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7970 in G5
- Thread starter rabidz7
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A+, hilarious, would read again and link to friends.
Incidentally, why bother with a Macintosh at all if you're just going to run Linux on the system? You'll have better luck with GPUs on a more modern Linux platform like the IBM PowerLINUX boxes or an HP Integrity.
Incidentally, why bother with a Macintosh at all if you're just going to run Linux on the system? You'll have better luck with GPUs on a more modern Linux platform like the IBM PowerLINUX boxes or an HP Integrity.
It is not a troll thread, the linux drivers should be able to initialize the 7970 just like an unflashed 7970 will work in a mac pro in windows. It would work in OS X, and it does, on the mac pro, but only in 10.8, 10.5 has no recent AMD drivers, but linux has loads.
The graphics card has its own video BIOS which is loaded into RAM on boot and executed by the CPU. You are trying to run a Video BIOS written in x86 ASM on a PowerPC chip - so it is not going to initialize. It was a good idea though (unfortunately Linux can't do anything with the GPU if it's not initialized).
This article sheds a little light on the boot process: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.coreboot.org/data/vgabios/
This article sheds a little light on the boot process: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.coreboot.org/data/vgabios/
The only you will get it to work is to find a PPC bios for the 7970 and flash, and i'm fairly certain that a ppc bios doesn't exist for any card past the 7800 GTX. At least not publicly anyways.
This is pure speculation, but i would assume if anyone had them it would be Apple. AMD has no reason to create a BIOS for PPC hardware unless someone requested it specifically. The only reason Apple would request one is if they decided to go back to IBM. Although it's unlikely, i'm sure they have 10.8 running on PPC hardware for a just in case scenario, as well as ARM and who know how many other architectures. They would need a GPU to go along with those architectures.
If any of that is true, then getting apple to release that BIOS is probably not going to happen, but i wont say it's impossible.
Apple doesn't have 10.7 or 10.8 running on G4/G5 PowerPC type machine or even have the source complied for that because it would be extremely slow, even on the pompous quad. Because of 10.7 and 10.8's 64-bit requirement, it would be limited to G5s. But because of the G5's high overhead when running a 64-bit binary, it would be extremely slow. Much slower than an early Core2Duo running the same 64-bit binary. This slowness and Apple's push to make 10.6 a 64-bit native OS caused it to be dropped from PowerPC machines. Not Apple's greediness or to make people buy a new machine, but because it would run slow on G5's. It is very likely that it would run faster on a 1.8Ghz G4 than a 1.8Ghz G5 because of the G5's 64-bit overhead.
Apple doesn't waste resources porting OS's to PPC hardware 7 years after it was abandoned, or even the current version POWER chips. They're a multi-billion dollar corporation who makes mostly very intelligent decisions. I wouldn't doubt they have someone working on ports to ARM, however, just to see how viable it would be to manufacture their own CPU's.
I wasn't exclusively talking about the G5. I was also referring to the Power 5, 6, and 7 chips that apple could easily have running in a lab somewhere as well as possible ARM versions. Hell, they may even have IA64 versions. We don't really know what apple has going on behind the scenes or what they have compiled source for, so we cant say for certain whether they do or don't.
The point i was trying to make was that if anyone would have modern GPU PPC bios rome, it would probably be apple.
In 32-bit maybe. But in 64-bit it would fall much shorter. The overhead is just too much. That's why there are so few 64-bit PowerPC binaries. They weren't made and used unless needed for increased memory applications. Then there's the higher latency and slower ram and dead end GPU options. For complex 64-bit computations, a Core2Duo is much faster than a G5. Even in moving data around the system is much faster on an Intell Mac. The only place where a G5 may perform better is with synthetic benchmarking or tight cycle cache based computations.
You don't think apple wants to futureproof OS X? They probably have OS X running on every architecture imaginable.
I agree, who knows what could happen in the next five to ten years. Hell, we apple could switch to MIPS for all we know. Is it likely? Hell no, but no one but apple knows what the future brings in this scenario.
*sigh*. Yes, a power-hog of an old tower computer can benchmark "as high as" a five year old laptop. Congratulations. And benchmarks often don't reflect real world, either.
And as others have said, you would need a PowerPC ROM on that video card for it to initialize. Which doesn't exist.
As for the "I bet Apple has OS X running on PowerPC/MIPS/Itanium/6802" argument... So what if they do? They had OS X running on Intel for half a decade and that port never got out, so what good would it do for them to have it running on any alternate architecture now? By the time the port *DID* come out, it certainly didn't run on any machines that were current when the Intel port was publicly abandoned previously.
If something does happen that causes Apple to move back to PowerPC, I can assure you, based on business pressures they will *NOT* support any previously-released PowerPC Mac. I mean, they've already dumped support for some 64-bit *INTEL* machines, why would they go back to supporting their previous PowerPCs? (Plus, if they DID move back to PowerPC, it would be because IBM/Freescale release a new much-faster-than-what-Intel-currently-has processor, which would make the old PowerPCs that much more obsolete.)