Best PPC Computer

[powerpcguy]

Everyone knows the best PowerPC of all time was the 12" PowerBook.

[ppcfanforever1]

Originally Posted by rjcalifornia

It wasn't that Apple were not able to get a laptop friendly G5 processor. I think it was IBM fault.

IBM was working really close with Toshiba and Sony to get the Cell Processor up and running. And after getting the Cell Processor done, they had to mass produce it for Sony.

Not only that, it was a Win-Win situation to leave Apple in the dust. Now they use Cell Processor on IBM Main frames, and still produce for Sony.

Probably IBM could have come up with a better G4 processor, may be a dual G4 for the iBook/Powerbook line up. Why did they never come up with a dual G4 ibook/powerbook?

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Motorola and Freescale are like Italy... They leave you and do something else when you most need them...

No don't blame it on ibm, Steve rushed them, Steve opened his mouth too early and promised faster g5 processors and since he did this without ibm having the ability to release fast enough all g5 products died including the laptop ones.

[Goftrey]

Originally Posted by ppcfanforever1

No don't blame it on ibm, Steve rushed them, Steve opened his mouth too early and promised faster g5 processors and since he did this without ibm having the ability to release fast enough all g5 products died including the laptop ones.

Regardless of whether Steve pushed IBM or not, I very much doubt that IBM would have ever been able to (feasibly) design a 3ghz+ desktop CPU, and a laptop CPU that wouldn't panini your lap. Especially when there were the Athlon 64 X2's from AMD & the Core Duo's from Intel around.

[ihuman:D]

Originally Posted by oscar92070

A dual G4 laptop would be extremely hard to cool and definitely not feasible.

Look here at the MPC864x section.

[seveej]

Originally Posted by ppcfanforever1

No don't blame it on ibm, Steve rushed them, Steve opened his mouth too early and promised faster g5 processors and since he did this without ibm having the ability to release fast enough all g5 products died including the laptop ones.

LEM disagrees:
http://lowendmac.com/musings/08mm/power-mac-g5.html
"Based on promises from IBM, Steve Jobs promised the Apple faithful that the Power Mac G5 would reach 3.0 GHz within a year."

RGDS,

[Southern Dad]

I like the G5's but you specified portable... so much for that idea with those heavy metal desktops.

[GermanyChris]

Originally Posted by seveej

LEM disagrees:
http://lowendmac.com/musings/08mm/power-mac-g5.html
"Based on promises from IBM, Steve Jobs promised the Apple faithful that the Power Mac G5 would reach 3.0 GHz within a year."

RGDS,

I'd rather have a quad 2.5 than a dual 3...

[rjcalifornia]

Overall, IBM was more interested in their Cell Processor thing. Apple should have funded IBM...

Sometimes Apple puts their money in the wrong basket. Remember how they did invested in the HD DVD? lol

[seveej]

Originally Posted by rjcalifornia

Overall, IBM was more interested in their Cell Processor thing.

I think Apple's original decision to embrace PowerPC was an ideological decision. The Wintel world used Intel (x86), so Apple, trying to differentiate itself, put its money in another basket. You could debate whether Apple's original decision to go PowerPC was misguided.
In a way, PowerPC held great promise (at the moment of selection), but I bet many saw that the platform would ultimately fail after it did not gain traction. Since about 2000 (you may disagree on the date) it was obvious that PowerPC would not become a serious contender for the crown.

Once the AIM-alliance stopped being serious about creating a generally viable alternative to Intel in desktop (and mobile) processors, Apple was in a bind.

The G5, while in many ways revolutionary was in some ways an exercise in desperation: Apple allying itself with IBM (ask yourself: what types of processors does IBM have a vested interest in) instead of Intel (what types of processors were Intel focussing on?) was basically the most non-sensical move in Apple's history. Especially as it was clear, that IBM had no viable mobile processor design.

One could argue, that Apple saw the situation for what it was, but deemed the timing to be bad for a PPC->Intel transition and decided to postpone the operation (Apple was still in the midst of its transition to OS X).

RGDS,

P.S. Mind you, I am not saying that PowerPC was inherently non-viable, but IMNSHO, the structure behind Apple's PowerPC's (namely AIM) was not on par with the machinery Intel could bring to bear. If standard wars in high-tech have taught us anything, it's that the winner is not selected based on quality/performance but on compatibility and related affects.

