Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

I got one of the first PowerPC computers in a lab full of high end spare no expense PCs and it cranked. If your experience was otherwise, I suspect you were running software under emulation so the fact it was “no better” was a borderline miracle. The second gen PowerPC macs were “the fastest 680x0 boxes ever shipped” (an Apple engineer boasted to me at WWDC and he wasn’t wrong)

The PowerPC allowed Apple to overtake the Pentium and gave it boasting rights until the failure of the G5.

View on HN

Yes, I believe the majority of software and even parts of the OS ran in emulation. Still, even when they moved a lot of that code native, performance wasn't amazing. Someone else mentioned that the rest of the hardware may have been holding these machines back and I could easily believe that.

My opinion: when released, performance didn't meet my expectations and failed to meet my expectations for another five years (when the G3 was released). IMHO, I don't believe the Mac was competitive against the PC until the release of the G4. I could understand why Apple would want to hedge against the PowerPC.

That's funny, I too remember things differently. As Mac advocates often, and loudly pointed out, the Mac consistently smoked the PC -- especially at the only benchmark that mattered, Photoshop filters. It was the 90s and RISC architecture really was gonna change everything. At the time, Intel was playing the "megahertz myth" heavily in its marketing, the false belief that more MHz made for a faster CPU, which just wasn't true when comparing across different microarchitectures like Pentium and PowerPC.

And of course, as those from the Lost Amiga Civilization recall, it took about a 500 MHz Windows 9x PC to feel as responsive as a 25 MHz Amiga.

It's been a long time, my memory is less a collection of data and more a hazy soup of anecdotes.

I do suspect that Photoshop filters might get some real performance gains out of AltiVec instructions, maybe my boring developer style workloads weren't reaping similar benefits from the availability of those instructions.

What the G4 giveth, Objective-C/Carbon/Cocoa taketh away.

And the G5 really only failed because of cooling issues - obviously, IBM has been able to continue to push the POWER platform that undergirded PowerPC far beyond the G5

Not just cooling -- the G5 drew too much power to be viable in one of Apple's growth markets at the time: laptops. The Intel Core chips were based on the Pentium M microarchitecture and so already had power characteristics that were suited for laptop use.

Of course, POWER would go on to be a great arch for desktop and server use, but that wasn't enough for Apple after the G4.

Excessive power draw ... which, while seen in abysmal battery life, was most directly seen in an inability to cool

Reply on news.ycombinator.com