Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

PowerPC dead with apple... not with microsoft

Nyy8

Nyy8

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 12, 2011
524
198
New England
as we know apple dumped the PowerPC 5 years ago.. but microsoft is isnt done with them..

http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriank...roduction-of-xbox-720-may-have-already-begun/
Over the past few months I’ve come across dozens of Xbox 720-related rumors. One rumor states that it will be at least ‘six times more powerful that the current Xbox’ and feature either a modified AMD Radeon HD 7000 or Radeon HD 6670 series GPU mated to a PowerPC CPU.
Click to expand...

What are you thinking? Think it can be real? If they are, what do you think of it?
 
Don't forget the Cell CPU in the PlayStation 3. It's a highly customized PowerPC chip.
 
PowerPC has been incredibly popular in consoles and servers, even if the average consumer computer cannot be bought with PowerPC anymore.
 
It's great to see the architecture still fill some type of role in the industry as it almost appeared destined to die when Apple dropped it. The G5 is about the only variant that wasn't/isn't inherently efficient. It's not surprising that it was the G5 that soured Apples PowerPC love due to the lack of any kind of chip that could run in a portable.

The G4 7447 and 7448 chips are still made and sold also in the industrial computing industry and SoC (system on a chip).
 
IBM is still making chips on the POWER5, POWER6, etc. architectures, all of which are PowerPC. In fact, a modified version of Yellow Dog Linux is able to run on a Sony PlayStation 3. I'm wondering now.... can a Wii become a good Hackintosh?
 
Ariii said:
IBM is still making chips on the POWER5, POWER6, etc. architectures, all of which are PowerPC. In fact, a modified version of Yellow Dog Linux is able to run on a Sony PlayStation 3. I'm wondering now.... can a Wii become a good Hackintosh?
Click to expand...

nope. unless you wanted to run some version of OS X before Leopard then i suppose technically you could make it work somehow if you had the know-how but why anyone would want to do that is beyond me.

this also reminds me that the dev machines for the Xbox 360 were PowerMacs at the time because they used a variant of the G5 chip. the PowerPC chips were and still are good processors, but they're just not the best for general computing and for staying competitive.
 
Intell said:
No. It is not possible to run Mac OS X on any PowerPC machines except for those made by Apple.
Click to expand...

MacOnLinux works on pretty any PPC. Leopard isn't much fun due to the lack of 3D-drivers, but I know for a fact that Tiger can run on Genesis' Pegasos1 and 2 computers just fine (600MHz G3 or 1GHz G4).

There was even once a project to port the open-source portion of OSX (Darwin) to make it run nativily but in the end interest for it faded away.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV_95-rmYNo

Here's the IBM Cell running OSX. If you look at the video closely, you can see the OSX dock at the bottom of the screen. Yeah IBM never let it leak out of there hands, but it does exist and is totally possible, just like the XBOX360 dev kits were G5's and just like how Nintendo has been using IBM cpu's since the Gamecube, the new Wii U or whatever its called will run on a POWER7 chip and the XBOX720 or whatever its name is will probably run on POWER6.
 
Supposedly PowerPC's are great for consoles, because they are supposed to be highly efficient number-crunchers. They can deal with all the calculations gaming engines etc have to make. As far as I know this is what made Mac's superior editing machines for Video and Photo's. The PPC architecture was far superior to Intel for rendering and such.

Whether this is still true I'm not sure. It may not even have been true to begin with, someone who actually knows PPC Macs feel free to correct me :)
 
The PowerPC the XBox uses it a cousin of the G5, but a more distant cousin. It's not really suitable for desktop computers. It's very much geared towards games and specific optimization and not general purpose. The PowerPC in the XBox is actually missing quite a few important features the G5 had to make room for the third core and lower energy profile.
 
Benjy91 said:
Whether this is still true I'm not sure. It may not even have been true to begin with, someone who actually knows PPC Macs feel free to correct me :)
Click to expand...

Back in the 90’s with the megahertz myth being as prevalent as it was meant that it was true. Trouble is that processors have changed and desktop computers have changed their emphasis to where more power computing wise on a desktop means more cores. I also remember that G5 processors back then were incredibly power hungry and notoriously heat inefficient compared to their Intel brethren which made big improvements with their core solo and core duo, core 2 duo processors.

I also seem to recall that Apple had trouble with IBM securing processors for their laptop lines and their chips were not hitting the numbers that Apple wanted.

The processors used in gaming consoles are pure data crunchers and are purpose built for dedicated processes and use cases. They are far removed from the type of processors for general computing. I don’t see them being used on a general computing platform - there is practically zero software development (commerical desktop computer wise - not specialty stuff) - all of it is focussed on gaming for different platforms with major hardware differences and is optimized for specific hardware sets. Everything desktop/laptop is for Intel based systems or ARM for Windows 8 Tablet (or whatever it’s called). I doubt the current crop of PPC stuff is suitable for a desktop computer given the needs consumers demand.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back