You can talk about cpu power if you want (though it's good to distinguish if you mean Watts or MIPS).
My view on this thread is that it is about SOC's for small, cheap and low-watt general-purpose systems, either embedded cards or perhaps small desktop replacements. The Cell is not suitable for anything like that - to my knowledge, there has never been a PowerPC-based chip that could be a good choice for that kind of thing.
The Cell chip did have a few peripherals and controllers in the chip. But the main point of the chip is that it has one fairly solid general-purpose PowerPC core, and 9 (IIRC) specialised PowerPC cores with dedicated memory, designed to be a flexible graphics and game accelerator array. The peripherals on the device are just a footnote.
That is, I think, the market for this kind of chip. How big a market is another question. People don't want to re-write their software written for Wince, 32-bit XP, DOS, or whatever. But they also don't want to have to re-design their boards to use a new x86 chip - they'll use old stock for as long as they can.
Then they will look at QEMU + Wine on ARM Linux, and see if it is good enough yet. (I haven't tried it myself.)
You are actually in the segment of users that are most difficult to "convert" to Linux - people who use their machines for a lot of different purposes and have a long-term investment in the technical details and quirks of Windows (whether you like the OS or not). Getting to the same level of competence on a different system takes time and effort, and naturally you'd rather avoid that.
That market is not as big as many people think. Most people use Windows machines for browsing, email, watching videos, light "Office" programs, games, and whatever programs their companies say they have to use. For all but the last two points, you could install a user-friendly Linux distribution like Linux Mint, and people have their email, browsers, office much like before. Details of appearances change, but they do that between Windows versions too.
Games are a different matter - there is no doubt that Windows is the prime platform for games. Steam works on Linux, and many games run fine on it, but not all. And not all Windows games are on Steam.
Then there are programs used as part of your job. Some might be cross-platform, some might run under Wine, some won't. If I want to use Altium Designer, I use my Windows machine. Almost all of my coding and compiling is done on my Linux machine - but usually I also check that it all builds fine on my Windows machine too. All my network stuff is Linux only. For other people, with other programs and needs and different levels of support and knowledge from their employer, results will vary.
Common for most people, however, is that computers are tools, and no one wants to change things that they are used to and can work with. It needs a lot of reason and motivation to change - and the more you have invested in learning about a system, the more reason you need to change.
David Brown snipped-for-privacy@hesbynett.no wrote in news:t0cclc$uc9$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
It had nine identical PowerPC cores and one was a manager and eight were main compute cores. It was a badass for its day except they made it too slow, and then dropped it. But folks were making their own miniature supercomputers with a few Playstation consoles and some software. One college lab used 96 IIRC. I had two and one reamined Linux capable, but they dropped support with a firmware update so I left it prior to that update. It was reallt sad too because I bought it specifically because it would also toggle over to a Linux boot and then back to Sonly Playstation. I ran GenToo on it IIRC. Fun kernel build there. They screwed a bunch of customers too with their update because it flat formats the drive and all your Linux effort and data is suddenly kaput. Great multi-OS learning experience though.
They are not identical. There is a single general PowerPC core, the "Power Processor Element", and 8 "Synergistic Processing Elements" that have roughly the same instruction set, but significantly different implementations of the ISA.
(It's all there on the wikipedia page I linked.)
It was slow, expensive, not particularly power efficient, and very hard to program well.
The SPE's were good (at the time) for workloads that were processor bound, highly parallel, and used relatively little memory. That suited some kinds of HPC work.
On a sunny day (Thu, 10 Mar 2022 12:18:44 -0000 (UTC)) it happened John Doe snipped-for-privacy@message.header wrote in <t0cqb3$v6o$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
No way
There are likely more things running Linux than windows, For example my Samsung big LCD TV runs Linux (yes the open source is on their site) Almost all the little WiFi modems run a version of Linux, for example my Linksys ones. Cameras, what not.. So many embedded systems run Linux, Linux is even present in some satellites. MS windows was dead when they integrated the GUI and OS and it became a salesman's trap for the customer. Add to that programming in Cplushplush (a Crime Against Humanity language) and nobody sane wants windows it for embedded. And all them android phones are basically Linux versions.
John Doe snipped-for-privacy@message.header wrote in news:t0cqb3$v6o$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
You have no clue about OS efficacy.
Oh boy!
It makes tons of difference, unless you try to do it with your old POS 286.
Modern PCs are so very very fast that the difference between many app being in a VDM envelope or run direct is very little.
You're an idiot. UNIX was and is a server OS, but the CAD industry used UNIX workstations for years as the PC indiustry grew and became fast enough to be 'workstation' class machines.
Linux was a PERSONAL OS derived from UNIX and can and is also configurable to be a 'server OS', but operates as a personal OS just fine. There are 3D CAD apps and image manipulator app (gimp). all kinds of apps specifically meant to run on Linux. That decidedly makes it other than "a server OS" and that claim makes you other than computer science knowledgeable.
The city of Boston Massachusetts, with a transit network serving 5+ million residents, apparently has exactly two machines capable of printing reduced-fare disability passes for the system, both of which somehow broke and require waiting months for spare parts from some German outfit called Scheidt & Bachmann, that could only be sourced from Germany.
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Many programs run faster under Wine than natively under Windows. It all depends on what the program is doing.
It is that too - it covers an incredibly wide range of use-cases. Embedded systems, laptops, desktops, servers, virtual systems, gaming systems, routers, HPC - pretty anything bigger than a microcontroller.
You fail to grasp the obvious. People don't have a reason to do that, change. More importantly, you are describing typical desktop/laptop use which is not the market we've been discussing. Neither the rPi nor the Vortex86 are particularly aimed at that market.
Since you are discussing the wrong markets, nothing you've said here has relevance.
I guess another thread is lost to the great topic drift. This started out discussing the Vortex86 devices but someone brought up Linux and now the wars have started.
Isn't topic drift what this group is all about? :-)
Anyway, the source of this drift was that someone brought up /Windows/ !
If you want to return to the Vortex86 devices - do you think they will have any use except for newer versions of legacy embedded systems where someone a decade or two wrote the code for Windows or DOS and the manufacturer has to find new hardware for the old software ?
Absolutely true, but they use them under Windows. Ask them to use a Linux machine and you have to start training all over again. That may not be more significant than updating to a new version of office tools, but it is an expense most companies won't suffer.
Beta was a better video tape format. Windows is what people use. Linux is for geeks and nerds. You know I'm right.
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