Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Groxx 4700 days ago
any particular reason? error rate, power use, ?
2 comments

General Motors was a big user of Motorola 68k variants. Workstations and personal computers that used the 680x0 series switched to the Power series, maybe the developers just find them easier to migrate to.
Personally I've just found the architecture clean and well-designed. Even if this only helps the developers I'd say it's worth it.
The ISA is not better than others in any real way, but IBM put a lot of early work into RAS features for their server chipsets, and this sort of leaked into the automotive and aviation world.

If you want to run 3 cpus lockstep, verifying each other's results, the PPC world already has the infrastructure. This and other similar things make it an easy choice for some applications.

IIRC, the service processor on IBM x86 servers is a PPC. (runs the light-path diagnostics, and manages remote boots, etc)