[rampancy]

Originally Posted by ihuman:D

Look here at the MPC864x section.

Yes, and that's a G4 derived chip targeted at the embedded market. Compare that to what Intel had available with the Core 2 Duo at the same time.

Originally Posted by rjcalifornia

Overall, IBM was more interested in their Cell Processor thing. Apple should have funded IBM...

The math wasn't in Apple's favor. Put yourself in IBM's shoes: where are you going to put your R&D and chip fabbing resources? Into desktop and portable-class CPUs for Apple, which would get you several millions of sales over a five or so year period...or into making PPCs for MS, Sony and Nintendo for an entire console gen, which would get surely you hundreds of millions of sales over almost a ten year period?

The whole promise/premise of the PPC was that it was going to crush WinTel, or at least garner a segment of the desktop market that was significant enough to drive R&D for PPC CPUs for desktops and notebooks. That sadly never materialized (due to Moore's Law favouring x86, interference from Microsoft, etc.), so Motorola (later Freescale) and IBM turned their attentions to the markets which were far and away far larger than Apple and the Mac: the embedded market, servers, and consoles.

Apple may have the clout do things like strong arm Intel into crazy stuff like the custom shrunken Core 2 Duo for the original MacBook Air, or CrystalWell (supposedly Haswell with 64-128 MB of CPU on-die RAM linked to the integrated GPU via a 512-bit bus), but back then, Apple didn't have the market power or the money to single handedly fund desktop PPC development.

Originally Posted by rjcalifornia

Remember how they did invested in the HD DVD? lol

Huh? Apple never shipped an HD DVD drive in their Macs. It wouldn't make sense anyway since Apple is on the Blu-ray Disc Association (Jobs' "bag of hurt" comment notwithstanding). You're probably thinking of DVD-RAM, an early rewritable DVD format that Apple shipped on the first Sawtooth G4 Macs. It wasn't a bad format for it's time; it was actually quite technically impressive... it was just was prohibitively expensive to implement, and was eventually rendered obsolete by DVD+/-R/RW.

[rjcalifornia]

Originally Posted by rampancy

The math wasn't in Apple's favor. Put yourself in IBM's shoes: where are you going to put your R&D and chip fabbing resources? Into desktop and portable-class CPUs for Apple, which would get you several millions of sales over a five or so year period...or into making PPCs for MS, Sony and Nintendo for an entire console gen, which would get surely you hundreds of millions of sales over almost a ten year period?

I'll say over a 5 years period. Rumor has it that both Sony and Microsoft will make the switch to AMD/Intel in their next gen game consoles. It has to do with more processing power with less energy consumption.

The whole promise/premise of the PPC was that it was going to crush WinTel, or at least garner a segment of the desktop market that was significant enough to drive R&D for PPC CPUs for desktops and notebooks. That sadly never materialized (due to Moore's Law favouring x86, interference from Microsoft, etc.), so Motorola (later Freescale) and IBM turned their attentions to the markets which were far and away far larger than Apple and the Mac: the embedded market, servers, and consoles.

Apple may have the clout do things like strong arm Intel into crazy stuff like the custom shrunken Core 2 Duo for the original MacBook Air, or CrystalWell (supposedly Haswell with 64-128 MB of CPU on-die RAM linked to the integrated GPU via a 512-bit bus), but back then, Apple didn't have the market power or the money to single handedly fund desktop PPC development.

Well, yeah. IBM was not and never will be like Intel. Intel has a good experience dealing with small costumers with funky chip requests in short time.

Huh? Apple never shipped an HD DVD drive in their Macs. It wouldn't make sense anyway since Apple is on the Blu-ray Disc Association (Jobs' "bag of hurt" comment notwithstanding). You're probably thinking of DVD-RAM, an early rewritable DVD format that Apple shipped on the first Sawtooth G4 Macs. It wasn't a bad format for it's time; it was actually quite technically impressive... it was just was prohibitively expensive to implement, and was eventually rendered obsolete by DVD+/-R/RW.

Nope, HD DVD. Don't you remember that you could 'burn' Blue Ray discs but not read them (for a while) Apple backed HD DVD over Blue Ray. I remember seeing endless fights/threads about why people couldn't watch BD discs movies.

[quasinormal]

The last revision 15" and 17" Powerbooks with DDR2 RAM and high resolution screens are my favourites. The last revision G5 and 17" G4 imacs were great too.

