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rjcalifornia

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 4, 2012
668
7
El Salvador
No, this is not about 'can I install it...' thread. It is more about an analysis of the PowerPC Architecture.

I was thinking the last couple of days that my ibook G4 1.2 Ghz is still a useful and somehow powerful laptop and I was thinking that it seems to be 'slow' because of the lack of development of applications/OS for PowerPC

So I began thinking, if Snow Leopard/Mountain Lion were still PPC capable, would our PPC macs be able to run it 'smoothly'?

Why I am wondering that? Well, I've repaired laptops from time to time, specially mini or netbook. They seem to run Windows 7 Professional without issues and I can watch a youtube video with no problems. I am talking about the Atom netbooks. So, if such laptop with such specifications can run something as heavy (let's face it, W7 is pretty heavy) as Windows 7, PowerPC G4/G5 can run Snow or Mountain.

So technically speaking I believe the late G4/G5 can run those OS. Or not?

Please note that the PowerPC Architecture is not dead and it is pretty much the best and outperforms x86. Xbox 360, Play Station 3, Wii, use PowerPC :)
 

Intell

macrumors P6
Jan 24, 2010
18,953
508
Inside
Snow Leopard may have been limited to G5's and Lion would have still dropped support for PowerPC's. They just don't have enough raw power to easily drive Lion or newer things.
 

wobegong

Guest
May 29, 2012
418
1
They just don't have enough raw power to easily drive Lion or newer things.

They have (some, G5's for sure) the power, thats got nothing to do with it it's just it is not in Apple's commercial interest to support an old architecture, they want people to buy new hardware so why waste money with a) two dev & support teams (PPC & Intel), two sets of code b) Allow people to keep their PPC when they could be being forced to move to Intel and buy new product. Same reason Universal Binary is now stopped from being allowed on the AppStore, why else do that, if a 3rd party dev wants to do Universal so he caters for PPC as well as Intel owners what difference does it make to Apple? Only to remove the support pillars from PPC owners to force them over to buy new hardware.

In the same way as Windows 7 Professional runs absolutely fine (without Aero interface admittedly) on my god knows how old (certainly MUCH MUCH older than a PMG5) Pentium M 2Ghz laptop then an O/S, even Lion, would also be fine on a G5 for sure and maybe even less.
 

surroundfan

macrumors 6502
Nov 22, 2005
345
36
Melbourne, Australia
Snow Leopard may have been limited to G5's and Lion would have still dropped support for PowerPC's. They just don't have enough raw power to easily drive Lion or newer things.

An interesting hypothetical... And my response to the analysis is 'Yup'... Snow Leopard could be run on a Core Solo mini with 1GB of RAM. A basic G5 would have offered either similar or only slightly worse performance. However, this would have cut out *every* notebook made by Apple.

Lion, OTOH, represented a big jump in resource usage due to the 64-bit kernel and general bloatiness, so you would have seen only high end PowerMac G5s able to drive it, by which time the market would have been far too small to warrant the engineering effort required for a separate PPC build...
 

orestes1984

macrumors 65816
Jun 10, 2005
1,000
4
Australia
Why write the code for two separate architectures when you can write it for one. I don't think Apple ever wants to go back to the fat binary days either 68k/PPC or PPC/Intel.

Lion... represented a big jump in resource usage due to the 64-bit kernel

Not really at all actually, A quad G5 comes in at about the same performance as a low end Core 2 Duo from the first Intel Macs. The 64bit kernel is a non issue, the kernel really adds no weight at all to the OS and the G5s are fully 64bit compliant in a true sense where the Intel chips have 64bit extensions. I've run a 64bit kernel on a G5 running Linux. The real overheads come from more and more window dressing, GL desktops, Quartz Extreme.
 

orestes1984

macrumors 65816
Jun 10, 2005
1,000
4
Australia
Yep, they could have just as easily stripped out the intel bloat for PPC but they dropped it. It's not a lot different than a lightweight 10.5 and you can strip out the code from Leopard yourself.
 

