iPhone SDK on PowerPC Macs

[MacRumors]

http://www.macrumors.com/images/macrumorsthreadlogo.gif (http://www.macrumors.com)

While Apple's formal requirements for the iPhone SDK is an Intel Mac running Mac OS 10.5.2 or later, one enterprising individual managed to get the environment working more or less on his PowerPC iBook (http://3by9.com/85/).


http://images.macrumors.com/article/2008/03/12/185409-iPhoneSDK_ppc.jpg
(http://3by9.com/85/)
Image courtesy of 3by9.com (http://3by9.com/85/)

The only oddity I’ve encountered so far is that you get 1 Warning when you build, because the target architecture doesn’t match (PPC vs. i386) but that’s to be expected. Also I don’t know if the certificates that Apple hands out once you’ve paid your $99 fee will work perfectly with this system, so for now I’d simply use it as a development environment and plan to get an Intel box running with the SDK sometime between now and June’s AppStore launch. It should be noted that I’ve got Leopard running on the iBook. But, it works!

[ Via Daring Fireball (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/march#wed-12-ppc_hack) ]

Article Link (http://www.macrumors.com/iphone/2008/03/12/iphone-sdk-on-powerpc-macs/)

[Kingsly]

Attesor?


:D

[szark]

Well, I know what I'm doing tomorrow night. :D

[menthol moose]

Any chance of getting it working on Tiger, or is that just not possible?

[KindredMAC]

Am I the only one that finds this irritating?

How many perfectly good PowerMac G5's are there out here that are more powerful than most of the Intel Macs currently or EVER available?

Don't be starting this crap Apple. It's bad enough that some software developers aren't using Universal Binary and going straight for the X86 version....

[DJSdotcom]

Thanks for the linkage guys!! It's very cool to see it linked from MacRumors... I found out from my RSS reader :)

-Mike (that enterprising individual)

[Rocksaurus]

Am I the only one that finds this irritating?


No.

[Rocketman]

Am I the only one that finds this irritating?

How many perfectly good PowerMac G5's are there out here that are more powerful than most of the Intel Macs currently or EVER available?

Don't be starting this crap Apple. It's bad enough that some software developers aren't using Universal Binary and going straight for the X86 version....

You know which users are happiest with their Macs? The ones who set up a CPU and OS version for a set of software and just leave it running for YEARS.

When a new Mac that comes out that you think you need, ADD it, not REPLACE with it.

Apple abandons enough compatibility and hardware and stuff to use this paradigm forever.

The only risk is finding yourself looking for a low graphics resolution G4 to run Mac Draw 1.9 on. :)

You need two Macs on your desk. If it gets to three, reevaluate your sanity and attachment to old software.

Rocketman

[La Porta]

You know which users are happiest with their Macs? The ones who set up a CPU and OS version for a set of software and just leave it running for YEARS.

When a new Mac that comes out that you think you need, ADD it, not REPLACE with it.

Apple abandons enough compatibility and hardware and stuff to use this paradigm forever.

The only risk is finding yourself looking for a low graphics resolution G4 to run Mac Draw 1.9 on. :)

You need two Macs on your desk. If it gets to three, reevaluate your sanity and attachment to old software.

Rocketman

Agreed. In fact, as my sig says, I have 33 Macs, and can run anything from System 1 up. Wait, doesn't that put me in that bad group....

[idonotliketostu]

How many perfectly good PowerMac G5's are there out here that are more powerful than most of the Intel Macs currently or EVER available?


kidding right?
don't tell me that you think the g5 can beat a c2d

[elppa]

kidding right?
don't tell me that you think the g5 can beat a c2d

I'd like to see some evidence to back up these claims. The idea that Intel won't be able to produce a chip in 5,10,20 years time that is faster than the PPC G5 sounds a little dubious. I imagine the current Mac Pros would out perform the PPC G5, although I may be wrong.

[KindredMAC]

kidding right?
don't tell me that you think the g5 can beat a c2d

No, I'm not kidding..... and yes it can.

If you go strictly by the numbers that get posted for Benchmark it appears that the PowerMac G5's are obsolete. If you go by real world usage of applications that aren't written to take advantage of more than 2 cores/processors presently than you know that the G5's still have some pretty strong legs.

We have Mac Pros and PowerMac G5's in my art department. I will tell you this much, when running Photoshop you cannot see a noticeable difference in running the app.

People get too hung up on the "numbers".

[elppa]

If you go by real world usage of applications that aren't written to take advantage of more than 2 cores/processors presently than you know that the G5's still have some pretty strong legs.

