PPC in Wii, WiiU 0 PPC finally getting smaller?

[1042686]

On a side note, I read that the Wii is powered by a 729Mhz PPC 750CL processor and the new wiiU is a beefed up 1Ghz PPC 750 with extra cache, 3 cores etc. It has always seemed to me that in all of the reading I did on Apple's switch from PPC to Intel was because PPC was fast but waaay too hot and with the trend of smaller, thinner computers, tablets, phones etc. the demand for this type of customer driven innovation could not be met with PPC architecture, hence the move.

BUT, then I read about a PPC processor driving my Wii and now the WiiU with multiple cores and I'm wondering if this is still true or has IBM and the PPC people been able to push forward with new technologies that meet the small, light, cool to the touch consumer driven market demands?

I'm not implying that Apple would ever go back to PPC - not the point with this and I myself am just a goof ball hobbyist but I was curious if you tech guys that are in-the-know can confirm that PPC has in fact made this push? Should we start seeing PPC processors in teeny tiny tablets and other tech bits?

 

[Bug-Creator]

WiiU is old news, production stopped replacement due in March (without PPC).

Everything PPC (except POWER by IBM) is now only in legacy mode, just like when Motorola/FreeScale/whatever_they_are_called_this_week was selling ColdFire and Dragonball to former 68k costumers.

The CPU in the WiiU is neat, but still pretty weak for an 2012 product so being lowpower comes at no suprise.

(wrote the guy who would not trade his WiiU for an XBox-One-S AND a PS4Pro)

 

[1042686]

So PPC ISA evolved into IBM's Power line. So all their current stuff 7/8/9 is servers then. OK, cool - thanks for the up-to-date info.

Stupid question of the day. So if PPC legacy had a storage limit of 2TB and Intel UEFI is 9ZB, how did IBM overcome this limitation in their Power8/9 servers?

Also, does anyone know the storage ceiling on ARM?

 

[0248294]

IBM POWER existed before PowerPC, which was a spin off of POWER. Each new generation of PowerPC was derived from the latest POWER line, so storage limits in the older PowerPC architecture is most likely already overcome in newer POWER lines.

 

[AmazingHenry]

IBM POWER existed before PowerPC, which was a spin off of POWER. Each new generation of PowerPC was derived from the latest POWER line, so storage limits in the older PowerPC architecture is most likely already overcome in newer POWER lines.

That makes me wonder, if the POWER and PowerPC chips are so similar, would it be possible to port software from the newer POWER architecture back to PowerPC? This is probably a really, really stupid question. But I have to know.

 

[Bug-Creator]

"Port" suggests (re)compiling, which means you can port it to pretty much every ISA.

Running unmodified binaries could be possible but might require some work on the kernel level.Problem is that most would be 64bit SW disqualifing anything except the G5 which is a downsized POWER4 design....

 

[0248294]

Also, I doubt there is much useful software for POWER machines to port to PowerPC that would benefit the average user. POWER CPUs are only used in servers and supercomputers, not desktop systems. I doubt anyone is going to make their PowerMac their next supercomputer, and server functionality can be achieved with any Linux distro for PowerPC.

 

[Gamer9430]

One thing I wish is that we could get dolphin, the Wii/GameCube emulator, working on PPC Macs... since the Wii and GameCube ran on PPC processors, it would be easy to convert over to PPC on a Mac... sadly, I don't think the developers know this... oh well