Intell

macrumors P6
Jan 24, 2010
18,953
508
Inside
They have (some, G5's for sure) the power, thats got nothing to do with it it's just it is not in Apple's commercial interest to support an old architecture, they want people to buy new hardware so why waste money with a) two dev & support teams (PPC & Intel), two sets of code b) Allow people to keep their PPC when they could be being forced to move to Intel and buy new product. Same reason Universal Binary is now stopped from being allowed on the AppStore, why else do that, if a 3rd party dev wants to do Universal so he caters for PPC as well as Intel owners what difference does it make to Apple? Only to remove the support pillars from PPC owners to force them over to buy new hardware.

G5's would not have been supported with Lion. The newest G5's were 6 years old when Lion came out. This is outside of Apple's support range as the G5's would be falling in the vintage/obsolete part of their life cycle. Even the quad G5 doesn't have enough raw power to drive Lion. It's Geekbench score is between the 2007 and 2008 iMac in terms of power. The slower G5's are even lower than that. Apple would just cut off all support for PowerPC in Lion.
 

rjcalifornia

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 4, 2012
668
7
El Salvador
G5's would not have been supported with Lion. The newest G5's were 6 years old when Lion came out. This is outside of Apple's support range as the G5's would be falling in the vintage/obsolete part of their life cycle. Even the quad G5 doesn't have enough raw power to drive Lion. It's Geekbench score is between the 2007 and 2008 iMac in terms of power. The slower G5's are even lower than that. Apple would just cut off all support for PowerPC in Lion.


Yeah... I have a 1.0 Ghz Celeron with 1 GB running Windows 7 with Aero, Visual Studio Purposes and I can compile, watch youtube and chat. It is older than my iBook G4 and runs smooth.

Even the quad G5 doesn't have enough raw power to drive Lion

Are you for real? The purposes of newer OS are to be faster and more powerful. Windows 8 is all about being fast even with 1 GB. If Lion is that 'heavy' I certainly will avoid it.

For me, Apple dropping PPC support is like Microsoft dropping AMD Processors support.
 

wobegong

Guest
May 29, 2012
418
1
G5's would not have been supported with Lion. The newest G5's were 6 years old when Lion came out. This is outside of Apple's support range as the G5's would be falling in the vintage/obsolete part of their life cycle. Even the quad G5 doesn't have enough raw power to drive Lion. It's Geekbench score is between the 2007 and 2008 iMac in terms of power. The slower G5's are even lower than that. Apple would just cut off all support for PowerPC in Lion.

Actually Snow Leopard was outside of Apples 'support range' but in terms of 'ability to support' of course they would, a G5 (any) is well able to run 'adequately' even Lion, like the previous poster says even a 1Ghz Celeron/Pentium 3 can run Windows 7 just the same as an early Intel is certainly able to support the newer OSX versions it's just that Apple is always eager to cut it out to force you to buy more hardware - Like I say the same reason they now BAN Universal Binary from the App Store, it forces people to upgrade. Apple isn't what it was, the friendly hip saviour to the evil of MS, it's now taken over that role fully and expanded upon it in a way even MS never did......
 

GermanyChris

macrumors 601
Jul 3, 2011
4,185
5
Here
Why write the code for two separate architectures when you can write it for one. I don't think Apple ever wants to go back to the fat binary days either 68k/PPC or PPC/Intel.



Not really at all actually, A quad G5 comes in at about the same performance as a low end Core 2 Duo from the first Intel Macs. The 64bit kernel is a non issue, the kernel really adds no weight at all to the OS and the G5s are fully 64bit compliant in a true sense where the Intel chips have 64bit extensions. I've run a 64bit kernel on a G5 running Linux. The real overheads come from more and more window dressing, GL desktops, Quartz Extreme.

My quad has a GB of 3700 which is faster than many mac portables, and you need to get pst 2010 for a Mac Mini to beat it..

my 17" 2009 17" MBP runs Mountain Lion just great and has a GB of 4600..
 

hackerwayne

macrumors 6502a
Feb 17, 2012
789
12
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
My quad has a GB of 3700 which is faster than many mac portables, and you need to get pst 2010 for a Mac Mini to beat it..

Lol.. My Late 2009 iMac smokes it for good.. GB score 4297. Mid 2011 is double of that with 9757.
my 17" 2009 17" MBP runs Mountain Lion just great and has a GB of 4600..

----------

And speaking about G4, its already struggling real bad to even run Leopard, not sure how its gonna run Lion even if its supported. Lion lags badly on Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz with 2GB of ram.
 

wobegong

Guest
May 29, 2012
418
1
Lol.. My Late 2009 iMac smokes it for good.. GB score 4297. Mid 2011 is double of that with 9757.
my 17" 2009 17" MBP runs Mountain Lion just great and has a GB of 4600..