We have Mac Pros and PowerMac G5's in my art department. I will tell you this much, when running Photoshop you cannot see a noticeable difference in running the app.

Interesting stuff, I wonder if it has anything to do with AltiVec (the Velocity Engine), which I believe Photoshop benefits from.

It's an interesting point you make, that numbers != real world performance. Getting to the bottom of the matter is quite difficult, I mean Apple are hardly going to say: “Here's the new Mac Pro, but if you rely on Photoshop heavily, then carry on using those G5 machines we sold you a couple of years ago, cause they're faster”.

[dr_lha]

As an owner of a Power Mac G5 and a Mac Pro I can safely say that the Mac Pro massively out performs the G5 in every thing I do. I don't do Photoshop though, to be fair.

I think we have some people here clinging onto that old idea that PPC is magically better than Intel. Might have been true 10 or maybe 5 years ago, but not now.

[mainstreetmark]

No, I'm not kidding..... and yes it can.

If you go strictly by the numbers that get posted for Benchmark it appears that the PowerMac G5's are obsolete. If you go by real world usage of applications that aren't written to take advantage of more than 2 cores/processors presently than you know that the G5's still have some pretty strong legs.

We have Mac Pros and PowerMac G5's in my art department. I will tell you this much, when running Photoshop you cannot see a noticeable difference in running the app.

People get too hung up on the "numbers".

Yet oddly, there has been no development on the PowerPC 970 (aka G5) in nearly 3 years. Apple and IBM have both abandoned it. I know it works great, but I'm not sure you can make the argument that it's better than newer technology.

Photoshop is only CPU hungry when you're applying filters (according to MenuMeters)

[ibwb]

No, I'm not kidding..... and yes it can.

If you go strictly by the numbers that get posted for Benchmark it appears that the PowerMac G5's are obsolete. If you go by real world usage of applications that aren't written to take advantage of more than 2 cores/processors presently than you know that the G5's still have some pretty strong legs.

We have Mac Pros and PowerMac G5's in my art department. I will tell you this much, when running Photoshop you cannot see a noticeable difference in running the app.

People get too hung up on the "numbers".

A quick Google search pulled up this link: http://www.macworld.com/article/54476/2006/12/photoshop-cs3-performance.html

Which shows the MacBook Pro doing about as well as the old PowerMac Quad on Photoshop CS3. Obviously the CS2 numbers are favorable to the PowerPC as that release didn't natively support x86.

Of course it depends on what you do, exactly. If your art department's Photoshop usage is relatively cpu-light, you're not likely to notice a second here or there. Perhaps more importantly, there's no technical reason why a G5 machine wouldn't be appropriate for an iPhone developer's workstation. But I don't think it's accurate to say that the G5's performance could be considered comparable to the Core 2 Duo.

[kingtj]

The things many Mac users seem to either forget or ignore is, many popular pieces of software were developed for YEARS on the Intel processor, because they were writing them for Windows. By contrast, the G5 PPC was a "special case" people had to learn to develop for independently of the Intel architecture.

This is why companies like Adobe quickly released some of their newer products for Intel Macs, but didn't offer a PPC version (Soundbooth, for example). The code was practically already written from the Windows version.

Even if you could make a good theoretical case for the G5 potentially "outperforming" an Intel-based Mac, it wouldn't pan out in the real world, because people didn't put years of effort into optimizing software around the G5 processor. Any code targeted for the Intel CPU is going to have more "experience" behind it at leveraging all the benefits of that architecture.

Photoshop may be about the single most popular app you can name that provides a good experience on a G5 PPC. That's because Adobe heavily invested in developing it as a "flagship" product to show off when the PowerMac G5 debuted. They know when people think Macintosh, they think Photoshop. But as we move forward, you can bet they'd rather put more time and energy in optimizing routines for Intel - where the work benefits BOTH the Windows and the OS X side of things for them.


A quick Google search pulled up this link: http://www.macworld.com/article/54476/2006/12/photoshop-cs3-performance.html

Which shows the MacBook Pro doing about as well as the old PowerMac Quad on Photoshop CS3. Obviously the CS2 numbers are favorable to the PowerPC as that release didn't natively support x86.

Of course it depends on what you do, exactly. If your art department's Photoshop usage is relatively cpu-light, you're not likely to notice a second here or there. Perhaps more importantly, there's no technical reason why a G5 machine wouldn't be appropriate for an iPhone developer's workstation. But I don't think it's accurate to say that the G5's performance could be considered comparable to the Core 2 Duo.

[chuckles:)]

I installed the aspen packages on my iMac g5 without knowing that they weren't supported, and everything works fine.

