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I wonder have they considered switching back to PowerPC (power9/power10) now that it is open (for whatever that means, I am not sure)? I am sure they would appr

by nsajko 6y ago

I wonder have they considered switching back to PowerPC (power9/power10) now that it is open (for whatever that means, I am not sure)? I am sure they would appreciate the control that could give them. Does somebody have an idea how much approximately would it cost Apple to switch the Apple A14 from ARM to POWER? Usually it is said that the instruction decoder is a small part of a CPU core, and the architectures are not hugely different (compared to AMD64/Intel, at least).

dathinab 6y ago
They have already heavily invested into customized ARM chips. They do all they need. So no reason to look back at POWER. Sure for high end mac the ARM chips probably wouldn't be the best fit for now. But staying with x86 for them is just way easier. POWER might only be interesting if they do a server OS. Which they made pretty clear they are not interested in in the near future. (The rack mounted mac is still a rack mounted workstation. Rack mounting high end workstations isn't that uncommon in certain audio/video processing related job areas. For a server it is missing some pretty basic thinks like: Redundant power supply, management interface, trivial easy to swap RAM/Disks without removing it from the rack, and probably more. ).