[pypy-dev] Of interest, eventually? (IBM opening ppc h/w design)

[Alex Martelli]

On 2004 Apr 01, at 00:07, Bengt Richter wrote:

> Here is IBM's announcement:
>
> http://www-306.ibm.com/chips/news/2004/0331_power.html

Wow.

> How would pypy adapt-to/have-an-advantage-in-exploiting the existence 
> of such a
> configurable h/w platform?
>
First of all, it seems to me, by having a generator for PPC machine 
code -- which, it seems, was one of the things dropped from our 
projects due to reduced funding:-(.  With PPC (in the form of plain 
unadorned G5) pulsing at the core of supercomputers ("Big Mac" at 
Virginia Tech), IBM mainframes, Apple 1U servers, down to high-end 
Apple PCs, and soon, probably, laptops, and also a serious contender 
for the next generation of gaming consoles (apparently both Sony and 
Microsoft are considering it), _and_ now even potentially "extensible" 
in such ways, I think that if I had to nominate just one chip 
architecture to generate machine code for it would have to be PPC (the 
fact that I'm a recent and enthusiastic Mac owner is not really 
related, except in stemming partly from the same reason -- I've 
revisited PPC architecture in the wake of all the recent hoopla about 
G5 and it appears that there _is_ a lot to like about it).  Ah well -- 
I do realize that, with our limited resources, the near ubiquitousness 
of the [expletive deleted] descendants of Intel 80386 makes it most 
likely impractical and impolitical to eschew supporting their 
bedraggled complexity in favour of PPC's clean and powerful 
extensibility:-(.


Alex