[EagerDragon]

No, I'm not kidding..... and yes it can.

If you go strictly by the numbers that get posted for Benchmark it appears that the PowerMac G5's are obsolete. If you go by real world usage of applications that aren't written to take advantage of more than 2 cores/processors presently than you know that the G5's still have some pretty strong legs.

We have Mac Pros and PowerMac G5's in my art department. I will tell you this much, when running Photoshop you cannot see a noticeable difference in running the app.

People get too hung up on the "numbers".

The numbers are there to sell new systems. But most Apple users seem to keep their systems much longer than their PC counterparts.

Got to keep the economy going I guess, but I am still on PPC.

[EagerDragon]

I installed the aspen packages on my iMac g5 without knowing that they weren't supported, and everything works fine.

Did you try the emulator?

[cherry su]

Cool! Now I can play with it on my G4 Mac mini. I hope it runs okay with 256MB RAM...

[sord]

The numbers are there to sell new systems. But most Apple users seem to keep their systems much longer than their PC counterparts.

Got to keep the economy going I guess, but I am still on PPC.
I'm still on PPC too (PowerMac Quad), and I don't plan on "upgrading" for at least another two or three years. Apple is starting to frustrate me -- I purchased my machine just before the Intel announcement (I ignored the rumors as the move had been rumored before), and now I have to deal with Apple starting to ignore the PPC machines....

[qubex]

The things many Mac users seem to either forget or ignore is, many popular pieces of software were developed for YEARS on the Intel processor, because they were writing them for Windows. By contrast, the G5 PPC was a "special case" people had to learn to develop for independently of the Intel architecture.
I'm afraid I must totally and utterly disagree. To most software developers these days, "the Iron" is totally irrelevant. Compilers and IDEs make the process of constructing actual instruction sequences transparent and invisible to the average application programmer. They only need to invoke the correct system calls and APIs, and from that perspective, the Apple/OSX world is just as alien compared to Windows win32/win64 as it ever was. The switch to Intel has made absolutely no difference to the average programmer's learning curve: just consider how easy it is to compile hybrid ("Universal") PPC/x86 applications in Xcode.

On a technical note, the optimisation of algorithms relies heavily on graph-theoretic concepts ("discrete topology") and is handled by the a higher-level structure of the optimising compiler than the low-level formulation of assembler code sequences. The delay in releasing Intel-optimised (as opposed to Intel-compatible) versions of popular software is related to the complexities of producing these optimal path predictors, not to actual sequential programming tasks. As for Office, the delay was due to commercial greed ("Hey, here's an opportunity to make Intel users pay for decent performance!") and sloppy programming (archaic architecture-dependent coding).

And as a final note, writing raw assembler code for a RISC architecture such as the PowerPC is a far more satisfying and elegant experience than hard-coding illogical, idiosyncratic, legacy-ridden x86 code. The G5's AltiVec/VXD/Velocity Engine SIMD instructions allow a level of performance not easily attained by even the most recent SSE4 extensions courtesy of Intel. The processor is perfectly balanced and the HyperTransport bus allows you to feed data into the cores at exactly the right rate. To coin a metaphor, it's like when a 1980s aspirated engine takes off next to your turbo and makes you feel like a fool. It just isn't a fair comparison. That every "serious" supercomputer (as opposed to crappy "Linux-cluster"/Beowulf) is a RISC machine is an indicator of this.

To summarise: OSX on x86 is just as alien to Wintel programmers as OSX on PPC is/was, and PowerPC is still the superior architecture, even though it's been abandoned as a matter of economic pragmatism.

Please, no more of this unreasoned dogma. If you're not a programmer, don't pretend to be one.

[jbarr]

OK, now that everyone has vented and religiously upheld their views on which architecture is better.....

Can anyone respond to the first post? Is iPhone/iPod Touch SDK development doable on a PowerPC G4 platform, or is an intel-based platform required?

[elppa]

OK, now that everyone has vented and religiously upheld their views on which architecture is better.....

Can anyone respond to the first post? Is iPhone/iPod Touch SDK development doable on a PowerPC G4 platform, or is an intel-based platform required?

I feel a bit guilty for side-tracking and bumbling along about Altivec so I will try and answer as best I can:

The System requirements say you need intel.

I would wait until they've stopped shipping betas and start shipping the final SDK in June. At the moment PPC falls outside the system requirements but it appears XCode and the iPhone Simulator will still run provided you have Leopard.

However it is not support is not official and therefore could be broken at any stage in the future. So proceed with caution.

[jbarr]

Thank you for the feedback!

I asked because I would like to try my hand at some iPhone/iPod Touch app development, but I have an exclusively Windows-based environment at home and work, so I would need to purchase some sort of Mac.

<side note>
I tried installing one of the hacked Leopard versions on some Intel PCs, and it wouldn't install due to some hardware incompatibilities. I figured that I would at least try out the SDK to see if it was even worth my time and investment. If it was, then I'd invest in a Mac. But due to failed installs, that route is a dead-end.
</side note>

Anyway, I figure maybe a Mac Mini running Leopard would do the trick. I've seen TONS of them on eBay. Unfortunately, the cheap ones tend to be PPC, and the Intel-based versions are going for prices close to the price of a new model.

[greenlightracer]

No, I'm not kidding..... and yes it can.

If you go strictly by the numbers that get posted for Benchmark it appears that the PowerMac G5's are obsolete. If you go by real world usage of applications that aren't written to take advantage of more than 2 cores/processors presently than you know that the G5's still have some pretty strong legs.

We have Mac Pros and PowerMac G5's in my art department. I will tell you this much, when running Photoshop you cannot see a noticeable difference in running the app.

People get too hung up on the "numbers".

I must totally agree. There are more components to a computer the just a processor. The G5 had "Bandwidth to Burn" and they weren't kidding. The frontside bus on the slowest DP G5 was 900Mhz... compare that to the 667Mhz buses of the first C2Ds. And although the first couple of generations of G5s only had DDR400 Ram, you had to install it in pairs, because the U3 controller would treat two dimms as one bank, doubling the throughput to around 7.4 Gigabytes IIRC.

[roblimo]

I feel a bit guilty for side-tracking and bumbling along about Altivec so I will try and answer as best I can:

The System requirements say you need intel.

I would wait until they've stopped shipping betas and start shipping the final SDK in June. At the moment PPC falls outside the system requirements but it appears XCode and the iPhone Simulator will still run provided you have Leopard.

However it is not support is not official and therefore could be broken at any stage in the future. So proceed with caution.

Hi
I got the original SDK running just fine on my iMacG5. Has anyone out there tried any later SDK versions? Are they all running?

thanks!

[kabunaru]

Good to see that the iPhone SDK can still work on PowerPC Macs.

[roblimo]

Hi
I got the original SDK running just fine on my iMacG5. Has anyone out there tried any later SDK versions? Are they all running?

thanks!

answering my own question:
yes - it is still working fine! I tried it - pretty much the same as before:
- install the package from the apple site
- manually install the iphone packages
- moving the iphone relating things from /platforms to /developer/platforms
- editing one arch. spec file to enable the ppc to work.
I got these from http://www.tbradford.org/2008/03/iphone-sdk-beta-2-possible-ppc-fix.html

happy playing around, waiting for the iphone to finally reach finland...

[Biswas]

Hi,
I am having MAC System with PowerPC Mac process. I have downloaded iPhone SDK from MAC website and installed it in my system but it omit iPhone SDK-related files.
I have got some help in online (Ref: http://www.iphoneatlas.com/2008/03/10/surprise-iphone-sdk-also-works-on-powerpc-macs/) where suggest to follow some steps to install the iPhone SDK in PowerPC Mac process.
The url specified above said that i have to do the following:
1. Drag the iPhone SDK package onto the Pacifist icon
2. Select the top entry, “Contents of iPhone SDK”
3. Click the “Install” button in the upper-left corner and enter your administrator credentials

> I have installed "Pacifist 2.5.2" and tried to do the first step but it is throwing an error "The item "Packages" could not be moved because "Pacifist 2.5.2" cannot be modified."

> I don't understand from where i have to drag the iPhone SDK package. I think i am doing mistake somewhere. Pls help me to solve this problem.

Thanks in advance.

[Biswas]

Hi,
I am having MAC System with PowerPC Mac process. I have downloaded iPhone SDK from MAC website and installed it in my system but it omit iPhone SDK-related files.
I have got some help in online (Ref: http://www.iphoneatlas.com/2008/03/1...-powerpc-macs/) where suggest to follow some steps to install the iPhone SDK in PowerPC Mac process.
The url specified above said that i have to do the following:
1. Drag the iPhone SDK package onto the Pacifist icon
2. Select the top entry, “Contents of iPhone SDK”
3. Click the “Install” button in the upper-left corner and enter your administrator credentials

> I have installed "Pacifist 2.5.2" and tried to do the first step but it is throwing an error "The item "Packages" could not be moved because "Pacifist 2.5.2" cannot be modified."

> I don't understand from where i have to drag the iPhone SDK package. I think i am doing mistake somewhere. Pls help me to solve this problem.

Thanks in advance.