OK, so I am curious about somethings. I have tried to see if I could find some kind of answers online but can't.

1 - OK, so PPC has its ISA opened. What does that exactly do for us? Does it decrease the cost of PPC chips in any significant way? I know it means that anyone can now produce a PPC compatible processor without paying fees. But, does that have any major impact on the end cost?

2 - Emulation - Now I realize this is a stretch and I wasn't going to even ask. But, I want to know.. does the ISA being open now have any benefit to those writing PPC emulators?

Thanks

@DFergFLA

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1 - OK, so PPC has its ISA opened. What does that exactly do for us? Does it decrease the cost of PPC chips in any significant way? I know it means that anyone can now produce a PPC compatible processor without paying fees. But, does that have any major impact on the end cost?

No, I think most of the cost is due to designing the motherboard, writing drivers, if they did not replace all ethernet, sound, sata and so on chips every time they made new motherboard, can cut time to market, and costs. and if they did not pick CPU's with strange FPU instruction sets. They make it harder than it needs to be, and this way its so expensive.

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2 - Emulation - Now I realize this is a stretch and I wasn't going to even ask. But, I want to know.. does the ISA being open now have any benefit to those writing PPC emulators?

Well no, a perfect software emulator will be slower then current emulators, have look here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWqBmmPQP40

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Thanks, that is kind of what I thought. It's nice it's open now. But, I don't think this is going to do the Amiga community much good.

@DFergFLA

Is "open-source" the correct term? It is still governed by a committee, but IBM is no longer the dominant decider. It is now royalty-free, which I think is the more important detail, but doesn't make it open-source...

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I know it means that anyone can now produce a PPC compatible processor without paying fees. But, does that have any major impact on the end cost?

So, what had the royalty fee been?

Now, compare that fee to the cost of developing such a chip. The EDA tools are tremendously expensive. A competent engineering team costs some cash too. How long do you pay that team's salary to get to a chip tapeout?? What technology are you going to manufacture it in? Some technologies are more expensive than others. Some are tremendously expensive. You are talking millions to many millions just for masks in some technologies, and you haven't even got to the manufacturer yet.

So you might be spending 10's of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars, without considering the royalty fee, to make an SoC processor chip like we see from NXP or IBM's Power9. CellPhone part providers can afford to be on the higher end of that cost scale, since they sell several millions of units. NXP and Power9 are probably lower on the total cost scale, as they do not sell millions and millions of units, and are thus in less expensive fab technologies.

But for those that want to try and make something like a minimig-PPC, whatever the fee had been was likely too high to proceed. Now, it's at least financially possible, even if it would be a poor performer compared to an X1000 or X5000 or Blackbird or a CSPPC.

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@DFergFLA

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But, I don't think this is going to do the Amiga community much good.

Probably not directly, but perhaps indirectly. Someone may produce a new CPU or SoC as a result of this that could be used in an Amiga that is superior to what is currently available (not a high bar).

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@bison

There are already lots of high performance, low cost options available. This move is an epitaph for a technology that long passed its best before date.

The problem is the software.

But the bigger problem is the fact that the yardstick for completely bollocksing up a platform migration rests with Hyperion and now no one would dare refactor a 35 year old OS.

@ne_one

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There are already lots of high performance, low cost options available.

Then one wonders how the A1222 ended up with the P1022.

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@bison

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bison wrote: @ne_one Quote: There are already lots of high performance, low cost options available. Then one wonders how the A1222 ended up with the P1022.

Because using T1020 would have made too much sense being compatible and cheaper.

@bison

I suspect it has something to do with Servergy, the now defunct company that defrauded it's investors and which had plans for mini servers based on P1022. When they failed I'm guessing there might have been a few of those CPUs around at a cheap price.

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@WolfToTheMoon

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WolfToTheMoon wrote: @bison I suspect it has something to do with Servergy, the now defunct company that defrauded it's investors and which had plans for mini servers based on P1022. When they failed I'm guessing there might have been a few of those CPUs around at a cheap price.

Their servers were supposed to have P4080. P1022 was supposed to be on their SBC which was only shown as render.