Look up the history of ARM-it actually predates PowerPC/AIM.
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Look up the history of ARM-it actually predates PowerPC/AIM.
I say this with all due respect.... your perception of this does not relate to reality. And people keep trying to explain this to you, but you keep shrugging it off.
The real bottom line - Intel is destroyed and defeated as it should be - it will die like that a*** Otellini - I spit at the TV when they handed Steve the wafer to make Intel Macs.. if Intel was so good back in the 90’s and early 2000’s, why didn’t they do it then ? I am so so angry with Apple because it had screwed so many many people and underpowered the PPC, maybe they should take responsibility for their blatant actions. PPC, if Apple didn’t cripple it, would be still a viable choice - Yea, I am in defense of a good chip that could have destroyed Intel.. now we have ARM, another PPC type chip where all the Apple hype is stating this is the Final solution to the Intel problem. While I am excited about the new RISC Macs coming out, I feel justified to state that they better defeat intel permanently and decisively, or they will find themselves bankrupted on the Mac.
from the 2016 - later Macs the other issue of Apple spying on you with their T2 security chip.. which Thank God I have a 2015 MacBook Pro so I don’t need to worry about Apple’s BS.
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from the 2016 - later Macs the other issue of Apple spying on you with their T2 security chip.. which Thank God I have a 2015 MacBook Pro so I don’t need to worry about Apple’s BS.
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PPC was, and still is, an incredible workstation and server architecture. POWER9 based systems are in spots 2, 3, and 10 of the current Top 10 Supercomputer list.
Where it was and still is poor is in performance per watt, which is a really big deal in laptops and with increasing electricity costs is also at least somewhat important to desktop users.
In the time Apple was using PPC, two of their top of the line CPUs-the 604 and the G5-never made it to laptops. That's not to mention that the G5 only made it to 2.7ghz, not the promised 3ghz, and needed liquid cooling to do it. Apple didn't destroy PPC-IBM killed it for Apple by overpromising and under-delivering.
Apple correctly predicted that laptops were the way of the future for most users, and PowerPC just wasn't keeping up there. The first generation MacBook Pros managed to match or in some cases even exceed the battery life of the fastest PowerBooks but with a higher clocked dual core CPU and, once universal binaries rolled out, was faster in actual use for most applications. Apple pretty quickly brought Core2Duos to the entire line, which made everything 64 bit compatible and in a few years managed easily double the battery life of PowerBooks.
If Apple had stuck with PPC, products like the insanely popular MacBook Air, which with Haswell and later can now reliably give us 9+ hours of battery life, would never have happened. I'm continually amazed that I can get 5 hours+ from my 13" 2015 Pro, and provided I don't use power hogging Firefox even my 2012 15" can still pull an honest 3 hours or better.
Switching to Intel was the right move in 2006, and Apple probably would have faded into obscurity as x86 was increasingly leaving PPC behind in mobile applications.
Now, with Intel basically as stagnant as IBM was in 2005, Apple had two decisions-either move to AMD or go to ARM to keep their products competitive. ARM was appealing since it brought the CPU back under Apple's control.
Because the 603/604 series and the G3 CPUs were very good for their day, and were very competitive (if not superior) to their original x86 equivalents. Furthermore, Intel made a key miscalculation with NetBurst/the Pentium 4, which was their focusing on deeper pipelines and higher clockspeeds at the cost of performance per watt. The Core microarchitecture, and the performance gains it promised, were a large part of why Apple switched to Intel.
Apple didn't "cripple" the PPC: Motorola and IBM did. When Apple first released the Sawtooth Power Mac G4 they had to embarrassingly dump the clock speeds by 50 Mhz because Motorola couldn't reliably produce 500 Mhz PPC 7400s in sufficient volume; then Motorola had problems scaling up the PPC 7450 to 500 Mhz-1 Ghz and beyond, which led to Apple going through further embarassment with the Power Mac G4 stuck at 533/733/867 Mhz, as well as dual 500 Mhz configurations that were marketed as being able to make up the gap in clock speed; around this time Apple really started to push its "Megahertz Myth" marketing to also try to counter the perception that the G4 and the Power Mac G4 were slow. This reached its apex with the G4 Xserve and the MDD, where Apple used its "system controller" architecture to get around the poor bus speeds of the PPC 745x series.
