The POWER5 processor is a 64-bit workhorse used in a variety of settings. Starting with this introduction to assembly language concepts and the PowerPC instruction set, this series of articles introduces assembly language in general and specifically for the POWER5. Read more for links to all the parts in the series.
On this article, there is a title and summary, but no link to any article, nor a Read More link. Just a post comment link.
Works fine on osnews v3.
Do any major vendors or OS designers even support PowerPC anymore?
Yes, the Cell processor that you hear about so much in the console gamer world is a next-gen PowerPC processor.
From the first part of the article:
“Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, and Gentoo all have one or multiple distributions supporting the POWER5 processor, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and OpenSUSE being the only ones supporting the IBM iSeries of servers (the rest supporting IBM pSeries of servers).”
And there is AIX, IBM’s Unix variant.
There’s also Yellow Dog Linux, as in the Yellow Dog Update Manager (YUM), which was the first Linux distribution to focus specifically on the PPC architecture.
Microsoft Windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360
AmigaOS4! (and MorphOS)
Note the original posters choice of words “major vendors”.
Yet another case of Amiyperopia i see.
Edited 2007-04-03 21:24 UTC
IBM and Motorola/Freescale are the major proponents of PPC/POWER. The architecture dominates the console gaming market and competes strongly in the upper half of the embedded space. The POWER6 “eClipz” platform will be the basis for IBM’s midrange, high-end, and mainframe servers going forward.
The Wii(Broadway G3), Xbox360(Xenon), PS3(Cell), IBM(pretty much all their stuff), Genesei.
The POWER5+ CPU in pSeries servers is basically the fastest CPU on the planet for enterprise workloads.
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp
If you look at the hotly contested TPC-C benchmark, HP has just managed to par with IBM (albeit with a server available some 6 months later)… however they do so with twice as many cores as the pSeries. So in these systems, core for core, the POWER CPU is twice as fast as the nearest competitor.
IBM/AIX/DB2 obviously supports PowerPC. Xbox360, PS3 are PowerPC. Linux supports PowerPC. Lots of embedded devices are PowerPC…. you get the picture.
About the only real change recently is that Apple are not selling PPC systems any more. MacOSX definitely still supports PowerPC, though.