# Update on the official PowerPC laptop project



## sossego (May 6, 2016)

They are looking at possibly September as the month the laptop is produced. I've - and others - have done hardware suggestions. You're possibly looking at a sound card and a video card with their own dedicated memory and room for expansion. Someone also suggested something similar to PC-BSD for the laptop. A LiveCD could be produced for the laptop with a box type - maybe blackbox to LXDE - window manager.


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## kpedersen (May 6, 2016)

Who is?

This is perhaps the first hardware related news I have heard for the last 10 years that I actually find interesting 

I hope this isnt just one of those short lived projects that fizzle out after a few weeks.


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## Atsuri (May 7, 2016)

I would also be quite interested as I currently own an old PowerBook G4 with a broken screen (don't ask...). OP, does your/their project have a website that we could visit?


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## BSD-Kitsune (May 9, 2016)

What are the specs of the CPU, RAM etc? Any pics?


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## SirDice (May 9, 2016)

PowerPC for desktops/laptops is pretty much a dead-end. There's a reason why Apple switched to Intel instead.


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## sossego (May 10, 2016)

"<p>We are a non-profit association, bringing together about 50 volunteers with a common goal:<strong> Giving people the possibility to run GNU/Linux on an Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook.</strong></p>

<p>At this point, we need to gather around 55000 € to fund the design and the production of 5 prototypes.<br />
We will soon launch a crowdfunding campaign in order to reach this objective.<br />
A producer is willing to work on the design and production,<br />
but we need to complete the crowdfunding campaign <strong>before September 2016</strong>.<br />
This would make it possible to publish the <strong>Open Hardware design and produce the 5 prototypes for the end of year 2016</strong>.<br />
Then we should be able to start accepting pre-orders in January 2017.</p>"

That is from my email.

IBM offers free membership to students and schools for the Open Power Foundation. Some here should take advantage of that in order to positively affect the computing industry/sector/culture.

For the specifications, you would need to be part of the project. My goal of the former/defunct project proposition was to present this before the entire community and make it an all-around project. I am not always good with presentation. That being said, if the different BSD foundations were to be involved, the design could be improved including what goes where.

http://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/


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## roddierod (May 10, 2016)

I assume this is the web page?

http://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/


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## sossego (May 10, 2016)

Yes.


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## kpedersen (May 11, 2016)

SirDice said:


> PowerPC for desktops/laptops is pretty much a dead-end. There's a reason why Apple switched to Intel instead.



Oh really, how come? I imagine power management and things might be lacking compared to Intel but this can surely be improved. Are there any other reasons?
Tbh, it wouldn't surprise me if Apple went with Intel purely for compatibility with x86 developers


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## SirDice (May 11, 2016)

kpedersen said:


> Oh really, how come? I imagine power management and things might be lacking compared to Intel but this can surely be improved. Are there any other reasons?
> Tbh, it wouldn't surprise me if Apple went with Intel purely for compatibility with x86 developers





> Just as important as performance, is power consumption. And the way we look at it is performance per watt. For one watt of power how much performance do you get? And when we look at the future road maps projected out in mid-2006 and beyond, what we see is the PowerPC gives us sort of 15 units of performance per watt, but the Intel road map in the future gives us 70, and so this tells us what we have to do.


http://www.everymac.com/mac-answers/macintel-faq/why-did-apple-switch-to-intel.html

I'm not saying PowerPC was (or is) a bad processor. In this respect there have been many others too. Remember DEC Alpha? 680x0? All great processors but they're all but gone. Pretty much killed off by the speed of improvements of Intel. You just can't beat the enormous amount of resources Intel has. So, looking to the future, I just don't think PowerPC, Power ISA, POWER8, or whatever it's called, is going to cut it in the long run.


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## sossego (May 13, 2016)

I'm looking at audio/video production, networking, and AI type of applications. For audio/video: You are looking at Ardour and a few others on a very responsive and affordable machine. CISC and ARM just don't cut it there. With GPU + CPU rendering, animation will be rendered much more quickly than on AMD64. Networking is the same way. As for AI - what I call "Assistive Intelligence" - the POWER CPU is for learning. I "know" CPUs by the performance with different applications and hardware.


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## sossego (May 20, 2016)

I could use a few more BSD people in this area; and, there should be a school with a public access to Open/Free software. I was given two G4 towers from a local television station. Since there is no monitor for me to use, the specifications are not currently known. The purpose and intention is to have a local/publicly accessible machine for 2D/3D - I overwrote my silliness - animation along with audio as a positive and creative application of hardware and software for the artistic expression of children and whomever else wishes to convey such a message.  -- I am presenting the idea here as a way of cataloguing the development from different standpoints. --


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## sossego (May 22, 2016)

An associate of mine is married to a woman who sets up animation stations for children. It looks like the two towers will be going to good use. I may need to build on a system if the packages are not available.


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