I wouldn't say that. GCC enjoys just as good ARM support as any other compiler. The thing is that more people doing GCC development are more likely to have a PC or Mac - which basically puts them in the x86 or PPC camp.

There aren't a great number of desktop ARM systems in the world but this is changing really fast - especially as boards like Beagleboard, Gumstix, Sheeva etc. get more popular.

LLVM 2.6 will include pretty good ARM7a support and NEON intrinstics. If you hated GCC's code generation, you have an alternative now. By the end of the year it may be possible to build a kernel, and entire userspace using LLVM CLang.
Anything with a PCI slot. Marvell's ARM platform supports PCI Express. There is nothing stopping you - with the right compatibility technology for which with our firmware is done entirely in software, at a firmware level - plugging in a PCI Express graphics card here and enjoying that same support.
Except Atom sucks. The great thing about the PPC SoCs is high integration. Atom does not have that. It also has higher performance, an out of order CPU core, AltiVec, and similar power levels.

With the Cortex-A8 you get Atom performance at realistic 1W power levels at the same price. With the Cortex-A9 you get Core Duo performance at Atom power levels for the same price. Several PPC engineers have basically said, this is the end of the platform - there is no reason not to move to Cortex-A9 now except to support existing customers. If your existing userbase is 1500 users with no coherent wants or needs, it's hardly worth designing new chips for them when you can subsist on the old ones. And designing new boards around old chips could be a waste of money when you could migrate them all to new technology (m68k->PPC, PPC->x86..) as Apple did.

I'd be all for a Cortex-A9 desktop board. All we need is a chip that has a couple PCI Express buses.

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Matt Sealey

But b4 ppc is gone, a last geeral purpose ppc board would be nice. And, you never know whether ppc vanishes completly off or not. There is a lot of code base existing and not always the smart choice is the right choice.
Why x86 dominates the (desktop)world? Not because x86 is brilliant, but because of MS and Intel's good marketing. Okay, I actually don't see those opportunities for ppc,but ut is not warranted that ARM will succeed i the general comuting market. The market is sometimes driven by uncalculateable factors. Thus, if you think there is the chance to sell off some ppc boards for your expense or a little profit - go for it.

Here a single board based on 8640D:

http://www.globalspec.com/FeaturedProdu ... er/79089/0

Could be useful?

Anyway powerpc is not dead, in reality is the opposite, as long as non x86 archs grown up even powerpc arch have more opportunity.

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http://deliriotecnologico.blogspot.com

But pasemi still sell powerpc?
Why not freescale doesn't buy the PWR processor from Pasemi, if Pasemi dismiss it?

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http://deliriotecnologico.blogspot.com

PASemi only sell to existing customers and buying the processor technology from PASemi would have to be at the will of Apple; it is not only just a CPU design but there are many patents held by PASemi that Apple now own, that make licensing a CPU core more complicated.

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Matt Sealey

It doesn't work that way.

You can't just buy a product of that complexity and assume that you can maintain (and enhance) it on your own in a reasonable time frame. In other words, you need people to go with the product. If Apple acquired PA Semi for its people and their skills, why should it let them go? It wouldn't make sense.

Only 100 people would buy a PowerPC system?
Hard to believe ...

Not exactly, only ~120 people sent email that they would be interested in buying a PowerPC system. I guess disbelief is hard to beat.

Actually there is a quite cheap and powerful ppc system around *now* ;D

as was nicely advertised last CCC:

The Playstation 3 is also an option, but given that they have changed the Slim so it can no longer run an alternate OS or take a hard drive, and the XBox 360 is as hard to run your own unsigned code on without "illegally" modifying it and voiding your warranty as any other games console, how are these developer- or user-friendly native development systems?

Simple answer: they're not :D

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Matt Sealey

That's why I've bought a fat PS3 one. 8)

I guess, it doesn't matter. alea iacta est

Are more people interested in ARM than PowerPC?

It's not cast yet, there are still some remaining options. :)
Not in my emails but I would guess, that in general yes. I even received mail from ARM people about a A9 board. Also, judging from Haiku downloads (>100k downloads for the Alpha R1 so far) and the increasing interest for the ARM port -which moves faster than the PPC port, thanks to Francois Revol- I would say that ARM gathers much more interest than PowerPC. Still, I do believe there is a niche for a PowerPC board for the right price, even now.

A hundred k downloads - that's amazing! Just to give you a number of the MorphOS user base (which would probably drive a ppc board). Until 2 days ago only 632 ppl *registered* MorphOS. I guess many ppl didn't register due to the steep price tag, but een if only one out of ten ppl testing MorphOS regsiterd yet, that would keep the number of downloads in the few thousand range. 100k downloads is something MorphOS can only dream of (I still guess MorphOS is underestimated on my 1.5 GHz G4 it is astonishing ultra fast and reasonably stable). Hopefully, the userbase increases a bit, but it will keep very low anyway...

btw, gentlemen, what's your general opinion of ibm's latest ppc SoC - the 476fp? it seems like the next chip to go in the blue genes.