Re: Removing dpkg arch definitions for powerpcspe?

On 4/9/25 6:20 am, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> Interesting that new e500 based boards are made. It is probably one of
> the last available CPUs capable of doing 32bit powerpc.
> But reading Amiga I would expect m68k based CPUs not powerpc (especially
> this one). Color me surprised.

Well that would be Classic Amiga or real Amiga. This dates from the 90's 
but since m68K stopped being produced, it needed another CPU. It was 
also after Commodore died and Amiga was in limbo so one company produced 
a hybrid 68K/PowerPC CPU card and followed Apple. Later the OS was 
ported to PPC as AmigaOS4 and independent PPC ATX boards were eventually 
released. To cut a long history short the lineage went from G3, G4, to 
P.A.Semi PPC64, AMCC440/460, e5500 and the infamous P1022 SPE all from a 
few different companies. With designs now for the e6500 aside from the 
PPC laptop. The P1022 PowerPCSPE was (unfortunately) chosen for a low 
cost PPC board called the Tabor or A1222 and news spread a decade ago 
now. However, it cost more to produce than it was worth, as the ISA was 
more incompatible with PPC than any PPC ISA before it in the history of 
PPC backwards incompatibility. So it needed a an FPU emulator to emulate 
common FPU code using SPE code. Time is bullets and software cost money. 
All this along with Covid 19 hardware shortage meant the poor board was 
delayed, which was a good idea at the time, but all these issues just 
shot it down. The board was finally released in 2024 but ended up being 
more expensive and suffered reverses. The A1222 is still supported by 
the OS4 development team as well as receiving Linux support up to kernel 
5.4.