What you all seem to miss is that you don't need a high GB score to just run an O/S, a web browser, email and a couple of other lightweight apps that most people use a home computer for (you need it for games, development, heavy image/video manipulation etc).

So the response that a G5 could probably run Lion 'adequately' remains.

Just as (yet again) a 1Ghz Celeron can run Windows 7 adequately as can my truly ancient Pentium M laptop.. If an O/S used up so much CPU horsepower it needed high GB scores just to operate it would be the worst O/S in the world and I don't think OSX is that....

My MacBookPro is really no faster (that I can feel) on day to day blah tasks as my PM G5, thats because neither is taxed with running an O/S, a browser and an email client. It's only when I hit the real heavy stuff that the difference shows, especially multitasking but most home computers don't do much of that at all. Why I have the MBP for work, where I do need that...
 

GermanyChris

macrumors 601
Jul 3, 2011
4,185
5
Here
Lol.. My Late 2009 iMac smokes it for good.. GB score 4297. Mid 2011 is double of that with 9757.
my 17" 2009 17" MBP runs Mountain Lion just great and has a GB of 4600..

----------

And speaking about G4, its already struggling real bad to even run Leopard, not sure how its gonna run Lion even if its supported. Lion lags badly on Core 2 Duo 1.83GHz with 2GB of ram.


Things got drascally faster with sandy..

The early 09 iMac is the first Non Mac Pro mac to break 4000..

My '10 White MacBook ran it just fine, it's GB was 3600ish

the power is there in the G5's G4's I dunno
 

Jessica Lares

macrumors G3
Oct 31, 2009
9,612
1,055
Near Dallas, Texas, USA
Lion and Mountain Lion are so heavy, I don't think any of the G5s could run it efficiently. This morning, iTunes was taking about 2GB of RAM even! :eek:

Windows is WAYYYYYY more good about RAM usage.
 

thorns

macrumors member
Sep 27, 2011
96
0
It's not a hardware problem that Lion wouldn't be fast on a Core Duo CPU. It's solely lack of optimising on Apple's side. Newer software is almost never really optimised, since the raw power of current hardware is already making up for it. This is why you are probably having more beachballs on a current Mac computer than on older G4 and G5 computers. Apple is focusing on the iOS market, so it's no wonder development in the conventional computer area is seriously lacking.
 

hackerwayne

macrumors 6502a
Feb 17, 2012
789
12
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
I still have 2 PowerMac G5s around, 1 is the Single Core 1.6GHz and the other is the dual 2.5GHz. Yes they're still good for general computing (web, word, etc) but the problem is they consume way too much power and really really noisy and so its no longer worth it.
 

GermanyChris

macrumors 601
Jul 3, 2011
4,185
5
Here
Lion and Mountain Lion are so heavy, I don't think any of the G5s could run it efficiently. This morning, iTunes was taking about 2GB of RAM even! :eek:

Windows is WAYYYYYY more good about RAM usage.

8 or 16GB for DP G5's

I still have 2 PowerMac G5s around, 1 is the Single Core 1.6GHz and the other is the dual 2.5GHz. Yes they're still good for general computing (web, word, etc) but the problem is they consume way too much power and really really noisy and so its no longer worth it.

Worth is subjective. I'd run ML and the quad just because.
 

rjcalifornia

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 4, 2012
668
7
El Salvador
Lion and Mountain Lion are so heavy, I don't think any of the G5s could run it efficiently. This morning, iTunes was taking about 2GB of RAM even! :eek:

Windows is WAYYYYYY more good about RAM usage.

Indeed. I mean how is it possible I can use my old Celeron Desktop computer with windows 7, 1 Gb or RAM, DIMM RAM!!!

Yes, I said that before, but it is very frustrating that Apple did that. I understand the move to Intel but dropping support after only 5 years? Even Microsoft is thinking of extending XP support to 2017! Isn't that nice? And they're evil... haha

G5/G4 not handling Lion? Yeah... I don't think so. I think they can run it, not as fast as a Core 2 Duo 2.17 Ghz but still.


FYI Microsoft is still supporting Windows NT...
 
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