (and before), which the P1 (and P2) series has. e500mc of P4 series (and coming P3 and P5 series) has a "desktop compatible" FPU implementation.

More (and links therein):
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6313&forum=11&start=3
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6465&forum=11&start=19

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Yes, I saw that one, interesting, but it's not what I was thinking about.

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Yes, unfortunately it applies to our case, the P4 is way too expensive and I couldn't seriously suggest it as an alternative right now. (I know we are saying the same thing, there is no argument here). I just realized that for backwards compatibility, perhaps P1022 is not the best case, though attractive overall. It would need some serious work on the FPU real-time translation, and I can't even estimate the impact of that.

> What kind of interest there is on the Haiku side?

http://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/market_research_new_powerpc_system

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true, i mixed them sorry.

Mail sent. Support MorphOS. We need new Hardware.

Mail sent. We wish new PPC based Hardware.

with Regards

jcmarcos:
Yes, the CrabFire was essentially a Pegasos 2 G4 in a
custom-built 2U-case and a stripped down Linux OS.

CrabOS, however, was an operating system made by
ex. Gentoo developer David Holm. The target platform
was of course the CrabFire.

Too bad we didn't get the CrabFire to market. We all had
our day-jobs aside and the project pretty much died.

Today, however, I work in my own company with ZyXEL
firewalls. Their latest firewall-line (USG) are mostly running
PowerQUICC CPU's. Only the highest end USG 1000-2000
are running dual-core x86 CPUs.

Mail is sent.

Any update on the figures, how many people are interested in that project?

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I was just about to paste this:

http://www.codex.gr/index.php?pageID=&blogItem=62

Feanor: is there any limit you have to reach to consider making your project alive?

I'd like 500 mails yes. I could even consider it at 300 (a typical production run is 500 units), ~60 is too few, but I didn't expect to satisfy the limit in 3 days obviously. I'm a patient man -until the end of October at least. :)

Did you try to announce that out of Amiga, Morphos and Haiku related forums? Meaby that would be a good chance to get some brand new users to our market :)

I asked also on linuxppc-dev, and debian-powerpc -though I admit I never found a reply from the debian list. I'll probably try again. I also intend to post on several more linux/ppc lists (gentoo, arch, ubuntu, opensuse).

@feanor

Don't be affraid of multiple cores. MorphOS can use them in relatively easy to implement way. Not SMP, of course, but "dual/quadcore makes no sense for MorphOS" is a myth.

@Krashan

This is interesting...in what way and to what extent could Morphos make use of extra cores without SMP?

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I'm not afraid of multicores, in fact if P1022 was out now, I would go for this one no question about that, specs are right, the price is right and it's low-power. But samples start Q1/2010, it's a long wait and perhaps people will get bored waiting. We'll see.

@ Ruud

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In the same general way as MorphOS is able to offload certain tasks from the CPU to a graphics processor, for instance.

There are reasons why seemingly every major OS supports SMP, however

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The same way as PowerUp used two different processors. I see it as a library allowing for launching processes, or even an extension to dos.library. IPC may be integrated in exec. In fact supporting multiple cores of one processor is easier than PowerUp because of following reasons:

1. Cores are identical, so you need not to use different compiler. You may write the same code which runs on both single core and multicore systems.

2. Cache coherency between cores is ensured by hardware.

Disadvantages are:

1. Only new applications using the extension may take advantage of multiple cores (on the other hand it does not break compatibility). Old apps will run on "main" core only.

2. Programmer should desing an application multithreaded way (but this is also needed for systems with SMP as far as I know).

@ Krashan

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Yes, if a single application is supposed to utilize, say, four cores when running on an SMP-capable OS, then you need to design it to be multithreaded.

That being said, you can run four single-threaded applications on a quad-core machine and your typical SMP-capable OS will manage to utilize all four cores (one per app, for instance) rather than run the applications on the main core only.

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Exactly the same thing I thought of years ago. In fact, the PowerUP framework was more difficult than this scenario.

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The "dos.library" is the one that starts processes?

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Of course, some extensions would be needed in the kernel. By the way, is anyone surprised that we are talking about SMP, and there's NO mention of Quark? MorphOS IS the A-Box, there's still a SMP capable kernel beneath, and funnily, its SMP abilities wouldn't be used.

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Yes, one minor (ahem) detail, that emphzsizes just how amazing was the PowerUP system. A computer inside a computer, an operating system inside an operating system.

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There's been a lot of talk about this since a long ago...

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Of course, these are not disadvantages of this implementation, only the obvious, natural compromises, of SMP computing. For example, sometimes, doing something on several cores is actually slower than ina single one. That can't be counted as a disadvantage of the implementation, it's just life.

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Actually, life doesn't really bother with such details, it's just computers that deal with such stuff :)

I sent my email yesterday.

@Krashan

I would do multiple core support by simply allowing (through some new Exec functions) tasks to enter and leave a special state where they are multi-core-safe. While in this state the scheduler is allowed to run them on other cores. See here.