Asus hopes upcoming Eee desktops are Eeequally Eeenticing (ars technica) [LWN.net]

Asus hopes upcoming Eee desktops are Eeequally Eeenticing (ars technica)

Posted Feb 1, 2008 16:48 UTC (Fri) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033)
In reply to: Asus hopes upcoming Eee desktops are Eeequally Eeenticing (ars technica) by drag
Parent article: Asus hopes upcoming Eee desktops are Eeequally Eeenticing (ars technica)

I've just had a thought - anyone influential from IBM reading?  Now IBM no longer has its
Thinkpad business, it can afford to well and truly smash the mould (and put another nail in
Microsoft's coffin by so doing). 

Also Linux doesn't need x86. Maybe build it with a Power PC CPU? Even less watts for the same
oomph. And harder for Microsoft to crawl on board.

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Asus hopes upcoming Eee desktops are Eeequally Eeenticing (ars technica)

Posted Feb 2, 2008 5:53 UTC (Sat) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link]

IBM sold off Thinkpad to get out of the low-margin commodity hardware business, to focus on
services and high margin hardware like mainframes. I think there'd have to be a big shift in
corporate policy for them to get back into consumer hardware.

Asus hopes upcoming Eee desktops are Eeequally Eeenticing (ars technica)

Posted Feb 2, 2008 18:46 UTC (Sat) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

> Also Linux doesn't need x86. Maybe build it with a Power PC CPU?

I'm pretty sure PPC is a dead end.  It has been ever since Apple abandoned it.

PowerPC

Posted Feb 3, 2008 23:17 UTC (Sun) by edmundo (guest, #616) [Link]

PowerPC is still being actively developed for a number of markets: servers, game consoles,
cars and other embedded applications, etc. See the Wikipedia article. In any case, if I'm
running free software, why should I care whether the architecture might disappear or not?
Changing to a different architecture isn't that hard to do. What I mostly care about is the
price and power-performance available today.

Umm, no.

Posted Feb 10, 2008 5:39 UTC (Sun) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link]

There are PPC variants in every Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox360 and Sony PS3 sold.  The PPC is
doing better now than it ever did when Apple was using it.

not to mention...

Posted Feb 11, 2008 7:32 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

Not to mention that several chips sold as high-end FPGAs actually contain one or two PPC cores
in addition to acres of general-purpose programmable logic.  Many of these cores are used eg.
as DSP processors; many are permanently idle.

AFAIK Apple dropped PPC for one reason only; that IBM had repeatedly failed to deliver on its
promises for high-performance, low-power (or flexible-power) CPUs for laptops, whilst Intel's
PentiumM and CoreDuo range were too tempting for words.

I have no idea if more recent performance PPC chips are potentially as battery-friendly as
Intel (or AMD) processors, but this doesn't seem to be quite as urgent a consideration in most
of the devices where they're being deployed (low price, no requirement for long battery life)
as it is in high-end laptops.

On the subject of non-x86 laptop processors, did I once see a DEC laptop announced with an
Alpha processor, circa 1999?  Did such a beast ever exist, or is it a figment of my fevered
imagination?

Alpha Laptop

Posted Feb 17, 2008 17:45 UTC (Sun) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link]

On the subject of non-x86 laptop processors, did I once see a DEC laptop announced with an Alpha processor, circa 1999? Did such a beast ever exist, or is it a figment of my fevered imagination?

I once saw a laptop based on an Alpha CPU, but not from DEC. On Wikipedia I find mention of the ALPHAbook 1 by Tadpole (based on the 21066). I don't know if the laptop I remember is the ALPHAbook 1. A problem with the Alpha in laptops was that there never was a low-power Alpha CPU.

Tadpole also produced a number of SparcBooks.

And there used to be some ARM-based laptops around.