Currently I think (yet I am biased of course) that the most readily,
cheap
PPC gear would have to be the Playstation 3, I know most people only buy them
for games, and a brief movie or two.. But it's powerpc based, and would be
rather easy to learn. The core itself basically from the old G5.
If it would help at all, I wouldn't mind providing shell access to one
or two
of mine. Of course the research would most likely be on linux, until
opensolaris was bootable/networkable. Then I'd be happy to provide shell
access to a few for development, for those who wouldn't be in the position of
buying one, or simply wanted to try it.
I think newer POWER gear is great, but I simply couldn't afford it,
unless
someone else could offer it up.. Yet simply said, the price goes a long ways,
and most can't afford to do a full project on something that scale. For a
home user couldn't, certainly wouldn't, be able to afford a machine the price
of a car.
I'd propose only the PS3 for it's abundance, I know many won't vote for
it
due to it's status. Yet, my offer still stands, if it would help out others..
even the linux developers seemed to find quite many loopholes for video
hardware acceleration also.. I am sure with dtrace, and performance could be
stunning.. even with that little bit of memory.
PS3's are used in grids, which is my personal reasoning, it's really
not far
off from a server machine.
My offer is here, whether you'd like it or not.. I'm always in irc, for a
brief talk or a thought.
On Monday 04 February 2008 11:24:40 am Yonghong Yan wrote:
> Dennis,
>
> to build those board just for the port, it does not make sense to me.
> after that, where we go? but your idea is good to start finding
> funding for that, see whether you can convince Bill. But business is
> money oriented, there has to be future and potential market for that.
>
> On Feb 4, 2008 10:00 AM, Dennis Clarke <dclarke at blastwave.org> wrote:
> > > The thing is not hardware issue here, (we have lots of available,
> > > PowerMac, ODW, EFIKA), it is mainly we do not have yet a vendor that
> > > are mass manufacture powerpc desktop/server machine with a reasonable
> > > price. This makes the projects losing the interest from the community.
> > >
> > > I support what Tom mentioned and are doing right now: make port on the
> > > chrp (ODW, PowerMAC) working right now. most of us cannot help than
> > > just thinking of/discussing the hardware issue here. But it is the key
> > > factor to drive the port. The best place I can come up is power.org
> > > and I post something there.
> > > http://www.power.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1215 , support and have
> > > your related comments there!
> > >
> > > The community involvement is very important. yet it is hard to happen.
> > > most of the project leaders is sitting on top advising with little
> > > benefits at all.
> >
> > I say we sti2ck with what works best. The ODW is the best unit to proceed
> > with at this time and the onlt reasonable thing to do is to get some
> > board made. The question should be where are the design specs and can we
> > get fifty of these things made up? They will not be cheap at all. To get
> > fifty boards made you are most likely looking at $1000 per board plus
> > some up front prototype costs.
> >
> > Dennis
>
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Christopher Frost
http://kodotai.com/roller/frostcs/
