The IBM PowerPC® 970 CPUs are well-designed, high-performance chips that ship in millions of end-user systems under Apple Computers" Power Macintosh G5 moniker. These CPUs greatly lower the bar for 64-bit computing on the desktop and on small servers. Currently, Terra Soft"s beta Y-HPC is one of only two 64-bit Linuxes that run on G5s. As their names imply, the G5-enabled betas -- both 32- and 64-bit versions -- are for evaluation only. This article is an early look at the promise of Linux on a G5 and is intended for developers interested in trying out this combination in anticipation of production-ready releases to come.
For many Linux users, the best reason to buy an Apple Power Macintosh G5 machine will be, quite simply, the well engineered, high-performance, and reasonably priced machines available from Apple. Many enterprises, hosting companies, schools, and research facilities have a mixture of x86 and PowerPC systems that they provide to users. When you want to assure a uniform system/user interface across these machines, Linux is the best choice for an operating system. PowerPC 970-based machines are comparable in performance to AMD"s Athlon64 and Opteron and to the Intel Pentium 4EE and Xeon.