And cherrypal is back with $99 netbook based on arm.

http://tweakers.net/nieuws/64384/cherry ... net+Nieuws (dutch)

http://translate.google.com/translate?j ... l=nl&tl=en (english translation)

Actually it's MIPS32 (Xburst CPU). The article is wrong.

Freescale has just announced the MPC5125, a sister to the MPC5121e that was in the original CherryPal and LimePC. This is interesting news, as it seemed last year that Freescale had dropped PowerPC for consumer products, preferring the ARM-based i.MX series.

Main processor features (from press release and product brief):

e300c4 Power Architecture core.
32KB each of Icache, Dcache, and internal SRAM.
SDR/DDR/DDR2/LPDDR 16/32-bit DRAM controller.
Display interface supporting WXGA/720p, 24-bit color (no graphics coprocessor as far as I can tell, though it does have "hardware accellerated bleeding").
Dual 10/100 Fast Ethernet media access controller (MAC).
Dual USB 2.0 On-the-Go (OTG) controller
800 MIPS of performance at less than 1 watt.
Suggested retail price of $10.95 at 10,000-unit quantities.

They've also announced a $119 development module for Freescale's low-cost Tower development system. The module has 8GB NAND Flash, 256MB DDR2 DRAM, USB OTG, HDMI, 10/100baseT Ethernet, and SD card.

Here's the MPC5125 home page: http://www.freescale.com/mpc5125

Here's the press release:
http://media.freescale.com/phoenix.zhtm ... highlight=

It gets even more interesting. The Tower module (TWR-MPC5125) is actually made by LimePC, and the out-of-the-box demo runs LimeOS.

It's nice to see a cheap PowerPC-based system back in play. It will be interesting to hear how well it runs.

The TWR-MPC5125 is described here:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/sit ... dG06C10898

Click on the "Documentation" tab to see documents referencing LimePC and LimeOS.

Hi John, that is interesting. What a pity it took Freescale all these years to finally do this. towergeeks.org is registered to Freescale. We are reminded of the beginnings of Power.org and how much we could have accomplished had they supported the first Efika/Open Client or even the Pegasos/ODW prior to that with a bit more gusto. After we joined power.org we played a major role in convincing Freescale to join. Unfortunately, we could never convince Freescale or IBM that if they wanted to build up a developer community they needed to do things like this in Power.org. That would have been the place to do all this. The original presentations are still online...

http://www.genesi-usa.com/demo/powerarchitecture

http://www.genesi-usa.com/gallery/powerslides

All that was happening five years ago. Communities build volume. TI understood this and launched the beagleboard and the associated site. Google Analytics let us know how often the TI folks visited this site before launching theirs. TI did a great job. It seems Freescale is finally understanding the potential. It is just too bad Freescale took so long. It is hard to measure the opportunity lost. There is about to be an i.MX site launched too. It would be so much more clever to have all this coordinated through a single Freescale site.

As for the ill-fated 5121e there are plenty of threads here on PowerDeveloper.org that can be searched. The 5123 was supposed to be next. We never were able to develop the hardware for the 5123 reference design. We were contracted by Freescale to do this, but the management responsible for the chip were let go. They did not understand the market. This new team seems to get it. We wish them success.

The title of the thread is Cherrypal which like the LimePC was a fiasco. LimePC actually started right here as one of the original Efika Developer Projects. Matt Sealey and Andre Siegel of Genesi wrote the marketing requirements document for LimePC. We developed the first software. Cherrypal started as a LimePC with a cherry logo instead of a lime. Both Cherrypal and Lime were managed by frauds. LimePC may be linked from the Freescale site, but we seriously doubt you will see anything in volume or legitimate from either organization. Freescale would do well to stay away from those folks.

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

That said the board design and the card-edge "elevator" is a clever concept. In essence, a desktop MPC5125 blade system (except you probably can only have one MPC5125 :)

It's quite plain to see that the low-cost, expandable development board for the general community (rather than $3000 developer boards for nobody in particular) has finally gotten it's place in the industry as a whole, from the Efika to the Beagleboard to whatever is next, it is such a shame as Bill said that it took everyone but us nearly 5 years to realise it.

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Matt Sealey

how's the cache in the MPC5125?

Indeed late. very late. But better a late try than no try at all. If freescale is able to generate a bit of momentum it could hold a chance to rejoin the ppc area agin. But I am sure you're watching the scene anyway ;-) . A very, very low cost 512x based device can still be of some interest. At least I am still having fun with my Efika 5200B - another league than an iMX 515 or Atom of course but it has enough power for surprising many things.
At least interesting and nice to see that ppc is not completely dead yet, but that here and there some new chips get introduced.

PowerPC arch has no chances....same as MIPS.

chances for what? becoming the next big buzz? - unlinkely. but sticking in the industry, backed up by a dedicated community and market - why not? only last week i got an embedded industry newsletter (globalspecs') about a loongson2f-based pc104 board. i was surprised, to say the least, to find that cpu in a brand new industrial board. also, how long has 68K/coldfire been supported in the industry now? cpu platforms with once-lush ecosystems like the 68k, mips or the ppc don't just vanish overnight.

also, let's not forget how ARM started its career - as a niche cpu platform used mainly for british domestic home micros; there was neither an intel nor a microsoft behind it. the success or demise of a cpu architecture is determined by its cost, inc. cost of maintenance/ownership, its fitness for market-demanded applications, and finally, by the level of evangelizing by the vendor. both ppc and mips have been suffering from the latter - their respective vendors not being successful at promoting their architectures. unfortunately, initiatives like power.org do not compensate for the lack of cheap ppc devkits on a mass-market scale.

let's face it -- what genesi and companies of that caliber have been doing for the ppc is something that should have been done on a much larger scale by motorola/freescale and IBM themselves. for comparison, intel's new cpu's have always been available in mass-market-priced boards months after the cpu introduction.

of course, from a corporate POV, it's much easier to put the blame for the demise of your cpu architecture on technological/engineering aspects, than to see the hapless marketing effort. engineering takes the blame and goes does with the ship, marketing shakes off and moves on to greener pastures - such is life in western corporate cultures.

While x86 and ARM are the undisputed leaders right now, PowerPC and MIPS are still quite strong in their niches. Don't forget that PowerPC is in both PS3 and Wii, and because of far better performance per watt is less prone to heat-related failures, e.g., those reported for the Xbox. PowerPC is used throughout the data communication space, and in many automobiles. Just because a product doesn't have "PowerPC Inside" stamped on the case doesn't mean there must be an ARM or x86 inside there.

IMO, ARM has been extremely successful due to a minimalist philosophy they had from the beginning: low power, small number of transistors, and cheap licenses. There's a wonderful quote from ARM co-founder Dr. Hermann Hauser: "When we decided to do a microprocessor on our own, I made two great decisions. I gave them two things National, Intel, and Motorola had never given their design teams: the first was no money, the second was no people. The only way they could do it was to keep it really simple." This resulted in a very clean, very simple architecture with a minimal number of transistors, at least originally. It was low power from the beginning, since it had to operate in a cheap box with no fan.

ARM was in the right place at the right time when cell phones happened. They had a tiny architecture that didn't take many transistors and was very low power so battery lifetime was successful. They made the very smart decision to provide very cheap licenses, figuring you make a lot more money selling millions of ten-cent licenses than thousands of dollar licences. They've never had their own fabs, so they don't need the latest x86 processor to pay for the cost of the new US$100M fab. They just need to pay the salaries of a small number of really smart people.

IMO PowerPC could have been there instead if they had priced PowerPC licenses cheaply. Instead, there are only a few PowerPC chip makers (IBM, AMCC, Freescale) and very few really cheap PowerPCs. Xilinx has an FPGA with internal PowerPC, but it's an a high-priced series and as such you're usually better off with a cheap Xilinx Spartan FPGA coupled to a low-cost AMCC.

And then you have Sony: they're upset that people are using PS3's as general-purpose PowerPC boxes and their latest version of PS3 and software updates try to keep you from doing this. Hello? Maybe it might -- just might -- be a good idea to make a nice little desktop product based on the PS3 design?

Personally, I far prefer PowerPC to ARM. It's a much cleaner architecture. The original ARM was very clean (though limited), but over the years it has evolved into something of a dog's breakfast, albeit a very high performance one. But ARM is much cleaner than the x86 will ever be... got to keep that 8008 backwards compatibility!

"less prone to heat-related failures, e.g., those reported for the Xbox.."

Hrm.. The Xbox 360 carries a Tri-Core PowerPC CPU..

You're right. I did too little Xbox research on Wikipedia and found that the original Xbox had a Pentium III and assumed that it was the one with the heating problems. Thank you for the correction.

So let me amend my last post to include Xbox 360 in the list of video game consoles that prefer the PowerPC architecture. Given Microsoft's insistence on x86 for their desktop operating systems and application programs, their endorsement of the PowerPC architecture for Xbox 360 is very significant and speaks for the long-term success of PowerPC.

According to this report, the Xbox 360 heating problem was due to the graphics chip and not the PowerPC: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showAr ... =208403010

Yet another PowerPC chip announcement, this time from Applied Micro (formerly AMCC). The APM 821xx is intended primarily for network-attached storage and media servers. Sampling now, <$20 quantity 10K.

The APM 821xx SOC has a single Power Architecture 464 core clocked at up to 1 GHz, TCP/IP offload engine for networking, on-chip RAID 5 acceleration, PCI-Express, SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 OTG, 256 KB Level 2 cache, FPU, 16-bit or 32-bit DDR-2 SDRAM memory controller, integrated turbo security engine and NAND Flash controller.

It will be shown next week at ESC Silicon Valley, April 27 - 29.

http://investor.appliedmicro.com/phoeni ... highlight=

Always good to see PowerPC competition and new products. I've always had good luck with the AMCC (I mean Applied Micro) parts. They're based on the the IBM embedded PowerPC 403 and 405 parts that IBM sold to AMCC many years ago.

Very shiny...

It might be good for a desktop board too (like the Efika PPC, with a PCI Express slot for graphics) but I would be kind of miffed that a 3.5W power level got ruined by having to use a 30W graphics card :)

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Matt Sealey