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New POWER7 machines
- Thread starter thunng8
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NeXTSTEP, the OS that became Mac OS X, ran on Motorola 68000, Intel x86, SPARC and PA-RISC.
Running Snow Leopard on PPC is just a matter of adding PPC as a build target in Xcode. You'll have to copy'n'paste some parts of the Leopard kernel over to the Snow Leopard kernel (I guess Apple takes that out before releasing the XNU source), that's it.
Snow Leopard even runs on ARM (aka iPhone), there is nothing except "Go, buy a new Mac if you want it" that keeps Snow Leopard from running on PPC.
it wouldnt be that easy, sure, you can get the OS running on there no problem - then there is the issue with drivers, backwards compatibility etc.
i wonder if there will be a PPC7 desktop/mobile chip come out for the market, or arent IBM doing that anymore?
When you compile all the Leopard drivers for PPC hardware, it tells you a couple of times "X is deprecated, use Y instead". You remove X and put Y and you're done. Apple very unlikely dropped PPC support in Snow Leopard, they just don't ship it anymore.
PowerPC A2: quad-core 1.4GHz at 20W TDP with 16 virtual threads, 16 cores (64 virtual threads) with 2.3GHz at 60W TDP.
I don't know whether it's based on the POWER7, but it complies to the Power ISA v2.06 just like the POWER7.
*bows down*
forgive my ignorance
that is laptop worthy! WOW! that is so impressive! i have been unable to find any FLOPS benchmarks to compare to their Intel counterparts
so it is a bit hard to compare.
The processors are in a late development stage and finalized products will be available at a later, unknown date
Steve was pissed that every single one IBM / Moto processor has always been in "late" development stage and was about to shipn "just later this year". How long could you do with 450 MHz in your top of the line computers? Or 2,5 GHz when everybody else was running Pentium D which was really fast at that time?
PPC architecture was and is excellent. The problem is that Apple gave their best to optimize the OS for the CPUs. Now, with Intel, Snow LEopard can HARDLY be compared with the snappiness that Leopard and Tiger are on PPC machines running CIRCLES around their Intel younger brothers in case of user interface performance and smoohtness of day to day workflows. For instance for the same amount of work on Leopard you will need DOUBLE the RAM on Snow Leopard.
Apple shifted to ARM, and that is their future along with the iOS. I actually dread to see what kind of a mess 10.7 might really turn out to be judging from the past.
Steve was pissed that every single one IBM / Moto processor has always been in "late" development stage and was about to shipn "just later this year". How long could you do with 450 MHz in your top of the line computers? Or 2,5 GHz when everybody else was running Pentium D which was really fast at that time?
PPC architecture was and is excellent. The problem is that Apple gave their best to optimize the OS for the CPUs. Now, with Intel, Snow LEopard can HARDLY be compared with the snappiness that Leopard and Tiger are on PPC machines running CIRCLES around their Intel younger brothers in case of user interface performance and smoohtness of day to day workflows. For instance for the same amount of work on Leopard you will need DOUBLE the RAM on Snow Leopard.
Apple shifted to ARM, and that is their future along with the iOS. I actually dread to see what kind of a mess 10.7 might really turn out to be judging from the past.
Yeah, that sounds awesome, but is it a capable general purpose CPU or even marketable as a desktop CPU? Or is it $6000?
I am asking because I'm curious as hell about it.
no, these are desktop CPUs - they would be capable even being put into a MBA (TDP is low enough), provided their physical dimensions are low enough
no, these are desktop CPUs - they would be capable even being put into a MBA (TDP is low enough), provided their physical dimensions are low enough
That would be totally badass. The links that I read on The Register and such said it was IBM's most complex processor ever. I know that Freescale is coming out with the e5500 PPC core as well. I would imagine that the e5500 would be cheaper by far?