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If I recall, the scuttlebutt was that Motorola had promised Apple (meaning Steve Jobs) that faster clock speeds were just around the corner for a while, and when that repeatedly failed to materialize Apple (meaning Steve Jobs) got pissed and activated the Intel backup plan.


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By the time Apple dropped PowerPC and went to Intel, Motorola was already out of the picture and IBM was making the G5

The G5 was the desktop chip, it was Motorola's task to scale it down for laptops, which they were unable to do.

That's a good point, thanks.

Sort of. The G4 chip was still used in laptops until the Intel transition, and was produced by Motorola until they spun off their semiconductor division into Freescale, which continued producing the G4 until the end.

Well it wasnt really clockspeeds, it was performance per watt. The g5 was able to go into a (watercooled) powermac but IBM couldnt get it to run cool and efficient enough to go into apple laptops (or the mac mini iirc). By 2005 intel was, at the very least, probably prototyping multicore (I dont remember if IBM’s processor offering to apple was multicore at the time) chips that blew ibm (and previous intel offerings) out of the water performance and efficiency wise and apple announced the transition.

The last generation of PowerMacs had dual-core G5s. They still ran very hot and it did not change much in the end.

Last generation had quad core with water cooling I think. They were really trying to get everything out of them.

It was two Dual-Core 2.5GHZ CPUs. I have one sitting under my desk right now. ;)

Pretty advanced for 2005. Four 64bit CPU cores, 16GB DDR2 RAM, and liquid cooled. It's still usable today 17 years later and it could work for 90% of what I do on the computer. It draws nearly 1000 watts under full load tho....


1000 watts, damn.

So what can’t it do? I’m guessing modern websites struggle on it


Yes, websites with heavy JavaScript really slow it down. The newest browser available for it is based on a very old version of Firefox.

https://github.com/classilla/tenfourfox/

Youtube is extremely slow, and it can only play back 360p or lower video smoothly. There is no hardware h.264 acceleration. “New” Reddit is also very slow. But old Reddit loads fine. Hacker news is very fast, loads as quickly as a modern computer.


It was driven by power and heat for the portable market. Intel x86 laptops were the best at the time and PPC couldn’t compete especially with thin and light.

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