4 ms·

The death of the powerpc is a bit sad to me as it feels like the lineage of the 6502 has really ended as of now. As much as everyone hates too on x86, I fear on

The death of the powerpc is a bit sad to me as it feels like the lineage of the 6502 has really ended as of now. As much as everyone hates too on x86, I fear one day it too will disappear and everything will be on some arm isa

theandrewbailey 2y ago
PowerPC's sort of descendant/predecessor POWER is still developed and sold. Raptor Computing seems to be the only company selling POWER based systems to the general public.
- fb03 2y ago
  I wonder what is the appeal of these systems, today? On what demand would one chose a POWER system like this one (which I think it's pretty cool) over a, say, more standard X86 or ARM server?
  - theandrewbailey 2y ago
    Raptor's big selling point is open source firmware. There's not a single bit of closed source software anywhere on their system. It's why they don't have any POWER 10 systems.
wk_end 2y ago
What's the connection you had in mind between the 6502 and the PowerPC? As far as I know they're geneologically unrelated. The 6502 was descended from the 6800 - one of a few ur-microprocessors - and somewhat clumsily evolved into the 65816 before its brilliant but highly specialized design (hard to target for HLLs and which fundamentally assumed memory could be accessed roughly as fast as the CPU was running) couldn't keep up with the times. As far as I know that's pretty much it for its branch of the CPU family tree. Meanwhile - and I admittedly know less about this - as I understand it the PowerPC is ultimately descended from the IBM 801, which was a high-end workstation and server chip. There might've been some influence from Motorola, and Motorola made the 6800 - the 6502's father - so in that sense the 6502 and the PowerPC might be very distant cousins. Still, that's pretty tenuous. My understanding is that the original ARM team was directly inspired by the 6502 - so if its legacy lives on anywhere, maybe it's there.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  IIRC PowerPC was IBMs core melded to Motorolas bus design, so that Apple could easily integrate it into their existing board designs (and make upgrade cards)
kalleboo 2y ago
I didn’t have high hopes for RISC-V outside of the cheap low-power chip space but watching ARM try to destroy Qualcomms new fast chips makes me believe we may see a big ARM/RISC-V showdown in the future, the instruction set wars aren’t over yet

theandrewbailey 2y ago

PowerPC's sort of descendant/predecessor POWER is still developed and sold. Raptor Computing seems to be the only company selling POWER based systems to the general public.

fb03 2y ago
I wonder what is the appeal of these systems, today? On what demand would one chose a POWER system like this one (which I think it's pretty cool) over a, say, more standard X86 or ARM server?
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  Raptor's big selling point is open source firmware. There's not a single bit of closed source software anywhere on their system. It's why they don't have any POWER 10 systems.

wk_end 2y ago

What's the connection you had in mind between the 6502 and the PowerPC? As far as I know they're geneologically unrelated. The 6502 was descended from the 6800 - one of a few ur-microprocessors - and somewhat clumsily evolved into the 65816 before its brilliant but highly specialized design (hard to target for HLLs and which fundamentally assumed memory could be accessed roughly as fast as the CPU was running) couldn't keep up with the times. As far as I know that's pretty much it for its branch of the CPU family tree. Meanwhile - and I admittedly know less about this - as I understand it the PowerPC is ultimately descended from the IBM 801, which was a high-end workstation and server chip. There might've been some influence from Motorola, and Motorola made the 6800 - the 6502's father - so in that sense the 6502 and the PowerPC might be very distant cousins. Still, that's pretty tenuous. My understanding is that the original ARM team was directly inspired by the 6502 - so if its legacy lives on anywhere, maybe it's there.

kalleboo 2y ago
IIRC PowerPC was IBMs core melded to Motorolas bus design, so that Apple could easily integrate it into their existing board designs (and make upgrade cards)

kalleboo 2y ago

I didn’t have high hopes for RISC-V outside of the cheap low-power chip space but watching ARM try to destroy Qualcomms new fast chips makes me believe we may see a big ARM/RISC-V showdown in the future, the instruction set wars aren’t over yet