PowerPC Reference Platform
| POWER, PowerPC, and Power ISA architectures |
|---|
| NXP (formerly Freescale and Motorola) |
| IBM |
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| IBM/Nintendo |
| Other |
| Related links |
| Cancelled in gray, historic in italic |
PowerPC Reference Platform (PReP) was a PowerPC hardware reference design developed at the same time as the PowerPC architecture itself. It allowed hardware vendors to build a machine that could run various operating systems, especially Mac OS, Windows NT and various flavors of Unix, notably Solaris and AIX. PReP systems were never popular, and the only vendors to actually ship PReP hardware were IBM and Motorola.
PReP was essentially aFirmware]], which gave vendors greatly improved support during the boot process, allowing the hardware to be far more varied.
Finding current, readily available operating systems for old PReP hardware can be difficult. Debian and NetBSD still maintain their respective ports to this architecture, although developer and user activity is extremely low.
Power.org has a new Power Architecture Platform Reference (PAPR) that provides the foundation for development of Power Architecture computers based on the Linux operating system. The PAPR spec was in the fourth quarter of 2006.