Have a look at this gallery of pictures from the Spring of 2005. This was just before we shipped the first Open Desktop Workstation to Beijing for the opening of the MII National Linux Systems Development Lab (Genesi PR). In the gallery you will see a group of Freescale, ATI and IBM folks as well as those of us from Genesi/bplan. ATI was acquired by AMD a short time later. A few months after that the Computer Platform Division (CPD) at Freescale was closed primarily because Apple had left PowerPC for Intel. It is remarkable that this AMD-Genesi link still exists.
A Freescale Demo at FTF 2005
Pictured above there are two Open Desktop Workstations surrounded by a variety of collateral material in a Demo Stand that extolls the virtues of PowerPC based software.* Can you see the AltiVec handout? How about the one for the MPC8641D?
This past week Konstantinos Margaritis posted to Freevec MPC8610 AltiVec benchmarks against his earlier G4 (ODW) and a G5 (Power Mac) results -- Functions. The 8610 has proven to be quite the performer. The good news is despite the setback we had with the demise of CPD, the 8610 is positioned to deliver a solid comeback for the Power Architecture Technology. There are others that are developing hardware around the 8610. We won't be alone.
Developing solid general purpose host processors is an expensive and challenging business. Turning silicon into systems also has its pitfalls. We are looking forward to working with some of the same Freescale folks again. Who knows, we may see something like this once more...
Thomas and Gerald at Freescale, October 2004
The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!
*Correction posted to us by Phil Brownfield of Freescale on 08/08/08: The lower system on the stack is a Genesi ODW. But the upper is a prototype of one of our 7448 reference systems in the same type of chassis. I put that LAMP demo together and drove it to Orlando, so I'm pretty sure my memory is right. The 7448 would have been the server and the ODW ran the client - as well as running a terminal emulator attached to the serial boot console of the 7448. Both were running Gentoo Linux, except for the still-under-development kernel on the 7448 system.
Thanks Phil!
3 comments:
The MPC8610 is a great chip, so I hope to see it ASAP in a netbook and also on the desktop!
nice cpu! I'm going to realize a CRUX PPC 2.5 "only G4" preview full compiled with libfreevec.
Hello,
My concern is this: Intel, AMD, Sun, and IBM appear to be heading toward a massively multi-core future for their embedded and general-purpose processors (see Cell, the Xbox 360 CPU, the POWER series of CPUs, Core 2 series, Fusion, Niagara, and Larrabee) where a single die will have 8-32 of these less complicated cores on them. This model of processor core you're using can probably lend itself to similar feats. What's the goal for multicore?
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