Re: Let's start a survey on our userbase

On Sun, 2025-09-21 at 14:43, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On Sun, 2025-09-21 at 06:10 +0000, WHR wrote:
>>> On Sat, 2025-09-20 at 19:33 -0300, Leo Historias wrote:
>>>> Baseline for PPC is G3,PPC64 is G5...unless i'm right...
>>>
>>> No, the baseline for the ppc64 is not G5 but G5 without AltiVec.
>>
>> That's POWER4.
> 
> You're probably right. I used that weird naming scheme as I was never
> 100% sure what the various baselines are. POWER is really complicated
> with many different architecture baselines with and without AltiVec
> and so on.
> 
> While one can be sure that any reasonably recent x86 CPU supports some
> form of MMX or SSE, there are many even recent PowerPC CPUs that don't
> support AltiVec.
> 
> I never really understood that design decision by IBM and Freescale.
> 
> Adrian
> 

IMHO the biggest issue for POWER4 and PowerPC 970 (G5) is it's 
Endinanness. Most modern software no longer gets tested or Big Endian, 
and Power/PowerPC transisioned to Little Endian as well, so those old 
PPC machines were additionally left behind on this front.

Additionally, e.g. the PowerPC 74xx (G4) is left behind as it's 32-Bit only.

Could be that some software won't work because it expects SIMD 
extensions as well, but AFAIK at least for the G4/G5 AltiVec/VMX was 
never as well established as was SSE on x86.

Just my 2¢.
Linux User #330250