It has been 100 defgrees F outside and I have air conditioning. I am using air conditioning. And I have a Wintel Atom HP Netbook on a plastic crate. I have two high velocity fans blowing air on it. It takes all of these methods to keep it cool.

Meanwhile, the POWER / PowerPC hardware never gets hot. The iBook G3s never get hot. The iBook G4 I am sampling MorphOS fan only turns on when playing a 3D game (NeverBall).

It appears ARM hardware is even more durable than Power. There aren't any fans in mobile devices such as cell phones, cameras, and tablets.

These are my experiences with these types of hardware.

Wintel is annoying. I kindly request you do not ever port or migrate to X86. If you do, at least select AMD computer to match MorphOS uniqueness.

Porting to ARM sounds difficult because of apparent lack of documents.

I am completely unfamiliar with MIPS hardware. But in the "ARM For The Future?" discussion, there is information about low cost, open documented MIPS hardware including MIPS laptops. Is MIPS really comparable to ARM, on the other hand?

If Power ever becomes 110% dead, or just plain too expensive, I recommend MIPS if this is a solution.

>...a Wintel Atom HP Netbook on a plastic crate. I have two high velocity fans blowing air on it. It takes all of these methods to keep it cool.
>It appears ARM hardware is even more durable than Power. There aren't any fans in mobile devices such as cell phones, cameras, and tablets.


New Atom powered tablets seem to stand heat better than iPad, so, consider looking for replacement Atom devices in future.

>... If Power ever becomes 110% dead, or just plain too expensive, I recommend MIPS if this is a solution.

To me it would look that high end MIPS chips sales growth has slowed down after freescale updated their chip offerings, and MIPS is smaller brand in high end embedded than PowerPC, so it would surprice me if PowerPC dies "before" MIPS.

And... from few years back high performance embedded MIPS did not seem lower power than high performance embedded PowerPC (MIPS just provided more cores per mm2).
((we had to use special cooling measures with it vs powerpc part))

If ISA change becomes mandatory one day, the main options will remain ARM or x64, IMHO. (today I see x64 as better, in five years I do not know, also analysts disagree where things are going, it looks bad for x64, but with intel R&D anything can happen, ARM is hot topic now, therefore it gets most of the attention today, and ARM like Power core licencing is only doing it's first steps, no-one knows if they manage to imitate any of the "ARM" hype & stuff..)


...and for the availability of developer documentation... I think it's hard to ro support complex chips if there is little documentation, so in some way, simpler chips (without integrated GPU) might be easier to use. And no matter what the selected ISA is, some companies do not give development material that easily to a small niche company. And... I doubt china developed & manufactured MIPS SoC chips have perfect development documentation ... not even after you learn china. + with dome technical trouble, it can be almost impossible to get any answer where some problem is, their culture does not allow anyone to admit there is anything wrong anywhere, etc etc....
(but perhaps I just have some personal issues with chinese R&D & stuff... )

[ Edited by KimmoK 10.07.2014 - 09:26 ]

> Wintel is annoying.

Fortunately you don't have to run Windows on Intel CPUs. How about running Linux ("Lintel") or MacOSX ("Mactel")? :-)

> ARM like Power core licencing is only doing it's first steps

IBM has been doing ARM-like licensing of PPC4xx cores since way before the current ARM hype started. ARM Ltd. has undisputedly been more successful with it, though.

> simpler chips (without integrated GPU) might be easier to use.

You can always ignore (i.e. simply not initialize) the GPU.

> in the "ARM For The Future?" discussion, there is information about low cost,
> open documented MIPS hardware

More of that:

http://imgtec.com/news/press-release/imagination-takes-open-and-accessible-micro-computing-to-the-next-level/
http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/mips-creator-ci20-development-board-now-available

And one more:

http://blog.imgtec.com/mips-processors/t-platforms-tavolga-terminal-desktop-pc-mips-linux
http://www.t-platforms.com/baikal.html


Edit: added one more

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 04.03.2016 - 14:28 ]

I like AMD-cpus, but they draw even more power than Intel-cpus.
And when changing the isa, it would be even better to use amd64 instead of x86.

[ Edited by Tom01 06.12.2014 - 23:41 ]

Quote:

I could only find a "Wintel" article and that's why I keep calling it Wintel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wintel/

I was unfamiliar with the other terms.

>>> Wintel is annoying.

>> Fortunately you don't have to run Windows on Intel CPUs. How about running
>> Linux ("Lintel") or MacOSX ("Mactel")? :-)

> I could only find a "Wintel" article and that's why I keep calling it Wintel. [...]
> I was unfamiliar with the other terms.

I made up the other terms on the spot, for a reason :-) I understand that Windows on Intel x86(-64) or compatible CPUs is referred to as "Wintel", but why would it have to be Windows anyway when you don't like it and there are other operating systems running on this architecture such as Linux or MacOSX, or even MorphOS if it will ever be ported to it?