Old stuff survey

[ClassicHasClass]

Since Raptor is offering this subforum, I'm wondering what old Power-based stuff people have hanging around. I'm sure a fair number of folks have Power Macs, and the number of Power Macs, PowerBooks, etc. in this house is too many to enumerate exactly, but what other old school Power hardware do you have?

IBM hardware:
2-way SMT-2 POWER6 (Type 8203-E4A), which runs Floodgap
IBM ThinkPad 860
IBM ThinkPad "800" Type 6020 (SCSI fuse got opened by a bad SCSI2SD; at some point imma repair this)

Be hardware:
BeBox dual 133MHz 603

Microsoft hardware:
Xbox 360 (one with mod chip, one without)

You can see most of these at http://www.floodgap.com/etc/machines.html and http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/riscy/ . What's lurking in your machine room?

[q66]

Not a lot of it, actually. Just a Power Mac G5 dual-core (2005, PCIe, DDR2) which I use to test Void on BE, and a PowerBook G4 15" (2004), otherwise it's all new stuff (a couple POWER8 servers, my Blackbird daily driver desktop, Talos 2 Lite which is mainly a Void buildserver). I intend to expand this as opportunities arise, as there's never enough testing hardware.

[MPC7500]

I only have ordinary Apple hardware.

PowerMac B&W G3 300MHz (1999)
PowerBook FireWire G3 400MHz (2000)
Cube G4 450MHz (2000)
PowerMac Quicksilver G4 733MHz (2001)
PowerBook G4 12" 1.5GHz (2005)

The Pismo has a faulty hard drive as it seems and the Quicksilver has a faulty PSU.
On both PowerBooks I will install VoidLinux. Shouldn't be a problem for both.
The only Macs that are problematic are eMacs and iMacs. Both have a CRT without EDID support.

I also have had a PowerMac Quad G5 (Late 2005, PCIe) and now I have a Blackbird.

@ClassicHasClass: Which OS are you running on the BeBox? BeOS 5?

[ClassicHasClass]

Yes, BeOS 5.

If we're going to list Power Mac/Apple stuff, too, I'll just list the exceptional items and/or the items I use frequently:

Apple Network Server 500 (and 700, and a non-working prototype)
Quad G5
MDD G4 (with a dual 1.8GHz 7447A Sonnet upgrade)
PowerBook G4 DLSD
Mac mini G4/1.5
iBook G4/1.33
iMac G4/1.25
TiBook G4 867MHz
Power Mac 7300 (with an 800MHz 7455 Sonnet upgrade)
iMac G3 (with a 600MHz G3 Sonnet upgrade)
Twentieth Anniversary Mac (with a 500MHz G3 Sonnet upgrade)
PowerBook 1400 (with a 466MHz G3 Sonnet upgrade)
Sawtooth G4/450

Except for the ANS, which runs AIX, and the mini, which runs NetBSD, these machines all run MacOS 9 or Mac OS X (the DLSD runs 10.5 and everything else runs 10.4).

[xilinder]

It's not POWER, but I have and use a A-EON X1000 (PA6T 1682M) running Fienix Linux and Amiga OS4.

At this time I'm running the 5.4 kernel that I build on my Talos 2 with Deb 10.

[MPC7500]

Maybe you could do some Phoronix Test Suite benchmarks with the X1000? (Sorry, confused it with the X5000).

On OpenBenchmarking.org I couldn't find any results, but from a T2080RDB from NXP

Yes, BeOS 5.

BeOS was a great multimedia OS, I guess. I never saw it IRL.
Ah, and I have a Playstation 3, no Xbox.

[MauryG5]

I have a second-hand IMac G5 in 2007, unfortunately recently it failed and I can't use it anymore and put it aside. The Amiga x 1000 are based on Pa-semi which was then bought by Apple and did not produce more Power derivative processors but what is mounted on the X1000 is however a Power derivative. The most recent X 5000 has the Freescale P5020 or P 5040 but without Altivec and they are based on Power 8 if I remember correctly ...

[madscientist159]

The most recent X 5000 has the Freescale P5020 or P 5040 but without Altivec and they are based on Power 8 if I remember correctly ...

POWER7, actually.  They implement Power ISA v2.06 (https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Power_ISA) and are BE only.

Confusingly the actual product page (https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/power-architecture/qoriq-communication-processors/p-series/qoriq-p5020-and-p5010-64-bit-dual-and-single-core-communications-processors:P5020) refers to a "P5 platform" which I suspect is not POWER5, but I have no idea offhand what it is.  I do know the 4 core and up chips have a mystery management core of some sort, but then again with pre-OpenPOWER stuff the chips weren't exactly open source firmware across the board regardless of vendor.

Also, welcome to all here on this subforum!  I don't have any pre-OpenPOWER ppc[64] hardware but find the history fascinating regardless.

[nglevin]

Count me in the "old Apple stuff" camp.


An aluminum PowerBook G4 sometimes acts as a tinkering machine.

A 1.33 GHz iBook G4 is seeing active usage by my significant other, as a "portable" laptop that's less of a luggable than her ThinkPad P50.