I know people that still quite happily use these machines.

[rampancy]

Originally Posted by rjcalifornia

I'll say over a 5 years period. Rumor has it that both Sony and Microsoft will make the switch to AMD/Intel in their next gen game consoles. It has to do with more processing power with less energy consumption.

The Seventh Generation of video game consoles "officially" started in 2005 with the XBox 360, and it's been about eight years now since then. It's interesting that both MS and Sony have gone x86 now with the "XBox 720" and the "PS4", but Nintendo still has the PPC in the Wii U. Nevertheless, IBM got much more profit out of the Seventh Gen Console Wars than it did (and would have done) in the same time frame with PPC and Apple.

Originally Posted by rjcalifornia

Nope, HD DVD. Don't you remember that you could 'burn' Blue Ray discs but not read them (for a while) Apple backed HD DVD over Blue Ray. I remember seeing endless fights/threads about why people couldn't watch BD discs movies.

DVD Studio Pro eventually received the ability to burn HD DVDs, but Final Cut Pro later supported Blu-ray too. Regardless, Apple never shipped HD DVD drives on their Macs (or Blu-ray for that matter). If Apple issued any actual clear statement saying that it fully and publicly backed (and put money into) HD DVD, I'd like to see it.

[MisterKeeks]

Originally Posted by quasinormal

The last revision 15" and 17" Powerbooks with DDR2 RAM and high resolution screens are my favourites. The last revision G5 and 17" G4 imacs were great too.

I'm not sure if they use a DDR2 controller (or even DDR).

[rampancy]

Originally Posted by MisterKeeks

I'm not sure if they use a DDR2 controller (or even DDR).

The later model PowerBooks did indeed use DDR2 memory, using the same architecture originally used on the Xserve (e.g. where most everything got pushed onto the System Controller chip to get around the bandwidth limitations of the G4.)

[MisterKeeks]

Originally Posted by rampancy

The later model PowerBooks did indeed use DDR2 memory, using the same architecture originally used on the Xserve (e.g. where most everything got pushed onto the System Controller chip to get around the bandwidth limitations of the G4.)

I know, I just seem to remember sometime here when it was brought up that the PowerBooks didn't have a DDR controller, it just used DDR for marketing purposes. I could very well be wrong, though.

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Here it is:

Originally Posted by wobegong

If its like the late PBG4's (and I'm 90% sure it is) then it doesn't have a DDR memory controller so the DDR benefit over SDR is hardly used at all.
DDR memory was used as that was the current memory type and was easier to source as SDR RAM was becoming obsolete (of course synics might say it was used so it would show "DDR" on the spec list which would indicate it was a true DDR machine when it wasn't)...

[rampancy]

Originally Posted by MisterKeeks

I know, I just seem to remember sometime here when it was brought up that the PowerBooks didn't have a DDR controller, it just used DDR for marketing purposes. I could very well be wrong, though.

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Here it is:

I think the confusion arose from the fact that the G4's bus didn't have the bandwidth to handle DDR-type memory. From my understanding, Apple's solution was to route everything - RAM, graphics, and I/O into the System Controller instead so that memory access could, as much as possible, bypass the CPU. It was, IMO, a sign that Apple was getting desperate in its attempts to move past the problems it was having with the G4 and its development.

In any case, I'm not sure what that other person was talking about anyway, because DDR and DDR2 DIMMS are not physically compatible with SDRAM DIMMS (so Apple couldn't just trivially put them into previous generation PowerBooks) and as I mentioned before the System Controller was fully capable of handling DDR2 and DDR memory; the weakest link was the CPU bus.

[rjcalifornia]

Originally Posted by rampancy

I think the confusion arose from the fact that the G4's bus didn't have the bandwidth to handle DDR-type memory. From my understanding, Apple's solution was to route everything - RAM, graphics, and I/O into the System Controller instead so that memory access could, as much as possible, bypass the CPU. It was, IMO, a sign that Apple was getting desperate in its attempts to move past the problems it was having with the G4 and its development.

In any case, I'm not sure what that other person was talking about anyway, because DDR and DDR2 DIMMS are not physically compatible with SDRAM DIMMS (so Apple couldn't just trivially put them into previous generation PowerBooks) and as I mentioned before the System Controller was fully capable of handling DDR2 and DDR memory; the weakest link was the CPU bus.

So, Intel was the smartest move.