The Inquirer has posted details of an interesting new dual-core SoC PPC processor. I wouldn't mind an OS4 compatible board based around one of those

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Who do you serve, and who do you trust? - Galen

sounds sweet

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Amiga is additive coz it is fun to use

@DrBombcrater

Damn you! you beat me to it.

That processor looks really pretty good. I think that Eyetech or Genesi or one of the other motherboard manufacturers should be taking a good look at it - it brings everything that is needed in a single processor. You could arrange it as follows:

Dual-core PowerPC
PCIe x16 (for graphics)
2x GbE (we don't need 10GbE, maybe in a couple of years)
PCIe x4 (for high-end PCIe cards, or a link to a PCIe southbridge like ULI's or ATI's)
2x PCIe x1 (for low-end PCIe cards)

The SPECint score isn't that amazing, but the SPECfp is pretty good. Both are pretty good when the power consumption is taken into account.

By DDR1066 I expect they mean DDR2-533.

@DrBombcrater

Thanks for the info - sounds indeed very interesting

Here a link to the original press release on the company homepage: http://www.pasemi.com/news/releases/2005_oct_24_1.html. I just wonder how much pins these thing will have...

IMHO the smaller PA6T-1361E would also be nice to start with for an amiga board... Olegil?

Also it seems these are based on the 970, as VMX is mentioned in the specs...

All in all good to see that other companies start making PPC compatible chips

edit: hmm, me wonders if Apple knew about these

Last edited by fisk on 24-Oct-2005 at 10:43 AM.

Quote:

edit: hmm, me wonders if Apple knew about these

Me too. This is an amazing opportunity in the PPC desktop market. Hope to see something coming out.

@FithisUX

I think there's a chance Apple will sustain PPC in parallel to the x86 line.

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"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." - Oscar Wilde

In 1996-1997, there was a PowerPC X704 (533 MHz) from Exponential.

Exponential got licenses from both IBM and Motorola.

The company failed after Apple refused to use X704 on its machines.

Will P.A. Semiconductor follow the same path?

Exponential Bankruptcy

@thread

Why not post your replies under the news article, rather than here in the forum? You get more (i.e. twice as many) AW.net "user points" for a post in a news article...

There's some interesting and useful comments so far - time for a copy/paste operation!

Perhaps the mods should close off these two "duplicate" threads?

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@asian

If Expotential failed because Apple refused to use their chip, and for no other reason than that one, then this company is already toast because Apple has already begun it's abandonment of the PowerPC platform. It's a bad idea to make a single possible customer the entire reason for your company to exist, especially one that's already turned it's back on your product before you're finished designing it.

But I don't think that's true here. Look at their target audience, storage applications and routers along with supercomputer things. While the PowerPC market was somewhat small back in Expotentials days, Apple is now a very very small segment of PowerPC even before they decided to jump ship. There's an enormous market out there that has nothing to do with the "personal computer" market, with tons of systems vendors to potentially sell to, and Apple is miniscule in comparison to this. And Apple is still a relatively big company, from our perspective at least.

I'm curious to learn a bit more about this thing, does it have RapidIO, is their SIMD unit Altivec compatible, can their dual memory controllers be used in an address interleave fashion to increase memory bandwidth, and other comparisons with 8641, so I can better know which one to wish for more. :)

And they are talking about performance per watt like Intel hasd made fashionable. Someone needs to define a unit of measurement so that kind of talk can actually have some meaning to it...

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All glory to the Hypnotoad!

@billt

Quote:

f Expotential failed because Apple refused to use their chip, and for no other reason than that one...

The Exponential chip was designed specifically for Apple, it used an exotic technology (BiCMOS) to get very high frequencies and burned 60W which was unheard of in those days.

The problem which caught them was it was slower than intended and the "conventional" PPCs had gotten very close before it shipped, Apple just went with them. The (then) Apple clones would have used them but Apple refused to supply the ROMs they needed.

Quote:

I'm curious to learn a bit more about this thing

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT102405055354

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Whyzzat?

The Inquirer has got a new article on the PA6t-1682M. While it doesn't look like it adds anything that hasn't been stated elsewhere before, it looks like a good pedagogical summary of those things, more or less.

Linkety link.