Both run 10.5 Server quite well.


Older bits (like a B&W) are currently out of commission and need servicing.

I'd love to have a PReP ThinkPad, but that's well out of my budget for new old things!

[Raion]

I divested my apple stuff long ago, but I still have some older stuff that isn't Apple:

I picked up a Genesi EFIKA 5200B for free from a guy in MD—he was selling off his collection of amiga stuff and I helped him out with getting the best prices.

I also jointly own an AmigaOne X5000 with a friend of mine—though I told him recently he can buy me out as my one attempt to run any BSD on it failed. I lent him the money for partial ownership, but he only wants to really do AmigaOS4 with it which interests me not.

Owned up until recently a Sam460ex by Acube—sold it to pay bills when I quit my job.

Out of all of them, the Sam460ex honestly was probably my favorite. I'm gonna probably give away the Efika, since it's a slow little piece of kit that isn't even mainlined on anything but MorphOS last I checked, and I'm getting out of 32-bit hardware other than M68k stuff.

[ClassicHasClass]

The most recent X 5000 has the Freescale P5020 or P 5040 but without Altivec and they are based on Power 8 if I remember correctly ...

POWER7, actually.  They implement Power ISA v2.06 (https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Power_ISA) and are BE only.

Not to be a (terrible) pedant, but while they do indeed implement (at least most of) the later ISA, the QorIQ e5500 microarchitecture doesn't have much in common with POWER7's. It's essentially a 64-bit e500 without the SPE crap and an FPU borrowed from the e600, itself an evolution of the 744x G4. The lack of AltiVec/VMX is a terrible omission, however, and limits its utility for general purpose computing. It's really an embedded part and meant for that application, and I have said in other places how much of a disservice I think running such CPUs in pricey desktops is to the Amiga community.

Confusingly the actual product page (https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/power-architecture/qoriq-communication-processors/p-series/qoriq-p5020-and-p5010-64-bit-dual-and-single-core-communications-processors:P5020) refers to a "P5 platform" which I suspect is not POWER5, but I have no idea offhand what it is.  I do know the 4 core and up chips have a mystery management core of some sort, but then again with pre-OpenPOWER stuff the chips weren't exactly open source firmware across the board regardless of vendor.

P5 just means the Freescale-internal generation; it is not related in any way to IBM POWER generations.

[madscientist159]

Not to be a (terrible) pedant, but while they do indeed implement (at least most of) the later ISA, the QorIQ e5500 microarchitecture doesn't have much in common with POWER7's. It's essentially a 64-bit e500 without the SPE crap and an FPU borrowed from the e600, itself an evolution of the 744x G4. The lack of AltiVec/VMX is a terrible omission, however, and limits its utility for general purpose computing. It's really an embedded part and meant for that application, and I have said in other places how much of a disservice I think running such CPUs in pricey desktops is to the Amiga community.

No problem -- thanks for the pedantry here, all I really know about the e5000 parts is that we disqualified them really early on for performance and concerns over the integrated "mystery meat" security core.

[madscientist159]

Not to be a (terrible) pedant, but while they do indeed implement (at least most of) the later ISA, the QorIQ e5500 microarchitecture doesn't have much in common with POWER7's. It's essentially a 64-bit e500 without the SPE crap and an FPU borrowed from the e600, itself an evolution of the 744x G4. The lack of AltiVec/VMX is a terrible omission, however, and limits its utility for general purpose computing. It's really an embedded part and meant for that application, and I have said in other places how much of a disservice I think running such CPUs in pricey desktops is to the Amiga community.

No problem -- thanks for the pedantry here, all I really know about the e5000 parts is that we disqualified them really early on for performance and concerns over the integrated "mystery meat" security core.

[MauryG5]

Yes Tim in fact I don't remember the derivation well, I had read a document a long time ago but I don't remember the derivation well.  In fact, I also never liked the lack of altivec on Freescale 5500 cores, altivec was implemented on the 6500 cores, but there was no system based on these cores and now that I remember better they were the e6500 cores that were based on  Power 8. At the time I was interested in the x 5000, when I saw that it was already back as hardware before it even went out and it was too expensive I changed my mind. I'm sorry I can't use Amiga OS 4 on Power 9, there must be  something that only recognizes X5000 hardware from what I know ... Amiga was not open but in my opinion today there is no comparable computer operating system level ... it was unique!  I always cry his death ...!

[Raion]

Not to be a (terrible) pedant, but while they do indeed implement (at least most of) the later ISA, the QorIQ e5500 microarchitecture doesn't have much in common with POWER7's. It's essentially a 64-bit e500 without the SPE crap and an FPU borrowed from the e600, itself an evolution of the 744x G4. The lack of AltiVec/VMX is a terrible omission, however, and limits its utility for general purpose computing. It's really an embedded part and meant for that application, and I have said in other places how much of a disservice I think running such CPUs in pricey desktops is to the Amiga community.

Indeed, I can't agree more. But from everything the amiga community has said; they'd rather pay for a pricy FPGA chip that's more of a novelty than a POWER9 machine like the Talos/Blackbird machines.