It thin that @FaunCB may be confusing the “Compiled for x86” with the fat binaries that included PPC and x86 code branches.
There was that three year transition where the fat binaries came out and mostly all was well. The older PPC systems eventually had issues because they did not have the horse power that the G5s had and the PPC branches started becoming less optimized (Apple aint got no more time for that). The late G4s were okay because they had high clock speeds and Altivec was utilized to the max.
By the time that they phased out support for the non-G5 and x86 architectures, they had been encouraging their developers to develop for x86 because they wanted to get rid of the fat binaries. As a result a lot of code would run on the G5s but was not optimized, and they were also running on the fly instruction translation/emulation because the G5s could handle it; it had 64bit registers used to run the x86 code in 32 bit mode. As a result, if you still managed to get a non support version of OSX on your G4 or older hardware, it was balls slow. Stripping out the x86 from the fat binary forced the PPC path which was not bad. Think of this like the current " Your battery is to weak to run the new iOS are acceptable speeds" deal. Some people on the the not so distant iPhones don’t have the issue when they by-pass this feature while others have phones that power off because they cannot handle the load (unless they have new batteries of course slight_smile:
There was coverage of this in LKML for a while as Icculus and a few others were championing a fat binary to deal with the Linux x86/x86_64 debacle. they were citing Apple’s model as poster child while also point out some of the flaws in the Apple approach. Icculus had a working patch for the Linux kernel that would work on day one.
Apple made a PPC on x86 emulator called Rosetta; I have heard about this one.
What you describe is a x86 on PPC emulator; I have heard nothing about this, and it also makes no sense, as it would be a lot of effort to write this kind of emulator for a architecture you are abandoning. Especially if as you mention, it only works well on G5.
Are you sure about this, and if so what is your source?
I may have confused the two. I would have to look through some old bookmarks.
I know PPC on x86 was hella slow. In regards from a business perspective, it would make sense for them to make Rosetta Stone work on G5s as they announced the Intel change all of a sudden and those G5s were not cheap. Again, I will have to look through my old bookmarks to validate that.
I do remember that there were some issue with the endian-ness of the two architectures as well when dealing with the fat binaries. Sometimes the files were partitioned such that little endian would be on one side and the big endian would be on another. Some vendors did not adhere to this practice and sometimes the code would be intermingled. This created parsing issues on both sides, slowing things down, following pointers to get to the other chunks of relevant data. Again, I will have to look through some old bookmarks.
I thought for endian-ness, x86 would be at the disadvantage overall.
It is in HFS+; since HFS+ is big-endian PowerPC lets you skip the byte swapping. The wikipedia article does specify “metadata”, so maybe they partially fixed this for file contents at some point?
I will look through my bookmarks. I did not know that about HFS+. It always seemed like horrible FS. I did not realized the NTFS was better on a technical stand point.
I am currently trying to remedy a NIC bug on my rig so it may take a while. My temporary wireless USB dongle is flaky and seems to only partial work under Arch. partition. My heavy lifter is my Debian SID partition.
in yaboot, your help would be appreciated there I think.
I am also writing this because @FaunCB forgot to give a link when he mentioned this thread in his post, and I know Discourse will generate a helpful link there if I link to his post from here.
I have some stuff coming up at work that will probably keep me offline for a while, but before I go, I thought I should make one final post.
Torpcoms’ News
It looks like JSharp on the RCS wiki is working on some kind of crazy Power9+Opteron cluster, and he also links to a tutorial on the OCC (on-chip thermal controller core on POWER). This is the same guy that was asking about Power Ultravisor mode, and is talking about replacing the SAS controller on Talos II with an extra OCuLink port. If you find stuff on this thread interesting, you might want to keep an eye on what he’s doing.
Another user on the RCS Wiki, MarcusC, was actually recompiling the Talos firmware on Gentoo on an Amiga X5000. Apparently it takes 18 GB for the build.
Thanks for the discussion, it’s been really nice to have someone else to talk to about this stuff.
Also, I made a backup of my timestamps for certain videos on my GitHub account, if you want to use them or copy them, consider them and anything else I’ve posted to be in public domain or CC0.
Not huge news for many, maybe one or two people, but the newest version of Icaros Desktop that is coming out in a while will have better emulation support for PPC and POWER based machines. Kinda exciting.
The Talos 2? It was originally designed to take P7, Tyan stopped making P7 boards and recycled all the ones they had so that killed Talos 1, Tyan made Power 8 boards so they called it Talos 2, then Power 9 came out and they upgraded from one to the other.
Power 8 and 9, even 4 core, are rather high in price because its mostly HPC that buys them. Theres no real desktop use for them even though they would wreck any i7 that tried to compete.
Though I still drool at the 2 core 16 thread P7 chips from time to time…
Raptor originally had plans to make a POWER7 board? I’ve only heard about the Talos I crowdfunding attempt, which would have been POWER8 if successful.
From what I’ve read, (as I have no personal experience buying enterprise/workstation CPUs) the POWER9 chips are actually cheaper than their x86 counterparts, but the mainboard is more expensive.
From what I’ve read, yup. Thats the company’s hardware history. And since they aim at the consumer /[ college markets they’re way at the bottom of the totem pole as far as Tyan and other manufac’s are concerned.
If P9 really is all that much cheaper than the X86 parts I might actually look into putting a POWER machine together for myself. Dream computer right there.
The pricing thing was a comparison with server-grade stuff like Xeon/EPYC, consumer CPUs will obviously be cheaper. With some quick napkin math, the 8 and 18 core chips are the most reasonable price points at the moment:
Cores
Price
Per-core
4
375 USD
93.75 USD
8
595 USD
74.36 USD
18
1425 USD
79.17 USD
22
2625 USD
119.32 USD
Keep in mind that POWER9 is SMT4, so I don’t know what Xeon/EPYC chips (SMT2) would be equivalent to these.
Adi Gangidi was comparing STREAM benchmarks with POWER9 vs an EPYC 7601 and a Skylake Xeon 8176; but those were tests for memory bandwidth, so I don’t know if those are really the best processors for comparison.
I should note that the Barreleye G2 uses LaGrange modules, rather than the Sforzas in the Talos II. LaGrange has more memory channels:
I would love a Power9 machine. I have several PPC Macs and miss using them. A 867Mhz PowerMac G4 was my first personal computer and it was great for years. Till OSX Snow Leopard and support started to fade away,
slight_smile:
