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Adding to all...

Also, how do you provide our notebook to people who don't have a PowerBook chassis?

Also, I'd love to get an Aluminum PowerBook, they remain capable machines, and I'd hate to tear a working one apart. =)

Very interesting!

Now we need someone to port the apps. =))))))))))

Ah okay. But that's what a company should do. Care about the OS only.

Well, if they want to have their OS to be adopted in any level, they need to provide some basic functionality.
Including a browser is part of it.

AIX doesn't even come with wget or curl. There's no way to download anything there besides NFS, FTP or burning a CD.

Ugh, I wouldn't like 16:9 at all, 1080 vertical is way too low.

+1.
1920x1200 please.
Or anything 16:10.

Wouldn't that be a burden? To certify, test, develop drivers and all for one more OS?
Shouldn't that be something to aim for PPC Notebook v2?

Ah okay. Yes, of course. Does make sense. Long time ago I read, that Google has a PowerPC version of android. Maybe Chromium for PowerPC is the solution? IBM is using Ubuntu on POWER8. Do they also use a browser?

On my IntelliStation, I have AIX 7.1 and IBM offers Firefox 3.6.

On Ubuntu, you get the same browsers as anyone else:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?arch=powerpc&keywords=chromium-browser
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?arch=ppc64el&keywords=chromium-browser

As far as I know, IBM only works in getting the OS optimized for the hardware and nothing else.
What you are going to run there is more or less your problem.

Would you know the status of ppc64el with anything like Altivec?
I suppose Altivec is heavily dependent on ppc standard endianness, but do you know of any work in that direction?

So, should we look into getting a full GNU implementation now that the GNU Hurd is developing faster then ever before?

I share your enthusiasm, but I still think we need a viable machine today. I don't think PPC64el will do without Altivec. Maybe for the PPC notebook 2.0?

I started doing my tests (recompiling stuff without Altivec) and it is a huge difference!

I'm still a bit torn. Choosing a future-looking endian mode and leaving Altivec behind or going for Altivec and struggle with software in the future.

What about future Altivec support in both little and big endian modes?

I'll pick up the most processor intensive software on the list and compile them with and without Altivec and compare the performance. I would skip things like LibreOffice and focus on VLC, ImageMagick, ffmpeg (or whatever the replacement is) and report back.

We need a future-looking platform but it has to work well today otherwise the project fails.

PowerBook 

IBMs direction is little endian and POWER6 and all following CPU designs do have a SIMD unit.
More important, do IBM have interest in building a stripped down version of POWER CPUs anymore?
Because, from my perspective NXP won't do any further development regarding to POWER ISA.
If the QorIQ CPUs the last of it's kind, we should go Debian eb, twice.

They do have SIMD, but if it doesn't work in both endian modes, we are stuck (if I understand right).

Maybe you could also test the applications both on the G5. With and without AltiVec.
But I really have no clue how good these applications are optimized.
I only know the SETI client in 2005/ 2006 was highly optimized. At that date, the G5 slaughtered almost anything 8-)

What is the goal of the tests? Should I create a table and benchmark applications with and without Altivec for us to know where to focus our efforts?

The Cube is a G4 (with AltiVec) 32-bit machine, but should be OK for the tests.
BTW, this was my dream machine for years...
A word of advice: use ext3 for the partition containing /boot.
It looks like yaboot has issues with ext4.

My G5 Quad boots fine with ext4, but not my IntelliStation, so I think it could be something related to the firmware.
I'm planning to upgrade the firmware of my IntelliStation and try again. Took me 6 bloody and painful months to manage to boot it in Linux.

One more thing:

We could also try to figure out what are IBM's and OpenPOWER's plans for the POWER line in terms of adding SIMD-Altivec-like functionality to the future releases of the POWER processor, so help us decide between endianness and Altivec.

I'm available to test, compare and benchmark anything, and I'm going to keep a more active eye on the forums from now on.
Please shoot me a message if you need me to test anything. I will go through the list of software that is already here and report as I go.

Saulo

Hi team,

My two cents in the whole Altivec debate:

I use Debian Wheezy very often (almost daily) in my two machines:
I have a G5 Quad and an IntelliStation 285.
One has the PPC970 with Altivec and the other one has the POWER5 without Altivec.
Both machines have 8GB of DDR2 ECC RAM.
I disabled two of the G5s cores for my tests.

I expected the IntelliStation to win most benchmarks. IBM's benchmarks show it as a faster system overall. The PPC970 desperately begs for more cache, and the IntelliStation has generous 32MB of cache. But the actual numbers are surprising.

I compiled VLC without Altivec and yes, it runs as well as the G5, but the IntelliStation uses far more CPU time to play the same videos.
The G5 humiliates the IntelliStation on Blender benchmarks.

I'm so puzzled by the results that I ordered from eBay a graphics card that is supported by Linux (the IBM GXT135p works on framebuffer only in Linux), and I will run the tests again.

But my experience so far totally points on the direction of Altivec.

On the rest of the software, my computing experience is COMPLETE. Audio editors work, GIMP works, Blender works, I can totally live on my G5 only. But many packages are not actively maintained anymore and are several versions behind. Most of us are not coders, so there would be a lot of work to catch up.

The maintainer and developer of TenFourFox is apparently a fantastic person, I guess contacting him for clarification wouldn't be a bad thing.

But as far as I know, he does all of his TenFourFox work in XCode, and he leverages Mac OS-only APIs like Core Text and Core Image. I'm not sure how portable that code is.

His main working OS is to this day OS X 10.4.