Comments on: If a chip architecture fell in the forest…

By: Steven May

Steven May — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:44:50 +0000

John Nack said: “One last thing: I have to laughing at all the articles cheering Snow Leopard’s 6GB** reduction in install footprint… **I hate bloat, and everyone likes getting storage space back. Of course, 6GB of storage will set you back roughly 50 cents at Fry’s.”
With 24TB of storage on my network, 6GB is no big deal. But the thousands of files no longer present is a huge deal. The system boots much faster, repairing permissions has gone from 10 minutes to 2, and CCC works in 1/8 the time. Illustrator-Bridge-Photoshop CS4 launch simultaneously in 10 seconds, compared to over a minute in 10.5, and a 1GB TIFF file opens in 3 seconds.
Over the years, bloat has stolen tons of our time– we know– but in the case of Snow Leopard, just how much time has been lost to us in the past is now painfully obvious.
That 6GB was a very heavy burden.

By: Peter Kendall

Peter Kendall — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:07:35 +0000

Sadly, my Dual 2.7 Ghz Powermac G5 died about a half year ago (before the Snow Leopard announcement) so when it came to the Snow Leopard announcement, I personally didn’t care since I was going to be getting a new Mac anyway someday.
But back in the day, I was definitely a diehard PPC fan who repeatedly brought up the Megahertz myth! Sadly, when Apple switched the Mac to x86, we can now only be just as fast as PCs, we can never be faster!
[Or slower. It cuts both ways. Now the focus can be on other things like OS usability, industrial design of the machines, price, etc. That's all fine with me. --J.]
Just look at the POWER 7 that will be coming out! Too bad that thing will melt a laptop (not to mention melting the lap itself).
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted!
[Indeed it was. --J.]

By: stephane

stephane — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:43:11 +0000

Nobody cares because people know that when Apple got fed up with Intel, they will mov a,way and come back to the chip that procures you real joy! And peff for the same price.

By: oomu

oomu — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:24:44 +0000

PPC was also able to interpret 68×00 code. it was the best way for Apple at the time.
truly, PPC was impressive at first and helped Apple in the dark age.
But IBM move on to better pasture, Motorola faded away…
So long PPC.

By: Jp Cooper

Jp Cooper — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:07:32 +0000

ArsTechnica and other sites have had several articles about this. No big fanfare or anything – but it’s been mentioned.
My WOW! moment was when the first Quadra’s came out and how Bad Ass the 900s/ 950s were compared to anything around. The Design Office I was in at the time [a lowly intern] the Art Director had just got one in – talk about some jealousy.
It was a good run – but when IBM/ Motorola couldn’t keep up with architecture advancements and continuously fell short of what they said they could deliver [as much as i hated it at the time] it was logical to jump ship. Otherwise Apple’s slogan wouldn’t have been “The Fastest Mac Ever” – it would have been “The Oldest Processor Line in the Industry”.
I would totally rather be on RISC architecture than x86. But I like my Mactel and really can’t complain much.
R.I.P. PPC [on the Mac] you served us well thru the dark ages of the Apple Empire and made possible the continuance until such a time as the mighty Apple rose from the darkness and could embrace the Intel chips – thank you!

By: Bob Hopfner

Bob Hopfner — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:40:15 +0000

heh! I had a 486DX/66 and my friend had a 7100 and recall my computer being faster than hers. I had a faster HD and more ram though too iirc.
This was one reason why my company chose to move to Vista64 on dual-quad Dells. We knew Apple would force us to upgrade from our PPC G5s at some point. ServerSide-System integration and IT maintenance were bigger reasons.
I wonder if this is why no one has offered to take these orphaned macs home . . . .
Intel is just sexier!

