PowerPC Applications That Take Full Advantage Of G5 64 bit

[Wizzlemane96]

Hi i have searched here and found that my results were very vague. (64 bit comes up with a lot of results) I was curious of any powerpc applications that actually take advantage of 64 bit instructions if any actually exist. all applications for powerpc seem to be 32bit.

 

[redheeler]

IIRC Photoshop CS4 does execute 64-bit processes on G5, but not all of it is 64-bit.

 

[B S Magnet]

Paging @barracuda156 …

 

[Basic75]

Back in the day I used a 64bit binary of GCC to compile other 64bit PowerPC applications. There weren't that many 64bit PowerPC GUI applications for OS X. One reason was that Carbon remained 32bit and it took many developers a long time to make the jump to Cocoa. Of course most Macs couldn't even run 64bit software with their G3 and G4 processors. This didn't exactly increase developer interest in making the change. In particular with a lot of legacy code not being cleanly written so going from 32bit to 64bit could be a lot of work beyond a 64bit recompile. And back then not much software required more RAM than a 32bit address space could provide.

 

[Wizzlemane96]

Steve Boultbee
User level:Level 5

4,100 points
Nov 28, 2009 10:19 AM in response to mbp233
The only non-Apple ones I can think of off the top of my head are the Apache web server (included in OS X & runs in 64-bit on Leopard) and the MySQL database server which can also be had in a 64-bit version for PPC machines.

On my Leopard machine, the only 64-bit apps apart from the ones above are Chess, AU Lab, Quartz Composer, XCode, and Image Capture.

Thanks Guys. I found this on old apple forums too. Sounds like all the "64 Bitness" was just a marketing gimmick for powerpc to try and "keep up" with intel.

 

[Amethyst1]

Sounds like all the "64 Bitness" was just a marketing gimmick for powerpc to try and "keep up" with intel.

“Intel”? Who’s that?
It was AMD who made x86 go 64-bit first.

 

[Wizzlemane96]

“Intel”? Who’s that?
It was AMD who made x86 go 64-bit first.

Of course intel didn’t have it and that’s why apple had to have it to be competitive. Hence marketing.

 

[TheShortTimer]

“Intel”? Who’s that?

A CPU manufacturer that was abandoned by Apple because they were unable to keep pace with their client's hardware requirements.

It was AMD who made x86 go 64-bit first.

Precisely and as you know, it was MIPS Technologies who pioneered commercially available 64bit CPUs a decade before Intel released Itanium - for the server market.