4 Jun
2013
4 Jun
'13
7:56 a.m.
On 4 June 2013 12:41, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
Er, no. It was (if you really must frame it in those terms, with their
strong implicit biased interpretation) because IBM "wasn't interested"
in developing the PPC further for the *notebook* market.
The G5 was a good chip, but too hungry and way too hot for portables -
just as the market was swinging decisively to portables. Apple was
left with a competitive big-desktop offering, but limited to the
by-then-underpowered G4 in its notebook and notebook-tech based
machines (i.e. the laptops and the Mac mini).
It was not about the desktop. IBM is still cheerfully developing POWER
derivatives for servers and in the later days there wasn't all that
much difference between POWER and PowerPC any more, not as I
understand it.
Whereas the original PowerPC 6xx chips used the Motorola 880x0 bus
(IIRC), the G5 didn't - it's not really a PPC at all but a
desktop-scale single-chip POWER.
(Disclaimer: outsider 10,000' view.)
What, like TileEra?
On Jun 3, 2013, at 22:25, Liam Proven <lproven at
gmail.com> wrote:
The Dreamcast was a Hitachi SuperH, the GameCube was a PowerPC.
Thank you for the clarification.
(I did of course mean Nintendo Gamecube - I don't know where that
"NEC" came from.)
None of
the architectures you've listed has ever tried
(at least not that I recall) to take over the low-end desktop market.
I beg to differ.
The Sony PS2, Sega Dreamcast and NEC Gamecube generation of consoles
were all (I think) based on derivatives of MIPS. They shipped tens of
millions of units, maybe hundreds of millions between them. And it
didn't work. Apple led the exodus, jumping to its arch-enemy
Intel, soon dropping PPC code compatibility and offering a free,
built-in tool to dual-boot with Windows, while there is a /choice/ of
free hypervisors to run Windows under Mac OS X.
Apple did this largely because Motorola and IBM weren't interested in
developing the PPC farther for the desktop market. Motorola was
focused more on the embedded space (where they've done well,
spun off as Freescale) while IBM mainly went for the high end
server space with POWER.
[Nod]
Meantime, MIPS
is coming back, amazingly, as an
even-lower-power-than-ARM offering from Imagination, the company that
makes PowerVR GPUs.
There are also some very high power MIPS64 chips from other vendors
which are primarily used in networking equipment. Not that any of this invalidates your other points,
but for pedantry's
sake... :-)
:?) Well, right back atcha.
--
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