In June of this year, Apple announced a two-year migration away from the PowerPC to an Intel CPU. Although this transition marks a pivotal point in Apple's history, the ramifications to a wide-spread, dedicated, diverse PowerPC user base may not be immediately obvious to the CPU agnostic end user.

Architecture religion aside, the PowerPC historically has offered an improved price/performance/power-consumption/density ratio wherein particular high performance codes are found to run at a much higher level of performance than on their x86/ia64 counterparts. The scientists, researchers and cluster administrators who prefer the PowerPC in their laptops, desktops and clusters may find one of these three critical components suddenly removed from their procurement portfolio.

In the Apple traditional of instantaneous old product removal from all channels following a new product launch, and with no common knowledge as to which platform will transition to Intel first, the PowerPC user base is left in a game of Russian roulette.

With the backing of Power.org [1], an active, relatively rapid movement is occurring to fill the perceived product void by computer OEMs and software manufacturers whose product and customer foundation is built on the Power architecture.

Mercury Computer Systems and Terra Soft Solutions, for one, have joined forces to bring to market the dual 970 XR9. The XR9 is a 1U or 4U rackmount compute node that offers a full-featured extended ATX motherboard and an array of new-to-Power HPC components, including a user accessible service processor, reprogrammable firmware, board-level monitor and controls and two independent PCI-X buses.

The dual IBM PowerPC 970 CPUs on-board the XR9 are the same as those found in the current PowerPC-based Apple Xserve product line, with an IBM Northbridge born of the same family. This means code can be migrated easily from the Xserve or BladeCenter JS20 to the XR9, where all are running Linux.

Traditionally, PowerPC has offered a strong computational architecture for signal and image processing, where the on-board AltiVec unit enables 4 x 32-bit processes to execute in parallel. With the introduction of the IBM PowerPC 970, a CPU built from the union of a single core of a POWER4 and an AltiVec unit, Apple's G5 and IBM's BladeCenter JS20 have found in-roads to noteworthy supercomputing centers and sizable HPC clusters in a variety of markets, ranging from geophysics to life sciences, from the Department of Defense to NASA.

In comparison to Apple's 1U Xserve, the XR9 offers greater flexibility with adherence to the extended ATX form-factor in both 1U and 4U rackmount chassis and room for greater than 20 on-board SATA drives. The two independent PCI-X channels make certain all hosted cards are running without conflict, at full bandwidth. The on-board Flash ROM enables drive-less booting with use of the forthcoming port of LinuxBIOS. And a user interface to the on-board service processor reduces CPU load by assuming board-level monitoring and control.

The XR9 offers the following:

Extensive I/O offerings:

PowerPC 405EP Service and Control Processor:

Terra Soft is known for Yellow Dog Linux and Y-HPC, Red Hat/Fedora-based Linux operating systems for a diversity of Power architecture computers, including Apple's historic and modern PowerPC product line. Since 1983, Mercury has provided component-level and system-level solutions that span hardware, software, silicon IP and services for aerospace and defense, telecommunications, life sciences, energy, electronics manufacturing, education and research.

Under contract with Mercury, Terra Soft completed the board support package for the XR9 in the spring of this year. Terra Soft's 64-bit Y-HPC operating system is supported by IBM's XLC++ and XLF compilers and Mercury's middleware optimized libraries.

Terra Soft immediately offers the XR9 with 64-bit Y-HPC Linux OS pre-installed as turn-key server and HPC cluster configurations. More information is available here [2].

Although Apple's announced migration to Intel was a shot heard round the world, it it important to know that many OEMs specialize in Power architecture products. Design and engineering teams are working hard to quickly bring to market products that not only replace those commodity items required to conduct business as usual, but improve upon the products themselves and offer greater diversity.