Comments on: Remember when the PowerPC 620 was going to rule the world?

By: neozeed

neozeed — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 09:12:13 +0000

In reply to Alecv. I was under the impression that this was going to play into the new Power stuff like Power9? It's the stuff Google among others use, as people are silently (and quickly) shifting away from Xeon since they are all fundamentally flawed.

By: Alecv

Alecv — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 08:49:44 +0000

JFYI:
https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/08/20/big-blue-open-sources-power-chip-instruction-set/

By: Oddsocks

Oddsocks — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 04:53:56 +0000

Granted, Solaris might be on life-support but it’s still one of those 5 left. 🙂

By: neozeed

neozeed — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 15:34:57 +0000

In reply to Luca.

The real game changer was the Pentium Pro. With its speculative out of order execution it paved the way for Intel to utterly dominate the microprocessor scene.

The P2/3 made it all the better, especially with those easy to upgrade CPU slots.

I’ve had quite a few non Intel machines over the years and all it makes you do is appreciate good compilers, good source code… And networking!

GCC on the PowerPC was always kind of lagging behind the IBM Xlc offering. I know Cygnus was always SPARC obsessed in that era and didn’t seem to push those barriers.

It would be interesting to see them bench, especially old gcc/egcs and Xlc. The hard part would be doing all the tests, where would you even find a 620?

By: Luca

Luca — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 09:37:33 +0000

Unfortunately, on 1997 the 620 was just “too little, too late”…
On 1993, there was the Pentium running at 60–66 MHz; by 1997 the 300 MHz model was out but also the Pentium II model running at 66 MHz. It would be interesting to have the above benchmark graph updated with these new models…