And if you believe the rumors, there was also the 7457-RM and the PPC 7500 G5, both of which were Motorola PPC CPUs badly needed by Apple that were either too late, or too untenable due to heat issues.
As noted by bunnspecial, things didn't improve in the long term with IBM and the PPC 970, which Apple couldn't famously couldn't get to work in a PowerBook; oh yeah, and they also famously humiliated Steve Jobs by failing to get the G5 to 3 Ghz.
To be fair, some of the design decisions that affected the performance of PPC Macs have to be laid at Apple's feet, like how they horrifically hobbled the performance of the early 603-based Performas, or went with the L3-cacheless 744x series instead of the 745x series for the PowerBook. But with Motorola directing PPC development towards the embedded market, and IBM directing PPC development towards Big Iron/HPC applications, Apple had reached the end of the road with PPC. Macs like the MacBook/Air/Pro which arguably drove Apple's fortunes in the notebook market, simply couldn't have been possible with the PPC CPUs of the day.
Understood, so why did Apple state the G4 couldn't handle more than 2GB of ram ? Joybed just proved that Apple lied and crippled the memory controller by locking out 4GB of memory in a G4. I believe he is trying to get 4GB on his 1139 9970 DLSD PowerBook G4. Its sad that the IBM rep for Apple did not promise Apple 3ghz. But, its amazing that the 970MP didn't overheat in a XBOX or Play station.
I guess you can say I just love PowerPC because its what mad a Mac feel like a Mac - it was thinking different at that time. I like to think of ARM as a super PowerPC chip though as you stated, they are not alike, but only close to each other due to them being both RISC.. Maybe if PPC had what ARM had, then it would be a different story.
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So, i guess the answer to this question is: If PowerPC is so slow and based on what you wrote, why is the PPC community still strong and to a lesser extent, gaining new people ? Is it the name PowerPC ? G4 ? G5 ? I guess when the new ARM macs(HATING cook so so much, I prefer to call them: ARM MACS, not apple silicon which is stupid and lame), then this forum will die along with PowerPC and any attempts to REVIVE it to make it viable ? I sincerely hope and pray WINDOWS fails to run on ARM Macs and I would like to see the complete destruction and demise of HACKINTOSH. That was an embarrasment in itself. Sorry to so dictatorial, but I really hated Intel which is why I went Apple back in 1999-2000 with my 1st PM G4 350 because CompUSA employees at the time MADE FUN of Apple and tried to get people not to buy Apple's PPC machines) - I was an A+ tech with CompUSA at the time which I was about to quit the job because I hate how my store PERSECUTED and forced customers away from Apple - they even let them hang in the Apple within a store dept.
I bought for 1700.00 a G4 350 then with OS 9 retail box, and VPC 3.0 - To this day, the OS 9 survives and VPC 3.0 still survives, new in the box. I also just got a G4 TI 1ghz with L3 cache which for some reason seems to be much faster than my former 1.67 PB G4, probably because the 7447a was a chip without L3 cache.
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Well, 3 ghz wasn't that much difference compared to 2.5 - but I see your point. Sill once ARM is finally here, will this forum die along with PPC ? How much longer will Kaiser still keep the platform alive for internet browsing ? What is the projected lifespan of the PowerPC support in the PPC community - when will we be locked out officially from ever browsing the net ?
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As for OS 11 Big Sur - this is an example of a TOY. Apple made the OS like like a kids toy with its stupid new icons which don't make it a serious platform. It will never ever be like Snow Leopard which btw. aside from Leopard was one OS i LIKED ALOT and still use it. I am on Snow Leopard via my Mac Pro 5,1 - I could case less about SSL and TLS because I am behind 5 firewalls and 3 routers, so I can access my bank account any day whenever I want and no one will get my information. Really, I hate the internet and hopefully the next wave of COVID 19 may wipe out google and the rest of the providers and maybe everything will start all over again. Consider it, the dawn of a new beginning. The end of the old and the birth of the new.
