Tired of waiting for 970? Buy one from IBM instead of Apple!

I know this is probably way out of my price range, but I was just wondering hypothetically speaking, if this would work:

IBM makes this kick-ass Unix workstation called the Model 6E4 Workstation. It has either single or dual 1.2 ghz. or 1.45 ghz. Power4 processors, plus a whopping 8MB of L3 cache per proc. It also supports up to 16GB of RAM and 587GB of internal disk storage.

There's this piece of software out there called Mac on Linux. It lets you run OS X on any Linux PowerPC based system.

Although this isn't the most elegant solution, and you don't get the nice Apple design work that goes into their systems, it should blow the doors off of even a dual 1.42ghz. PowerMac.

Has anyone tried this? I don't have $10,000 or so to burn, but if money were no object, it seriously could be done.

Thoughts?

Originally posted by Mr. Anderson
you also now realize that the IBM Power4 wouldn't be a machine to run OSX......

It be good for development or a UNIX server though...the key thing that the Power4 is missing is the AltiVec unit, but then UNIX apps wouldn't need it

D

Click to expand...

But even without Altivec, it would probably still run circles around a PowerMac in non-Altivec applications, which, let's face it, is probably 90% of the applications out there. Not only that, Mac on Linux is not an emulation package, it is a virtualization package. Because the Power4 processor can run 32 and 64-bit PowerPC applications natively, there's no performance hit.

As someone mentioned earlier, the 970 will be a consumer version of the Power4 processor. Basically, the Power4 processor has dual cores, the 970 only has one core. Plus, the 970 has no on-die L3 cache (Apple will probably implement it on the chipset), where the Power4 has a whopping 8MB on-die L3 cache.

This sucker would scream on most apps, and it would probably even give a dual 1.42 a run for it's money on Altivec apps, just with sheer processing power and bus speed alone.