> Andreas, now that you've had time to look a the preliminary data on the new
> AMP T4240 with its e6500 multihreading core, what do you think?

I think that for our purposes the QorIQ T5 with its fewer, higher clocked, single-threaded e6500 core(s) would be better suited than the QorIQ T4.

> Is the PPC dead?

Power Architecture is definitely alive.

> Is this device unsuitable for desktop use?

Technically, I'd say the T4 is suitable for desktop use. As outlined above, even more suitable for a non-SMP OS like MorphOS would be the T5 though (preferably a T5010, which has been indicated to be planned). Economically, the suitability also depends on the price of the chips, which is an unknown factor yet.

> Without SMP, I can't see MorphOS making much use of this

Yes, that's why I'd like a QorIQ T5010 with one 2.5 GHz single-threaded e6500 core to appear. This would ensure the best exploitation of the available T5 processing power for the lowest T5 cost.

> I would like to see a Linux implementation.

Linux support for QorIQ AMP has already been announced:

http://www.mentor.com/company/news/mentor-announces-embedded-linux-platform-support-freescale-semiconductor-64-bit-processors

> Just a dual core model would allow four concurrent threads

With the T4, yes. A dual-core T5 however would only allow two concurrent threads. Four concurrent threads with a T5 would require a quad-core chip.

> Virtualization has come to the PPC in a big way with this one.

PPC has had virtualization and partitioning capability also before the e6500, namely with the PPC970MP, PA6T, POWER4/5/6/7, PPC A2, e500mc, e5500.

> Maybe some clever tweaking of Quark could allow multiple copies of MorphOS
> to run at the same time.

From a user's standpoint I don't see much sense in running several ABox instances in parallel, but for developers this could come in handy, i.e. developing in ABox #1 on core/thread #1 and testing the software in ABox #2 on core/thread #2 (which could run a virgin installation of the ABox and wouldn't require rebooting the other ABox in case of a crash).