The Wall Street Journal got an advance copy of a book from two IBM employees, in which they talk about reusing part of the Cell processor for Microsoft's Xbox. Ars Technica has some more technically detailed coverage, explaining that we're really talking about the PPE (Power Architecture) core inside the Cell processor.
Read more at online.wsj.com...
Pretty much every industry news site has written about IBM's acquisition of Transitive, the company that does cross-architecture dynamic binary translation. IBM had previously teamed up with Transitive, who is also behind Apple's Rosetta (run PowerPC OS X applications on x86 OS X), to run x86 Linux applications on Linux on IBM's line of PowerPC servers.
Read more at www.eweek.com...
From PPCNUX: Dear Power Architecture users: The long waited CRUX PPC version 2.4 multilib is now available.
Supports Apple 32bit 'NewWorl' G3, G4 and Apple 64bit G5, Genesi PegasosII and Efika, Acube Sam440ep, YDL Powerstation, IBM Intellistation POWER 185 and IBM Chrp 32bit.
Read more at www.ppcnux.com...
Terra Soft Solutions has been acquired by Fixstars Corporation, a Japanese company that specializes in the Cell processor. TSS's CEO will become Fixstars' COO, and Fixstars will continue to develop and support Yellow Dog Linux. Terra Soft has a history of working with the Cell processor, including Sony's PlayStation 3, IBM's QS20 family of blades, and Mecury Computer Systems blades and accelerator cards.
Terra Soft was one of the original companies dedicated to PowerPC Linux, espcially on Apple Power Macintosh, but they have shifted their focus to other PowerPC-related areas in the past few years, presumably caused by the decline of PowerPC on the desktop.
Read more at www.fixstars.com...
Xilinx has announced its "Virtex-5 FXT FPGA ML510 Embedded Development Platform", which is an FPGA platform containing two PowerPC 440 hard cores. FPGAs are pretty cool, especially attached to a useful general-purpose processor like the 440, but the 440's lack of hardware support for SMP coherence means users must be practically forced into running seperate kernel instances on each core. Xilinx announced support for both Linux and VxWorks.
Read more at www.itnewsonline.com...
An article at iTWire talks about running Ubuntu Linux on old PowerPC Macs (G3, G4, G5). Running Linux is definitely less resource-intensive than the latest versions of Mac OS X, though Ubuntu has actully dropped official PowerPC support. The article discusses Ubuntu options and where to get the "community supported" versions.
Read more at www.itwire.com...
A long time ago now, Apple acquired PA Semi, makers of a high-performance
low-power PowerPC chip. After much rumor and speculation, Apple eventually
reluctantly agreed to continue to make PA's 1682M processors available to
existing PA Semi customers (a move pressured by the US Department of Defense,
since most of PA Semi's customers were in the defense industry).
After all that, Mercury Computer Systems, who have done plenty of work with the
Power Architecture, finally announced their "PowerBlock 50", which apparently
is a ruggedized custom form-factor blade chassis. The PowerBlock 50 can hold a
few different types of blades, including an FPGA, a Freescale PowerQUICC III
processor, and, you guessed it, a PA6T-1682M.
Read more at www.marketwatch.com...
Express Logic, maker of the well-known ThreadX real time operating system (RTOS), announced that they have customized their NetX TCP stack to run on the Cell "SPE" coprocessor (of which current Cell processors have 8). Sony apparently wanted better performance than they could get from Linux, and the ThreadX stack acheived 8.5 Gbps with 3KB packets. There's an IEEE "Hot Interconnects" paper on the subject.
Read more at www.marketwatch.com...
Apparently Apple has hired Mark Papermaster, an executive in IBM's Power Architecure server division. However, almost before anybody could speculate as to why (Xserve? iPhone chip design?), IBM filed a lawsuit against Papermaster to prevent Apple from hiring him. With litigation flying, one can assume that he's not welcome at IBM any more either.
Read more at news.cnet.com...
From PPCNUX: Toshiba shows off the Cell-TV in Japan. It should be available in 2009. The purpose of adding a multimedia processor into a TV is straight forward. In the near future TVs have to show content via satellite, cable, wireless and via internet. It has to show not only the current formats and handle the various codecs but also those that will come. And there is only one way to ensure that your TV of today can handle the formats of tomorrow, a good cpu. Toshiba choose a Cell B.E. that can handle up to 48 streams or 8 live broadcasts at once. Read on EEtimes ...
Read more at www.ppcnux.com...