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"Why PowerPC?: The PowerPC architecture design is newer than the other successful CPU architectures. ..." This if like saying a screensaver of a fire is bett

"Why PowerPC?: The PowerPC architecture design is newer than the other successful CPU architectures. ..." This if like saying a screensaver of a fire is better than actual fire in your fireplace since its newer. Ignoring the fact it doesn't come close to half the features of a real fire (except for maybe the risk of burning your house down). But as a long term Apple user from before the the x86 era I can't deny there sentiment of going with the underdog :)

gcb0 9y ago
i'd guess you can emulate a PPC (for non-memory intensive tasks) on a modern x86 faster and with less power than running a PPC natively. I might be completely off. and with parallelization and containers fad, which benefit a lot from memory and context changes, they would have more luck funding servers for VM farms than laptops.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Huh? Emulation is always slower than anything running natively on comparable hardware, since there's an extra layer of abstraction. Do you mean something else here?
  - gcb0 9y ago
    nope. mean exactly it. You forget the fact that x86 is leaps ahead on clock speed of any PPC. if you are at 1/8th of the bare metal performance, ona top of the line average x86 cpu from today, you still have more than the best PPC money can buy. Even for memory and IO intensive tasks, where they are supposed to shine because of the obscenely huge in-cpu caches (when compared to x86) if you remember that the PPC state of the art IO standard is from 2004 and it could barely handle dual gigabit NICs. I might be completely off and not knowing newer PPC offerings, but I doubt there are any since the early 2000's, when i last looked into all this. tl;dr there is no "comparable" ppc in terms of clock speed to x86.
    - saagarjha 9y ago
      As expected, my laptop blows what was arguably the "fastest" PowerPC computer out of the water: http://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/compare/1989293/2644827 http://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/compare/1989293/2644.... However, I'm not sure this difference is enough for emulation to work at native speed. Taking the Wii (which used PowerPC) as an example, it wasn't until recently that most computers could handle emulating it without a significant frameskip. The G5 is much more powerful than 729 MHz Broadway that the Wii had.

gcb0 9y ago

i'd guess you can emulate a PPC (for non-memory intensive tasks) on a modern x86 faster and with less power than running a PPC natively. I might be completely off. and with parallelization and containers fad, which benefit a lot from memory and context changes, they would have more luck funding servers for VM farms than laptops.

saagarjha 9y ago
Huh? Emulation is always slower than anything running natively on comparable hardware, since there's an extra layer of abstraction. Do you mean something else here?
- gcb0 9y ago
  nope. mean exactly it. You forget the fact that x86 is leaps ahead on clock speed of any PPC. if you are at 1/8th of the bare metal performance, ona top of the line average x86 cpu from today, you still have more than the best PPC money can buy. Even for memory and IO intensive tasks, where they are supposed to shine because of the obscenely huge in-cpu caches (when compared to x86) if you remember that the PPC state of the art IO standard is from 2004 and it could barely handle dual gigabit NICs. I might be completely off and not knowing newer PPC offerings, but I doubt there are any since the early 2000's, when i last looked into all this. tl;dr there is no "comparable" ppc in terms of clock speed to x86.
  - saagarjha 9y ago
    As expected, my laptop blows what was arguably the "fastest" PowerPC computer out of the water: http://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/compare/1989293/2644827 http://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/compare/1989293/2644.... However, I'm not sure this difference is enough for emulation to work at native speed. Taking the Wii (which used PowerPC) as an example, it wasn't until recently that most computers could handle emulating it without a significant frameskip. The G5 is much more powerful than 729 MHz Broadway that the Wii had.