"Its like the IBM RT and Pick were made for each other" so said Dick
Pick in about 1986. Now the Pick world may have another chance of
chosing RISC as its primary platform. Please read on!

While speculation was rampant that Dan Dobberpuhl would revive the
Alpha processor, his company, P.A. Semi, quietly took out a PowerPC
license instead and used his skills to improve on an already fantastic
chip.

Here are some details
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1875302,00.asp

While this popularization of the PowerPC chip should have happened a
long time ago, it is better late than never. Perhaps, in the eyes of
people like Dan Dobberpuhl, Apple put a damper on the market and that
damper has now been lifted.

In addition to IBM, Samsung and Chartered Semiconductor are at least
two PowerPC licensees that can fab these chips for P.A. Semi. Even AMD
could fab PowerPC parts. Afterall, Hector Ruiz, AMD's Chairman, is an
old PowerPC guy, from Motorola, and AMD has licensed technology from
IBM that could allow them to do so.

With all the gameboxes, including the Microsoft XBox360, being based on
the same PowerPC instructionset, the non-embedded market for the
PowerPC family could soon be larger than the X86 market. The embedded
PowerPC market is ofcourse huge, probably more than half a billion
chips a year, chips that can be used in Thin Clients and other IT
devices.

Tom deLombarde has already ported OpenQM to a G4 class PowerPC box and
we expect to have a port to the 970 before too long.

Henry Keultjes
Database Scientifics Project http://www.ncolug.org/ppc.htm
Mansfield Ohio USA
Reply to hbkeultjes at earthlink dot net

Hi Henry,

Busy today but I saw this and need to set the record straight:

<snip>

I did no such thing!

There was no 'porting' to be done as Martin had taken pains to write
everything with the C standards in mind.

Jon Kristofferson found and squashed the only serious bug in openQM
that kept it from compiling and running on PPC architecture.

Montgomery Tidwell tested and contributed Mac diffs.

All I did was bundled these good folks' work and made it available for
download.

If in my haste I left anyone out please blast away.

In the interest of accuracy,
-Tom

Glen:

Thanks for your comments and confidence in the PowerPC. PowerPC is not
a pure 68K derivative. It is much more related to the IBM RT and its
RISC architecture.

As to the chances of the PowerPC instruction set, since PowerPC and
CELL are for all practical purpose the same architecture and have the
same instruction set, getting a significant market share. Remember old
Thomas Watson, the IBM guy, who predicted the market for computers
would be about twenty a year tops?

Most people in the Pick market now or those who have been in the Pick
market in the past think of Pick as some kind of dinosaur, defined as
something from the past that does not exist anymore, while I think of
it as the dinosaur of the future that will be the King of the IT world.

Don't agree? Please start by knowing that one cannot achieve what one
cannot imagine. So if you cannot imagine a rosy future for Pick, go
and make fun of my ideas on comp.databases.microsoft or some forum like
that.

Henry Keultjes


Glen B wrote: