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> PPC offered tremendous promise in the early 1990s at the same time Motorola's evolution of M68k was lackluster at best Apple entered into a trio with IBM & M
by RetroTechie 3y ago
> PPC offered tremendous promise in the early 1990s at the same time Motorola's evolution of M68k was lackluster at best
Apple entered into a trio with IBM & Motorola to develop the PowerPC in early 90's.
But at that time, there already was MIPS around.
Anyone know why this PowerPC project was started despite that? Especially if -per the article- the main goal was to move from CISC to RISC?
Even if MIPS cpus around at the time had performance/W issues (I've no idea yes or no), then improving technology for existing ISA would be easier than inventing entire new architecture, no? (+ all the software tools)
And there was also SPARC then.
So why invent new wheel, vs. improve MIPS (or SPARC) & use that? Not-invented-here syndrome? Licensing issues?
- datadeft 3y agoApple at the time of the x86 switch was roughly 3% of the PPC chip market.
- Sardtok 3y agoThis is the 68K->PPC switch about a decade earlier.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoHuh. What was yet other 97?
- gumby 3y agoIBM and a lot of systems that had been 68K. Though the architectures were different a lot of 68K assumptions were maintained in the PPC so porting was easier.
- philwelch 3y agoIn part, all three 7th generation game consoles (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- datadeft 3y agoPrinters, game consoles, supercomputers.
- Someone 3y agoAnd cars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_5000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_5000, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16221903-400-programmed-to-win/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16221903-400-programm..., https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/42065/reasons-for-popularity-of-powerpc-for-embedded-designs https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/42065/reason...)
- sillywalk 3y agoThey AIM alliance also wanted to end the Wintel Duopoly. Adopting SPARC would help out Sun Microsystems, which I believe was the leader in workstations at the time. MIPS was to be used as one of the 'standard' reference platforms for the Advanced Computing Environment[0] or Advanced RISC Computing (?) (the other being X86), that would run Windows NT. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Computing_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Computing_Environment
- microtherion 3y agoPowerPC was not really an entirely new architecture, it was a downsized implementation of the POWER architecture which IBM had already been shipping in workstations for a few years.