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PowerPC G4 performance against rivals

Project Alice said:
So these Pentium M’s are kind of like having an early Core Solo machine?
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Yep. The main differences between the Pentium M and the Core Solo, besides the socket, are that the latter is 65nm, has a faster FSB, and supports SSE3 instructions (crucial for Mac OS X).

The Pentium M itself is a heavily refined Pentium III. Way different to the Pentium 4.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Yep. The main differences between the Pentium M and the Core Solo, besides the socket, are that the latter is 65nm, has a faster FSB, and supports SSE3 instructions (crucial for Mac OS X).

The Pentium M itself is a heavily refined Pentium III. Way different to the Pentium 4.
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Tiger didn’t need SSE3 did it? I remember seeing a fair amount of Tiger hackintoshs running on pre Core series machines. I have also booted a Leopard installer successfully on my aforementioned Dell i6000 with a Pentium M. I never got it to successfully install afterwords, but I believe I was like 16 at the time. It was like 2010 or something. I haven’t done it since then but I definitely remember booting a successful installer and thinking it was cool lol.

I did not know that about the Pentium III’s. That’s super cool, kinda funny though that modern Intel CPUs branched from a line from before the P4. Back in the day/growing up I really only had AMD based PCs and I never really payed attention to anything Intel until the Core i series came out.
 
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Project Alice said:
Tiger didn’t need SSE3 did it? [...]
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Tiger itself does not, but Rosetta does. If you have a non-SSE3 CPU you have to use a modified kernel incorporating an SSE3 "emulator" or something like that.

Project Alice said:
[...] I remember seeing a fair amount of Tiger hackintoshs running on pre Core series machines. [...]
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...thanks to that SSE3 "emulator". SSE2 is mandatory though so anything older than e.g. Athlon 64, Pentium 4 or Pentium M is out.

Project Alice said:
I did not know that about the Pentium III’s. That’s super cool, kinda funny though that modern Intel CPUs branched from a line from before the P4. [...]
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The Pentium 4 (and its architecture) is pretty much a failure. "Slow" considering its high clock speeds, hot and power-hungry. I mean, a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 is sometimes tied by a 2.4 GHz Athlon 64.
 
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Project Alice said:
Ah, the A series. Aside from my iBook G3, an IBM ThinkPad A22m was one of my first laptops. It still works save for me removing the cmos battery in attempt clear a BIOS password. After I did that it became a power-on password and is now a paperweight. I do however have a much slower yet perfectly functioning A21m.

I second this about the X40; just plug it in and it’ll probably still work fine. An mSATA to IDE adapter will fit perfectly. However a word of advice if you decide to do this; the X40 has a weird sized 1.8” HDD. Make sure to get a small adapter and not a full 2.5” one like we usually stick in PowerBooks. If you do this, I found it much easier to take the bottom case off the ThinkPad rather than try to fenangle the adapter in there. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to get it plugged in before I just took it apart. Taking it apart is not hard either. No harder than a 15” PowerBook.
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Ah, this all brings me back to when I used to post more frequently on that unofficial community ThinkPad users forum that I think closed down sometime ago. I think I have two A22m's, one of which still runs some ancient version of Puppy Linux quite happily. Another one suffers from a failed lower RAM slot (which IIRC was one of the long-term issues with this line of ThinkPad?)

The X40 still works quite happily last I checked, but has boot issues due to the failed CMOS battery (it complains about the date being wrong all the time). The last time I checked, the cost of mSATA SSDs was quite high, and I found hunting around for the right sized mSATA-1.8" IDE adapter really confusing. There was also the issue of the CMOS battery, which was only available from some place in Italy...
 
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rampancy said:
Ah, this all brings me back to when I used to post more frequently on that unofficial community ThinkPad users forum that I think closed down sometime ago. I think I have two A22m's, one of which still runs some ancient version of Puppy Linux quite happily. Another one suffers from a failed lower RAM slot (which IIRC was one of the long-term issues with this line of ThinkPad?)

The X40 still works quite happily last I checked, but has boot issues due to the failed CMOS battery (it complains about the date being wrong all the time). The last time I checked, the cost of mSATA SSDs was quite high, and I found hunting around for the right sized mSATA-1.8" IDE adapter really confusing. There was also the issue of the CMOS battery, which was only available from some place in Italy...
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Would you believe I ran Windows Vista and later 7 on that old A22m of mine?
Besides no acceleration on the Rage 128 it ran quite well. Due to the aforementioned BIOS password it originally had, it was locked into what I assume was the power saver mode of Intel Speedstep and despite having an 800MHz PIII, it only ran at 600MHz iirc.

For the X40; This is the adapter I bought (not my ad). SSD prices are up a little but I didn’t find them too bad. I bought a 256GB from Newegg for like $40. I can’t comment on the CMOS battery. I’m not sure if mine is dead or not because the actual battery works. But it does look like every other ThinkPad CMOS battery I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine it would be hard to source one.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Tiger itself does not, but Rosetta does. If you have a non-SSE3 CPU you have to use a modified kernel incorporating an SSE3 "emulator" or something like that.
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I did little research after reading what you posted yesterday and it looks like there were a few kernels for Tiger for SSE2 only CPUs. Possibly using an “emulator” for SSE3? Everything I read was just on the osx86 website through the web archive because of course those old pages were nowhere to be found.
I wonder if the kernel does an “emulator” Rosetta would work? I think it’d be cool to set up a retro hackintosh one of these days. But Intel Tiger is kinda useless without Rosetta, lol.
 
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Project Alice said:
I think it’d be cool to set up a retro hackintosh one of these days. But Intel Tiger is kinda useless without Rosetta, lol.
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I have to disagree ;) TenFourFoxBoxes aplenty and Links2 on a Compaq NC2400 without Rosetta in sight....

