3 ms·

They switched because Freescale and IBM couldn’t keep up with Intel. Apple did not make CPUs at that time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transitio

• bshipp 7y ago
  Fair enough, I always associated PowerPC with Apple and assumed they were the driving force behind it's use. Regardless, that makes the financial calculus even more suspect as they would have even fewer units to amortize the cost over. But I don't work for Apple, and quite frankly the CPU market could certain use the injection of some more competition.
  • monocasa 7y ago
    They helped a little with the overarching design (the ISA of the vector unit was pretty much Apple designed) but they never made any chips themselves AFAIK.
  • IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
    Fewer units? They have arm processors in every iPhone, iPad and AppleTV. At least 70 million units a quarter. The Mac CPUs would need more cores/threads (perhaps octocore).
  • protomyth 7y ago
    Apple and assumed they were the driving force behind it's use Quite the opposite. Apple, according to the book The Race for a New Game Machine, was an unprofitable demanding customer. The scale of the XBox 360 and PS3 dwarfed Apple's usage and IBM made several decisions that were contrary to Apple's needs. PowerPC for the embedded market has been the primary driver of PowerPC development.
    • rbanffy 7y ago
      At some point IBM offered Apple the Cell processor. I'm glad Apple opted to move to Intel then. The Cell is the hardest thing I ever tried to write code for.
      • protomyth 7y ago
        IBM made decisions about the Cell PowerPC that made it unsuitable for Apple (no out of order) and offered the 970 as compensation. We all got to see how those promises played out.