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The future of PowerPC in the ARM revolution.

M

Macbookprodude

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Original poster
Jan 1, 2018
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Hello everyone ! I bring greetings to all PPC supporters and those who still believe our platform is still a viable choice still. However, I bring terrible news - with the end of Intel on Macs, comes a new powerful predecessor to the PPC - ARM. I feel that PowerPC's days are even more so in trouble because once ARM macs start to hit, we will notice a sharp DECLINE further with PowerPC since it will be over 20 years since the G4 came into existence. While I am all for PowerPC and a strong proponent of the PowerPC platform, I must regrettably state that very very soon the internet will be unusable at best on any PowerPC machine with the coming of ARM macs. If PowerPC itself is to survive and continue, we MUST create UB apps via the ARM architecture as there are similarities between PPC and ARM. I feel Cameron Kaiser too may be retiring TenFourFox in the next 5-10 years - the writing is on the wall. Sometime next year, PPC, unless some DRASTIC change occurs where it can be prolonged even further, will eventually cease to exist, or more so end up as a collector's item. PPC macs are not fun just for non-internet though, as having the Internet to access websites via TENFOURFOX is what is keeping it alive. Linux has been a blatant failure at best for the PPC platform, except for maybe Phenix and a few others, but if I can't get a a simple G5 Quad with an nvidia 6600 256 to run, this is an example of the failure of POWERPC on Linux, and I blame the developers for making it so so hard.

I believe PPC's future will lie with ARM, an architecture that resembles PPC and ARM itself - RISC :) The clock is ticking and PowerPC is on life support - ONLY through ARM will PPC survive.

I know many of you will disagree with me, which is expected.. but the writing is on the wall. ARM will be our way to the future, not LINUX.
 
I don't think much will change when the next big chip transition happens. After all, these PowerPC Macs that all of us here love so dearly are not machines from today - the last PowerPC Macs are now what, 15 years or old so? It is a miracle that through projects like TFF and Leopard Webkit we can even use these machines online at all. Running Mac OS X on these is, as you point out preferable due to how difficult getting a modern Linux distro on these machines, but again the architecture on these chips is very old. As such, it's hardly surprising that any real effort getting these machines running smoothly without issue comes from the bigger projects - they have bigger, more pressing issues to fry.

I would imagine that, over the years our PowerPC Macs will get less and less useful online, and become oddities and collector items similar to the old 68000 range of Macs from back in the day. These machines have long outlived their usefulness in my opinion, and while I love my PowerBook G4 dearly along with my little iBook, they are enthusiast level machines now, something to tinker with, something to do the odd bit of word processing on and play old games. There's little future in machines of this ages, in my opinion. It doesn't mean that we should stop using them, or to stop collecting them and enjoying them, but to expect any real sort of usable "future" from machines as old as these are would be misplaced, imo.
 
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Toyface19 said:
I would imagine that, over the years our PowerPC Macs will get less and less useful online, and become oddities and collector items similar to the old 68000 range of Macs from back in the day. These machines have long outlived their usefulness in my opinion, and while I love my PowerBook G4 dearly along with my little iBook, they are enthusiast level machines now, something to tinker with, something to do the odd bit of word processing on and play old games. There's little future in machines of this ages, in my opinion. It doesn't mean that we should stop using them, or to stop collecting them and enjoying them, but to expect any real sort of usable "future" from machines as old as these are would be misplaced, imo.
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I see them going the route of vintage cars. Neat to have, but they're mainly there for nostalgia or tinkering. And that's not a bad thing!

Look forward to the day when old men sit in lawn chairs in a large building somewhere behind their sparkly-clean vintage computer and sip coffee while saying "yup, they don't build 'em like they used to!" ;)
 
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Not necessarily. Earlier in the week IBM launched POWER10, a 64-bit CPU with up to fifteen cores per chip, each of which can run eight threads simultaneously:
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/17/ibm_t7nm_power10/

Obviously in our world Apple switched to ARM when they decided to abandon the Macintosh in favour of the Newton platform back in 1992, but imagine if Apple had continued to make desktop machines! The thought of Apple and IBM teaming up is intriguing.

The obvious question is whether POWER10 would fit in a laptop, but I imagine IBM wouldn't have much trouble squeezing the chip into a hypothetical "Power-Book".

I mean, BeOS is pretty platform-independent, I'm sure it could be ported to run on POWER.
 
JMacHack said:
I see them going the route of vintage cars. Neat to have, but they're mainly there for nostalgia or tinkering. And that's not a bad thing!

Look forward to the day when old men sit in lawn chairs in a large building somewhere behind their sparkly-clean vintage computer and sip coffee while saying "yup, they don't build 'em like they used to!" ;)
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Absolutely! I think this is where they're heading, and how cool is that going to be?! Part of the wonder of these PowerPC Macs right now for me is obviously the nostalgia, but the fact that I couldn't afford one back in the day, and now I can tinker with them however I want without any risk to a main machine or anything like that. It's similar to the 8-bit micros and Amigas I enjoyed messing around with when I was a teen, it's great fun and a nice hobby but not a whole lot more than that - and that's more than enough for most people!
 
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z970mp said:
@B S Magnet You don't like my bangin' tunes? :(
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Nah, I don’t appreciate the antiseptic — ::ahem:: — white jazz which, back in the day when I was still working in record stores, was pretty much only bought by then-forty-something boomers to throw into their 6-CD magazine of their 1990 Lexus LS400 to marvel in that cold rigidity of “DDD” 16-bit/44.1kHz recordings made of high-technique, but low-emotion “jazz”.

Just, you know, being honest.
 
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The bottom line, I think ARM can help us since it will be easier to make ub based apps to run on PPC, as ARM is RISC also, but time is of the essence, I am sure Kaiser in the next 5 years may retire 104fox which then will leave PPC macs not to be able to browse the internet. For some, I like to run PPC machines on the internet, but this too is not doing well.
 
Macbookprodude said:
The bottom line, I think ARM can help us since it will be easier to make ub based apps to run on PPC, as ARM is RISC also, but time is of the essence, I am sure Kaiser in the next 5 years may retire 104fox which then will leave PPC macs not to be able to browse the internet. For some, I like to run PPC machines on the internet, but this too is not doing well.
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With TFF and Leopard Webkit, I get by on the web just fine, but it always comes down to me getting anything real done I head to my Mac Pro or Surface Pro. I can see the logic in UB apps with RISC code in them, but we need to remember that the PowerPC RISC architecture our PPC Macs are using versus highly customised Apple Silicon will be world's apart. Not to mention the massive change in OS X over the years, you can only go so far back when making such a UB app. I don't see this transition helping us too much, really. If you want to focus on the whole web thing, WebKit and most browser engines have been able to run on ARM - and ostensibly RISC based CPUs - for years and years, but due to the old base of 10.4 and 10.5, there's only so much people can get working on these machines.
 
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Toyface19 said:
With TFF and Leopard Webkit, I get by on the web just fine, but it always comes down to me getting anything real done I head to my Mac Pro or Surface Pro. I can see the logic in UB apps with RISC code in them, but we need to remember that the PowerPC RISC architecture our PPC Macs are using versus highly customised Apple Silicon will be world's apart. Not to mention the massive change in OS X over the years, you can only go so far back when making such a UB app. I don't see this transition helping us too much, really. If you want to focus on the whole web thing, WebKit and most browser engines have been able to run on ARM - and ostensibly RISC based CPUs - for years and years, but due to the old base of 10.4 and 10.5, there's only so much people can get working on these machines.
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So, realistically PPC's days are numbered it seems.
 
Macbookprodude said:
So, realistically PPC's days are numbered it seems.
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PowerPC is fine. When Apple and Motorola pulled out of AIM, IBM kept it alive as POWER, and still sells chips using the ISA to this day. In fact, the cpu in a PMG5 is a close relative of the POWER4 cpu. You can buy a Raptor Computing System Talos II and it's a fully modern computer.

Raptor Computing Systems::TL2WK2 Intro

Talos™ II Secure Workstation
www.raptorcs.com

The operating systems of choice are Linux and Unix distros, and importantly, you are installing PowerPC64 Little-Endian distros. My understanding is that workstations and racks using POWER hardware are desirable because of their complete open nature, that everything on them can be audited.
 
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Macbookprodude said:
So, realistically PPC's days are numbered it seems.
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As far as Apple is concerned, they were numbered in 2006. It isn't just a matter of recompiling ARM executables for PPC G3/G4/G5 processors. You have to factor in all of the OS frameworks and drivers that the software relies upon. None of which has been updated past Leopard compatibility since the switch to Intel.
 
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repairedCheese said:
PowerPC is fine. When Apple and Motorola pulled out of AIM, IBM kept it alive as POWER, and still sells chips using the ISA to this day. In fact, the cpu in a PMG5 is a close relative of the POWER4 cpu. You can buy a Raptor Computing System Talos II and it's a fully modern computer.