Picture 1.png
 
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Dronecatcher said:
I have to disagree ;) TenFourFoxBoxes aplenty and Links2 on a Compaq NC2400 without Rosetta in sight....

View attachment 1986626
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Amethyst1 said:
Yep.


Who needs Rosetta? ;) Adobe CS4, Final Cut Studio 2, iLife '08, iWork '09, Office 2008, Parallels Desktop 5, VMware Fusion 2 etc. are all native x86 and run great on Tiger.
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Point then haha
I haven’t used much of Intel Tiger. I guess I just assumed most native x86 apps started coming out later. It came on a 2006 iMac I have but I soon after upgraded it to Snow Leopard.

I hardly use Tiger as it is unless I’m on a G3 actually. Still, it’d be cool to play with PPC apps on a ThinkPad or something.
 
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Project Alice said:
I guess I just assumed most native x86 apps started coming out later.
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The first Intel Macs were pushed out the door on/around January 10th, 2006 while Leopard was released on October 26th, 2007: more than 18 months later. There was plenty of time for x86 versions of apps to appear (some "big" titles like Adobe CS3 and MS Office 2008 were late to the party though), and they all ran on Tiger.
 
Wait, what!?. It's possible to install Snow Leopard in a MacMini 2012? Or are you using a VM?
 
NewbiePPC said:
Wait, what!?. It's possible to install Snow Leopard in a MacMini 2012? Or are you using a VM?
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I have both, standalone install and VM one. The second works slower and is somewhat annoying, but I did that after iOS 15 has broken Wifi Hotspot (my only Internet access at home is via iPhone).

And yes, I installed 10.6 and then upgraded it to 10.6.8 on Ivy Bridge MacMini from scratch. Had to use patched kernel though (expectedly).
Get it from here: https://www.tonymacx86.com/resources/iboot-ivy-bridge-1-1-0.156/
Dig out the needed file, replace original kernel with it (has to be done twice or thrice, it gets overwritten with OS update). Once completed, works normally.
 
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barracuda156 said:
[…] Once completed, works normally.
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It’s worth mentioning that while 10.6.8 runs on Ivy Bridge using that patched kernel, you’re missing out on quite a lot of stuff — most importantly graphics acceleration, but also Thunderbolt, USB 3.0 and maybe others.
10.6.8 is far from being “fully functional” on 2012 Macs, and how useful it is with these limitations depends on what you’re using it for. :)
 
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Amethyst1 said:
It’s worth mentioning that while 10.6.8 runs on Ivy Bridge using that patched kernel, you’re missing out on quite a lot of stuff — most importantly graphics acceleration, but also Thunderbolt, USB 3.0 and maybe others.
10.6.8 is far from being “fully functional” on 2012 Macs, and how useful it is with these limitations depends on what you’re using it for. :)
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Well, honestly I can’t imagine anyone wanting to use 10.6.8 on an Intel Mac as a main system as long as later OS are available.
 
barracuda156 said:
Well, honestly I can’t imagine anyone wanting to use 10.6.8 on an Intel Mac as a main system as long as later OS are available.
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One objective use case for Snow Leopard is… Rosetta. The fastest Intel Macs capable of running Snow Leopard run PPC software faster than the fastest PPC Mac.

And even if it’s not meant to be the main system, no graphics acceleration renders Mac OS X pretty much useless to me so I’m keen on having a supported GPU.

Besides, some people just love Snow Leopard, later versions be damned. :)
 
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barracuda156 said:
Well, honestly I can’t imagine anyone wanting to use 10.6.8 on an Intel Mac as a main system as long as later OS are available.
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I'd go back in a flash if there was a 100% contemporary browser - my daily driver is currently a 2010 Mac Mini Server running El Capitan off a couple of SSDs and it's the most loathsome OSX experience I've ever had - SD card socket works occasionally, USB accessories disappear or malfunction every day and there's a hard crash/total lock up at least once a week :/

Admittedly, I don't know whether this is a conflict between OS and hardware or the machine is just faulty?
 
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barracuda156 said:
Well, honestly I can’t imagine anyone wanting to use 10.6.8 on an Intel Mac as a main system as long as later OS are available.
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I leave one system running an OS later than Snow Leopard (High Sierra), and that’s mostly a necessity for web sites using later protocols and javascript which constrain the quantity and/or function of web sites being accessed from Snow Leopard. It also happens to be my one and only all-in-one desktop system which I, alternately, use for watching films and also the occasional Zoom meeting. It might get an upgrade to Mojave someday, but I’m in no great rush. Beyond that, I’m even less interested, given the loss of running venerable 32-bit applications for which there aren’t 64-bit replacements.
 
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Dronecatcher said:
I'd go back in a flash if there was a 100% contemporary browser - my daily driver is currently a 2010 Mac Mini Server running El Capitan off a couple of SSDs and it's the most loathsome OSX experience I've ever had - SD card socket works occasionally, USB accessories disappear or malfunction every day and there's a hard crash/total lock up at least once a week :/

Admittedly, I don't know whether this is a conflict between OS and hardware or the machine is just faulty?
Click to expand...
Among my extensive experimentation with Zorin 15.3 Lite on my Core Duo A1181s, I went back to installing Snow Leopard just for a lark. I've been pleasantly surprised with how well InterWeb and ArcticFox work with Gmail, YouTube, Twitter, and Google Docs. Sadly, Dropbox doesn't work. But between IW and AF, I can do most of the basic stuff I need to do on the web. And performance on 10.6 is simply sublime. Snow Leopard really is one of the best OS releases Apple ever put out.
 
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