PowerPC essentially died as a desktop and server processor once Apple decided to go Intel. IBM decided to go back towards Power's roots with the POWER5 (the follow-on to the PPC970 in the Power Mac G5 and the PowerPC-based XServes).
PowerPC really died in 1997-98 when it became clear that Jobs wasn't going to license Mac OS (classic or X) for 3rd party PowerPC boxes anymore, and Windows NT on PPC wasn't going anywhere.
Without an operating system, IBM and Motorola didn't have an incentive to build PC chips anymore. The G4 happened because it was already in development and the vector extensions were useful for Motorola's embedded ambitions. The G5 happened because Apple basically paid IBM to make a desktop chip out of their POWER designs, AFAIK.
Around 2004, there was a startup PowerPC maker called P.A. Semi [1] that apparently competed for Apple's Mac CPU business. After Apple went Intel, they acquired P.A. Semi to design iPhone chips instead.
I loved the PowerPC chips, the 604 and G5 in particular. Too bad it never became a viable platform outside of Apple.
(In the '90s, the PowerPC had very competitive price/performance, but there wasn't a viable desktop OS available after Apple terminated the original MacOS clone program. 5-10 years later Linux would have been much more ready, but the chips were not competitive with Intel anymore.)
The switch from 68k to PowerPC was because 68k was dead, Motorola was pushing the 88k which was already failing in the market, and while Apple also considered other architectures like SPARC, they didn't want to be tied to only a single company's fortunes again like they were with the 68k.
So when IBM came to them asking "hey how about we scale down POWER to a desktop chip for you?" Apple also brought in Motorola so that they could dual-source their chips and not be dependent on one company, and PowerPC was born. Rather than being an up-and-coming competitor, PowerPC probably wouldn't exist without Apple's involvement (they would probably still have pursued a scaled-down POWER, but it wouldn't be PowerPC)
When my wife worked at Apple Canada we got to borrow a G5 tower from the company demo pool for a bit. Noisiest and hottest computer I've ever worked with. In the summer I could have the AC on full blast and the room I was in with it would be hot. And in the winter it was an effective space heater. And a super noisy fan.
PowerPC always sounded good on paper. But it was definitely a dead end for Apple.
Some rump stump of the Amiga community seems obsessed with PowerPC still for some reason.
It is nice to imagine an alternative timeline in which Apple pivoted directly to ARM instead of to x86 when the switch happened. It was only a couple or three years after the Intel switch that the iPhone came out.
While it's definitely bad that Apple stopped supporting PowerPC Macs just 3 years after they sold the last machines, expecting any support at all 10 years later is ridiculous.
What ties people to PowerPC these days? Surely the speed and power consumption of the latest Intel machines is 100x better?
I purchased one of the first Macs that ran on a PowerPC processor and I was profoundly disappointed. Performance was no better than a 68040-based Mac and it was pretty crashy. As time went on and software was updated that machine became less crashy but performace was always poor.
I don't have any insider information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple felt like they needed a backup plan in case the PowerPC alliance was unsuccessful at matching the speed growth of Intel's products. I'd say the G3 was the first PowerPC CPU that impressed me, I think Apple only stuck with PowerPC for two more generations (the G5).
At least PowerPC machines were available for reasonable prices from Apple for about a decade - and Linux was quite well supported in addition to OS X. But with Motorola’s loss of interest in the PC and server market and IBM’s focus on processors for consoles, there was no future for Apple in the growing mobile market. After all, we’re still waiting for the G5 Powerbook :).
What was disastrous about the PowerPC? Sure, they eventually moved on to x86, but I don’t think PPC itself really caused big problems. Apple was already in serious trouble at that point; PPC on its own didn’t save them but at least it didn’t kill them.
The early PPC Macs were good machines, and the brief flirtation with licensed clones at least allowed me to buy a Mac-compatible computer (Power 100) that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford.
If PowerPC is such a great architecture, then why did Apple transition the Mac platform to x86 about 12 years ago? Has PowerPC gotten much better since then?
Because it wasn't Intel, it was PowerPC, and Intel always manages to pull a rabbit out of the hat in terms of performance and price.
Also if I recall I don't think Windows NT for PowerPC ever truly saw the light of day. And this was while Windows 95/98 was still dominant and before Windows 2000/XP, so there wasn't really consumer software for it. So no real operating systems.
PowerPC ended up being a dead end which only Apple pursued. Though I guess there were variants that ended up in gaming consoles for a while.
At a job I had (IBM subsidiary) in 1997 they had a pile of early-CHRP boxes hanging around. For kicks I got Linux running on them, just out of curiosity. They were basically juts PCs (PCI bus, etc.) that ran with a PowerPC CPU. Which is effectively what Macs were for years, too.
There wasn't an issue at all with keeping up with performance. The problem was that IBM was pushing PowerPC more and more into the server space and Apple needed a roadmap that factored in laptops.
In general, IBM was just going in a different direction with Power than Apple needed them to be going in. IBM was and is focused on the highest end, high priced end of the server market.
Meanwhile, Apple has gone through two deprecations of CPU architectures: first PowerPC and then Intel. Macs are nice, but I wish they had the same commitment to backwards compatibility.
Apple didn't adopt PowerPC after fighting with Motorola and it was no shock to Motorola, or the world. Motorola and Apple and IBM worked together on PowerPC in a consortium, after the Motorola 88000 RISC (which Apple also tried) failed for various reasons.
This was all in the exiled-Jobs years while Apple was thrashing about trying to build a real operating system (or systems) to replace classic Mac OS. (NeXT also played with the m88k.)
And ARM wasn't new to Apple with the iOS systems, either. The Newton was built around ARM back in the 90s.
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