Maybe you should get off the internet. It sounds like you might be happier that way.
I never said that PPC is slow-you are putting words in my mouth. What I did say was that PPC was falling way behind for mobile applications, and that's the major PC market now. Apple had several years to make a PowerBook G5 work, but unsurprisingly couldn't. The 970MP could have been a formidable competitor for the C2D if IBM had ever managed to get the power management and thermals under control, but at 100W TDP at 2ghz, it wasn't going to happen in a laptop.
PPC is perfectly useable with programs optimized for it, but those are few and far between now. There's also no getting around the fact that the newest PPC Macs are nearing 15 years old now, or about contemporary to the P4, and it's aged about as well. I use a fair few P4s at work, but they run Win2K and are basically "sandboxed" and running proprietary software-I find my Quad more useable on the internet than I do a P4, although on the latter I'll only venture out to find a driver or something like that.
I wasn’t aware that the icons suddenly deleted all the code inside the OS and made it a toy, can you show me where this is? I thought it was based off Catalina, that has the same code base as Big Sur. Silly me! /s
That sounds truly like a disaster. And I don’t think wishing the deaths of many for the internet to “restart” is very appropriate either.
I honestly don't know. Perhaps Apple was never able to make more than 2 GB reliably work with the G4 due to issues with the memory controller.
Partially out of nostalgia, partially out of an interest in antique computer architectures, and partially out of the challenge that comes with making old hardware successfully usable in today's world. One could make the same argument for similar interests like retro gaming, or classic automobiles.
500 Mhz may not seem like much today, but back when the G5 was introduced it was a big deal. The G4, while originally a very good CPU for its day, was marred with a string of succesive problems with frequency and performance scaling that left it lagging seriously behind x86. Jobs wanted to reassure us that with the G5, we'd left all of that behind -- after all, he wouldn't just say that a 3.0 Ghz Mac was coming soon after introducing the first 2 Ghz Power Mac G5, unless he was confident enough to go out on that limb. (And well, look where that got us.)
And to answer your question, no, this doesn't mean that our precious PPC machines will stop working, stop accessing the Internet, or will vanish from the MacRumors forums. It just means that technology will continue to march onward. There is still an active 68k user community after all; there's even still an (albeit small) community around A/UX. The PPC community will still be here. And it'll still be here even after Apple moves on to the next new thing.
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To be fair, IBM weren't the only one. Intel around the same time claimed they'd imminently get the Netburst P4 to 5GHz and never did, hitting a wall at 3.8GHz. Both teams likely ran into the same law of physics. To be fair it was only a couple of years ago that Intel started shipping a CPU that ran 5GHz as standard*.
Meanwhile an Intel project team were quietly power optimising a P3 based design ...
*Yeah, it's boost clocks but I'm counting it. 😜
macOS Big Sur looks good to me.
People had the same reaction to the icons and UI design in Yosemite when it came out. Everybody thought it looked like a toy. But most would agree that by the time Mojave arrived, we had a great looking OS.
It has been a long slow transition of introducing iOS-like UI/UX starting way back in OS X Lion. So moving things along to a hybrid of the two systems has been inevitably on the cards for some time and certainly comes as no surprise.
I don’t think Apple will ever trim their desktop OS down to a locked down iOS/iPadOS as they know that power users need to retain access to the file system, networking and terminal CLI. Not to mention all the software and web development tools which would never work on a locked down OS.
I received a free donor MBA 2013 13-inch which needs an SSD and a battery, so once I get this little Mac up and running I will happily try out the Big Sur betas and have a play with Xcode 12.
In saying that though, I don’t NEED the latest and greatest. I still get by very happily on my MacBook Unibody 2008 and Mac Pro ‘08 as my primary daily drivers. With a healthy dose of minis, G5s, G4s, PowerBooks and iBooks in the mix
People had the same reaction to the icons and UI design in Yosemite when it came out. Everybody thought it looked like a toy. But most would agree that by the time Mojave arrived, we had a great looking OS.
