Apparently the P.A. Semi acquisition was covered by a number of keynotes at the Critical Embedded Systems Conference, a conference about embedded systems in the military, and expectations range from optimism to pessimism about the future of P.A. Semi's current Power Architecture processors. Ray Alderman from VITA confirmed the rumor that, due to their use in military systems, the U.S. goverment is working to "ensure continued supply" of PA6T parts.
Read more at www.pennwellblogs.com...
On the heels of Apple's acquisition of P.A. Semi, and the uncertain future for that company's PA6T Power Architecture processors, both Debian and MontaVista have announced support for those same processors. (OK, Debian didn't really announce it, but a closed bug report is about as good as it gets.) The Debian integration has been in the works since January this year; one can only speculate about for how long the MontaVista support has been negotiated.
Xilinx has released Virtex-5, an FPGA attached to 1-2 550MHz PowerPC 440 cores. Previous Xilinx FPGA products used only 405 cores, so this apparently is a very big deal, since the 440 enables much more processor-intensive workloads. Linux support is available through MontaVista and Wind River.
Read more at press.xilinx.com...
Apple has confused the industry by acquiring P.A. Semi, makers of high-performance low-power single- and dual-core PowerPC SoCs. Since 5-13W power consumption isn't even in the ballpark for handhelds, the broad speculation about PA6T parts in iPods and iPhones is incomprehensible. Rumor has it that P.A. Semi's military/aerospace customers are upset about Apple declaring the nascent processors end-of-life, hinting that Apple won't even continue with Power Architecture. So why did they do it? We guess time will tell.
AMCC has released "Arches," a dual-processor reference board for the PowerPC 460GT processor. The 460GT is software-compatible with 440. Arches uses the mid-size AMC form factor, and was designed for AMCC by Silicon Turnkey Express, who have also designed for Freescale PowerPC parts. (One might wonder how a dual 460GT compares to AMCC's announced dual-core Titan processor, and if one has any thoughts on that feel free to send us an email.) Interestingly, AMCC also ships TTCP, DBench, HINT, STREAM and MPEG-4 benchmarks with the board, to make it easier for customers to evaluate the system.
Read more at www.businesswire.com...
From PPCNUX: Ubuntu's new version 8.0.4, Hardy Heron has finalized its testing period and is now available for download (though the server might be a little slow at the moment). The good about is: The PPC version is a 100% on time.
Read more at www.ppcnux.com...
From PPCNUX: Earlier today Engadget, MacRumors and Forbes report that Apple is about to acquire P.A.Semi.
Read more at www.ppcnux.com...
CODEX, the consulting company behind libfreevec, has released version 1.03. libfreevec is a collection of Altivec-optimized routines which show impressive performance improvements over glibc (and sometimes over Freescale's libmotovec as well). libfreevec is mostly focused on string/memory operations at the moment, but could be extended into matrix operations and higher-level algorithms in the future. The FAQ is also interesting reading.
Read more at www.freevec.org...
From PPCNUX: Yesterday IBM announced three new Power6 server series: the Power 595, the Power 575 and the Power 570.
Read more at www.ppcnux.com...
From PPCNUX: IBM's Linux Technology Center (LTC), known to contribute quite a bit of code (see LWN.net article or recent Linux Foundation article) and employ a number of prominent people in the Linux / OSS community has put together a blog roll that at any given time covers a number of interesting topics related to LinuxPPC. Makes for interesting reading of how-tos, findings and opinion.
Read more at www.ppcnux.com...