I've been reading about Motorola's ill-fated G5 design. I lost touch with Apple in the 1990s so a lot of the nitty-gritty passed me by. I had always assumed that Motorola gave up on chip design after the G4 and Altivec, but it seems that they had a design, or at least a roadmap, for a fifth-generation PowerPC chip.
Historically the PowerPC G5 ended up as an all-IBM thing. Apple appears to have opted for IBM's design around 2002 or so. It's fascinating to go back and read about Motorola's alternative, and also boring because the company never got near to actually building it, so there aren't any prototypes or anything.
The Register has a piece on it dated September 2001:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/09/17/motorola_completes_1_6ghz_powerpc/
They imagined it coming out in February 2002. "The new CPU will be offered at 800MHz, 1GHz, 1.2GHz, 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz, and while the first two are nominally aimed at the embedded space, the others are aimed straight at the desktop [and] we can see Apple using them as to transition over from the top end G4, the PowerPC 7450". The processor they describe was slower than the eventual IBM G5, with a slower front side bus, lower power consumption, but a higher upper memory limit (16gb). The article also predicted that there would be a 64-bit version of OSX 10.2 Jaguar, which didn't happen.
However the Motorola G5 project was mooted as far back as 1999:
https://www.macworld.com/article/1013919/motorola.html
"Waiting in the wings is the PowerPC G5, a 64-bit chip that will also support 32-bit processing to ensure compatibility with current applications. The G5, likely to be available in one to two years at speeds of up to 2GHz, will feature an extensible architecture, making it easier to develop specialized versions of the chip. Motorola says it will also offer a G6 processor, but has given no details on planned features."
It appears that Motorola' semiconductor division hit some kind of fundamental roadblock in 1999, 2000 or so, because the later reports essentially just reiterate the earlier ones. It appears that Motorola ran into trouble even during the G4 era - they got stuck at 500mhz for ages - and never recovered. Nowadays whatever remains of the former semiconductor part of Motorola is part of a Dutch company and the other bits of Motorola are either an empty brand (the mobile phones) or one of those amorphous service companies that does stuff but nobody knows what it is.
Apple's troubles in the pre-iPhone 2000s remind me a bit of Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories - there were several points where Apple could have made a disastrous mistake, but they deftly managed to switch from Motorola to IBM then to Intel with an operating system that worked, and generally got better each time.
Historically the PowerPC G5 ended up as an all-IBM thing. Apple appears to have opted for IBM's design around 2002 or so. It's fascinating to go back and read about Motorola's alternative, and also boring because the company never got near to actually building it, so there aren't any prototypes or anything.
The Register has a piece on it dated September 2001:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/09/17/motorola_completes_1_6ghz_powerpc/
They imagined it coming out in February 2002. "The new CPU will be offered at 800MHz, 1GHz, 1.2GHz, 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz, and while the first two are nominally aimed at the embedded space, the others are aimed straight at the desktop [and] we can see Apple using them as to transition over from the top end G4, the PowerPC 7450". The processor they describe was slower than the eventual IBM G5, with a slower front side bus, lower power consumption, but a higher upper memory limit (16gb). The article also predicted that there would be a 64-bit version of OSX 10.2 Jaguar, which didn't happen.
However the Motorola G5 project was mooted as far back as 1999:
https://www.macworld.com/article/1013919/motorola.html
"Waiting in the wings is the PowerPC G5, a 64-bit chip that will also support 32-bit processing to ensure compatibility with current applications. The G5, likely to be available in one to two years at speeds of up to 2GHz, will feature an extensible architecture, making it easier to develop specialized versions of the chip. Motorola says it will also offer a G6 processor, but has given no details on planned features."
It appears that Motorola' semiconductor division hit some kind of fundamental roadblock in 1999, 2000 or so, because the later reports essentially just reiterate the earlier ones. It appears that Motorola ran into trouble even during the G4 era - they got stuck at 500mhz for ages - and never recovered. Nowadays whatever remains of the former semiconductor part of Motorola is part of a Dutch company and the other bits of Motorola are either an empty brand (the mobile phones) or one of those amorphous service companies that does stuff but nobody knows what it is.
Apple's troubles in the pre-iPhone 2000s remind me a bit of Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories - there were several points where Apple could have made a disastrous mistake, but they deftly managed to switch from Motorola to IBM then to Intel with an operating system that worked, and generally got better each time.