It has been a long slow transition of introducing iOS-like UI/UX starting way back in OS X Lion. So moving things along to a hybrid of the two systems has been inevitably on the cards for some time and certainly comes as no surprise.
I don’t think Apple will ever trim their desktop OS down to a locked down iOS/iPadOS as they know that power users need to retain access to the file system, networking and terminal CLI. Not to mention all the software and web development tools which would never work on a locked down OS.
I received a free donor MBA 2013 13-inch which needs an SSD and a battery, so once I get this little Mac up and running I will happily try out the Big Sur betas and have a play with Xcode 12.
In saying that though, I don’t NEED the latest and greatest. I still get by very happily on my MacBook Unibody 2008 and Mac Pro ‘08 as my primary daily drivers. With a healthy dose of minis, G5s, G4s, PowerBooks and iBooks in the mix
I actually think the Yosemite to High Sierra look is the best one in the history of Apple OS's. Anyone using those should try the "Increase contrast" option in Accessibility - Display settings. Gives the UI a nice punch, and separates elements better.
Example:
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Every version of the operating system with a significant visual change ended up "walking it back" a bit and that + further refinement + people just getting used to it has always made people like it more fondly.
For all the love of Snow Leopard, I think the Leopard/Snow Leopard look was the ugliest phase of Aqua. The only credit I'll give it is banishing the thick-bordered Brushed Metal. Mountain Lion and Mavericks were a much nicer cleanup of the look (and brought back much more aesthetically pleasing, if smaller, traffic light window controls.)
For all the love of Snow Leopard, I think the Leopard/Snow Leopard look was the ugliest phase of Aqua. The only credit I'll give it is banishing the thick-bordered Brushed Metal. Mountain Lion and Mavericks were a much nicer cleanup of the look (and brought back much more aesthetically pleasing, if smaller, traffic light window controls.)
IMO that only makes matters even worse. But that's the great thing about opinions - everyone's got one.
Tiger 4EVER!
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Thanks to Dark Mode
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Congrats - great battery life and superfast PCIe SSDs await you.
The Xenon CPU in the XBox 360 and the Cell CPU in the PlayStation 3, while PPC CPUs, were nevertheless very different from the 970MP.
Not sure if 2013 Airs were on PCIe yet(my 2012 is still SATA based, albeit with Apple proprietary connector number 5,326) but regardless they are fast and do have great battery life.
The Haswell based ones are even more impressive-that has to be one of Intel's biggest CPU improvements in a decade of otherwise being mostly stagnant. It's not appreciably faster, but is energy sipping.
Geekbench 5 scores are out for the ARM development Mac mini, and my 9 year old Dell PC has a higher score.
forums.macrumors.com
Rosetta 2 Benchmarks Surface From Mac Mini With A12Z Chip
While the terms and conditions for Apple's new "Developer Transition Kit" forbid developers from running benchmarks on the modified Mac mini with an A12Z chip, it appears that results are beginning to surface anyhow. Image Credit: Radek Pietruszewski Geekbench results uploaded so far suggest...
forums.macrumors.com
That was quick.
Dell Optiplex 790 Minitower
-i7 2600 4C/8T (3.4GHz base/3.8GHz turbo)
-16GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM (4x 4GB)
-250GB Samsung EVO 850 SSD
-2TB Toshiba 7200rpm HDD
-Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1650 Super OC 4GB DDR6
-EVGA 450 BR 80 Plus Bronze PSU
Geekbench 5 scores are out for the ARM development Mac mini, and my 9 year old Dell PC has a higher score.
Rosetta 2 Benchmarks Surface From Mac Mini With A12Z Chip
While the terms and conditions for Apple's new "Developer Transition Kit" forbid developers from running benchmarks on the modified Mac mini with an A12Z chip, it appears that results are beginning to surface anyhow. Image Credit: Radek Pietruszewski Geekbench results uploaded so far suggest...
Note that the score is running Geekbench in Rosetta 2, which is an x86 emulator.
Geekbench for ARM should have it benching at least as good if not at least better than the iPad Pro, which is the closest thing to the DTK CPU in current circulation.