Raptor Computing Systems::TL2WK2 Intro

Talos™ II Secure Workstation
www.raptorcs.com

The operating systems of choice are Linux and Unix distros, and importantly, you are installing PowerPC64 Little-Endian distros. My understanding is that workstations and racks using POWER hardware are desirable because of their complete open nature, that everything on them can be audited.
Click to expand...


I heard of those.. but they are expensive though. but compared to the 2019 mac pro, it is cheaper.
 
I'm done with Apple. The 2017 MBP I bought for the better half is my last modern Mac purchase. They're just too locked-down for me nowadays, and there are other reasons why I despise the nefarious Apple now, that I won't get into here...

Regardless, ARM seems to have a nice future ahead of it. I'd like to have a nice ARM-based notebook, running Linux, to mess with...
 
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swamprock said:
I'm done with Apple. The 2017 MBP I bought for the better half is my last modern Mac purchase. They're just too locked-down for me nowadays, and there are other reasons why I despise the nefarious Apple now, that I won't get into here...

Regardless, ARM seems to have a nice future ahead of it. I'd like to have a nice ARM-based notebook, running Linux, to mess with...
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Same, and my latest final straw:

My early 2015 13" rMBP fell from a sofa onto a hard floor last weekend, breaking not the glass, but the retina LCD underneath.

When I pulled up iFixit to see what work I’d need to do in order to replace the LCD, I found there wasn’t even a repair how-to for getting inside the glass (not even with heating, spudgers, and so on) — just a how-to on replacing the whole display assembly.

Unfortunately, the cost for that, just to procure the LCD-as-assembly, used, makes it probably as (if not even more) expensive a failure replacement than the logic board. So this repair will have to wait indefinitely.

The sheer obstacles to maintaining your own Apple hardware which you own outright, due to proprietary features and a complete disavowal of modularity or interoperability, makes this, probably the last non-T2-chipped laptop they made, my last Mac. An entity cannot have a completely closed vertically- and laterally-integrated model of running a business without it hurting a lot of people in the process — shareholders and executives solely excepted.

Meh.
 
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The ARM revolution has already taken place for over a decade as Google Android and Apple iOS mostly phones and tablets have overtaken the laptop and desktop market.

I love using Mac OS X. I won't buy a new Mac. PCs suck. Windows is a horrible abomination. And though I do use Linux a lot, the "desktop" experience is sadly lacking. If I were too predict, I might say that the PowerPC Macs' time might be finished in 2038.
 
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mmphosis said:
The ARM revolution has already taken place for over a decade as Google Android and Apple iOS mostly phones and tablets have overtaken the laptop and desktop market.

I love using Mac OS X. I won't buy a new Mac. PCs suck. Windows is a horrible abomination. And though I do use Linux a lot, the "desktop" experience is sadly lacking. If I were too predict, I might say that the PowerPC Macs' time might be finished in 2038.
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That dreaded Y2K37 bug.
 
z970mp said:
Boy, are you in luck ...

PINEBOOK Pro | PINE64

Hexa-Core Rockchip RK3399 4GB LPDDR4 RAM M.2 NVMe expansion option 1080p IPS panel Built-in 802.11ac WiFi with Bluetooth 5.0 Bootable microSD and 64GB eMMC Go to Store The Pinebook Pro is meant to…
www.pine64.org
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Those are nice. I like mine, but the build quality is noticeably not as good as PPC Macs, which is to be expected at the price point. But for $200, it's still a great buy and you can replace anything that breaks anyway. The display is way better than all of my ThinkPads. I suspect that's more because Lenovo still uses crappy panels in their $1000+ T series line, which is kind of inexcusable.
 
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swamprock said:
I'm done with Apple. The 2017 MBP I bought for the better half is my last modern Mac purchase. They're just too locked-down for me nowadays, and there are other reasons why I despise the nefarious Apple now, that I won't get into here...

Regardless, ARM seems to have a nice future ahead of it. I'd like to have a nice ARM-based notebook, running Linux, to mess with...
Click to expand...
Don't get me started. Remember when Mac software never had license keys? Remeber when the OS was notification free, and we used to laugh at windows users for the barage of notifications they were bombarded with? Remember a time before the sluggish, restrictive, monopoly that is the app store? Remeber the days before macOS used to say "the developer of this app cannot be verified"?

Since Lion onwards the mac os has transformed into one giant piece of locked-down-notification-obsessed piece of ^&*%.

Ahhhh. I feel better after that rant, will go back to tinkering on the old iMac G4 now, with a cider, to bring my blood pressure back down.
 
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