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The transition was the disaster. The first gen PowerPC Macs performed significantly less running common user applications, while costing a premium. This was a s
by PeterStuer 6y ago
The transition was the disaster. The first gen PowerPC Macs performed significantly less running common user applications, while costing a premium. This was a software issue, but left a very sour taste and many, including me, transitioned to Wintel as a result.
- perardi 6y agoI doubt there's benchmarks from ye olde days, but are you sure? I thought the first PPC machines managed to outrun 68040 machines, even in emulation. I fully admit my recollection could be wrong there. But regardless, that entire pre-G3 era was the nadir of the platform. Those were dark days.
- sgerenser 6y agoIt was surprisingly similar to the current ARM transition if I’m remembering correctly. Many, but not all applications actually ran faster even in emulation. But there were certain tasks that didn’t emulate well and the pundits cautioned to wait to upgrade until the tools you used were fully ported.
- tambourine_man 6y agoIt depends on what you did. Photoshop wasn’t fully recompiled at first but they did get key performance tasks written to a PPC plug-in running inside 68k emulated Photoshop. And it screamed. Faster than anything before it. The fact that emulated 68k code could call native PPC was nuts to me but it was how most of the classic OS worked on PPC, with native parts being slowly rewritten over time.