By: jerry Harris

jerry Harris — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:36:38 +0000

Sorry about that, typing too quickly as usual. If you consider the screen size on the itouch, ipod, (horsepower per screen pixel) and the fact that this gpu supports a reasonable shader model, it is roughly on par from the programming standpoint with cards such as the 6800. The cards just prior to that had relatively poor programmability in terms of things such as looping, flow control, size of program, floating point support, etc.
Thanks for replying!

By: Charles

Charles — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:34:08 +0000

Count me in the really-peeved group of G5 owners. I bought a fully-loaded Quad G5 with the ultra expensive QuadroFX 4500 graphics board option. I bought it because I figured it would take a while before major apps (especially Maya) would ship an Intel version. Alas, the QuadroFX board never worked properly with Maya. And now Maya is Intel-only. Grr..
Anyone want to buy a really loaded Quad G5?

By: Bill Wadman

Bill Wadman — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:47:12 +0000

Jerry Harris, just a quick fact check:
The article actaully compares the new iphone cpu with a Pentium, not a Pentium 4. Think 1993 not 2003.
Similarly, he compared the graphics chip to something around the 1999 era. Much more simple than the high-end 6800 cards from a few years ago.
Personally as a person who upgrades frequently, it doesn’t matter much to me. Though I do find it funny that Mac users have no real problem with it, which people trying to install Windows Vista on a 2001 era machine expect it to run great out of the box. Imagine how well Leopard would run on the original G4 Ti laptop. Right, not that well.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:58:43 +0000

As long as Apple keeps shipping security updates for Leopard for a few years, that should help ease the transition. They need the change or they risk being like Microsoft with Windows getting so bogged down in legacy code that they can’t move (i.e. innovate) the way they might want to.

By: Michael Critz

Michael Critz — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:41:28 +0000

What’s with the tiny leading on these comments? My eyes hurt!
[I know. I'm waiting until we get a new blog system (next month) to fool with the style sheet. --J.]
Many apologies for being off-topic.

By: Jerry Harris

Jerry Harris — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:26:56 +0000

This has more to do with the other Apple platform that is growing at an incredible rate (iphone, itouch). It is pretty remarkable that Apple provides similar apis on both the mac and the iphone/itouch. http://gizmodo.com/5287426/the-iphone-is-a-pretty-damn-big-platform-to-develop-games-for How many of you realize that the new iPhones are faster than what Photoshop took its first steps on? This article equates it with a modern Pentium 4 in terms of power. Some of you might still be running PS on such hardware. http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3579 The iphone's graphic capabilities are probably on par with that $700 6800 card option on the last gen G5. This may could be the subject of another blog post but here goes... What aspect of photoshop would you like to see on a handheld gadget?

By: Mark Alan Thomas

Mark Alan Thomas — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:16:09 +0000

I for one am glad CS4 is Universal Binary. It made it super easy to migrate from G4 to Intel. No reinstall of CS4 necessary, which was a huge surprise considering how easy it was to break CS3.

By: Ben Hansen

Ben Hansen — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:10:41 +0000

what about the fact that After Effects no longer installs on PPC. F- sound booth!

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:43:32 +0000

Well, that’s what I expected when Apple announced that they would focus on bug fixes, performance, and leveraging GPU power. It really wouldn’t have made sense for them to do performance optimization for an architecture they no longer ship, especially considering that performance optimizations are not always portable between platforms. Therefore resources spent on the PPC side would have been missing on the Intel side. Having to support both architectures also would have prevented them from making certain architectural changes to optimize the OS for the Intel platform. I don’t know how much of the PPC-specific code is relevant to the iPhone, though. They might need to maintain and optimize some portions of OS X/PPC for that. But I wasn’t surprised by the news of the discontinuation at all.
But it’s still sad. Oh well, the end of an era.
But just out of curiosity: Why did Adobe choose to go with Apple’s Universal Binary concept? Why didn’t you simply create separate PPC and an Intel builds and have the installer install just the one appropriate for the system’s architecture? Wouldn’t that have made the installation process twice as fast and cut the harddrive requirements in half?