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snow-leopard-will-support-powerpc-chips

macgirl

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  • 7 months later...
Lostgame
Lostgame
Posted
Posted
you are all wrong they are throwing out ppc the beta even doesnet support ppc

 

This. Sorry, guys, I think you'll all be a little shocked upon release.

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  • 2 weeks later...
spokism
spokism
Posted
Posted
And this will be a good and marvelous thing.

 

I don't know about anyone else but I am fed up with having a shedload of useless PowerPC bytes clogging up my hard disk (and yes, I know, there are utilities to strip the PPC code from executables - I shouldn't have to use them though). And I can't believe my MacBook ships with half of the contents of its OS and system folders actually useless to the machine they're installed on, just to support an obsolete architecture that's no longer sold.

 

that is not cool. Not all people have the money to buy a new mac every 8 months. I have a 15 inch powerbook, which was made in jan of 2006. My ffin warranty is still good for gods sakes. It was the most expensive model too, and 3 years later, its going to be obsolete?!. I understand the ppc code and space problems, but they should not trash it, only they should make individual copy's for both ppc's and intel's. It is retarted to ship core 2 mac's with ppc code, but that does not mean that it should be obselete. Ur selfish dude

 

Apple should drop PPC support anyways. It'll force the PPC zealots to get a REAL processor.

 

Yea, i just love having a mac with a processor that cant even run youtube videos wthout framerate lag, in a laptop that i paid 2400 3 years ago. U are retarted

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Chris Mills
Chris Mills
Posted
Posted

I'm hoping that PPC support will be retained for the time being.

 

I have a Quicksilver G4 as well as my hack and there is certainly life in the old gal yet (unless I can find a G5 at the right price).

 

I certainly don't think it would be right for Apple to drop G5 (or G4) support in Snow. These processor families are still capable of cutting it for most applications today and are in constant use.

 

As someone said:- their PowerBook is still covered by AppleCare.

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adamsalac
adamsalac
Posted
Posted

Well,really I expected that Apple would NOT drop PPC in Snow Leopard!

 

Here are my arguements

 

1)The last PPC Macs were discontinued in August 2006 (PowerMac G5) and that's less than 3 years!

This would completly destroy the advantage of Macs towards PCs as they promised in Get a Mac ads that Tiger

(it's about 2 years ago) will run even on 7 years old Macs and Vista dosn't even run on 3 years old PCs.

 

2)It's not that weird that one architecture is not supported in a non-public beta phase. Most of the developer

have got enough money for the ADC Select or Premier membership,which is required for official downloading of

the pre-releases of Snow Leopard, will have enough money for an Intel Mac.

For customers,it would be a lot worse , as not every Mac user has got enough money for a brand new Intel Mac

and especially those guys, who have spent 3000 USD or even more for a nice PowerMac G5 with the confidence,

that their Mac will support all Apple OSes in the next decade.

 

3)The G5s have got more than enough power for any task.

Apple still compares the Mac Pro with the Quad G5!

http://www.apple.com/macpro/performance.html

And the results: The 8-core Mac Pro is in most test just 1,6~2,6 times faster than the Quad G5 even though

there're newer processors with higher FSB and so on....

Then you'll see that the performance increase is not that high.Apple can not argue with arguements like:

"The old PowerPC processors are simply not fast enough for our new "paste here" technology."

 

That's why I think that Apple will have to support at least G5 CPUs.

 

Adam

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Lostgame
Lostgame
Posted
Posted

'snow-leopard-will-not-support-powerpc-chips'

 

Explain this, Macgirl, I've got a legal build of 10A261 here, and it lacks almost all the core technology for PPC. As a matter of fact, all the frameworks that support grand central, etc, are all (suprise suprise) intel only. Apple has said several times that they won't support PPC, so suddenly some anonymous tipster defies all bounds of logic and reason and is completely correct?

 

Why can't you just give it up? Honestly - don't start a topic with an intentionally misleading name. There's no proof to back up your statement, actually, there's tons of proofs against it, and virtually none to support it. If you need to see the proper documentation and everything, PM me, and I can give you whatever you need.

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vbetts
vbetts
Posted
Posted
Well,really I expected that Apple would NOT drop PPC in Snow Leopard!

 

Here are my arguements

 

1)The last PPC Macs were discontinued in August 2006 (PowerMac G5) and that's less than 3 years!

This would completly destroy the advantage of Macs towards PCs as they promised in Get a Mac ads that Tiger

(it's about 2 years ago) will run even on 7 years old Macs and Vista dosn't even run on 3 years old PCs.

 

2)It's not that weird that one architecture is not supported in a non-public beta phase. Most of the developer

have got enough money for the ADC Select or Premier membership,which is required for official downloading of

the pre-releases of Snow Leopard, will have enough money for an Intel Mac.

For customers,it would be a lot worse , as not every Mac user has got enough money for a brand new Intel Mac

and especially those guys, who have spent 3000 USD or even more for a nice PowerMac G5 with the confidence,

that their Mac will support all Apple OSes in the next decade.

 

3)The G5s have got more than enough power for any task.

Apple still compares the Mac Pro with the Quad G5!

http://www.apple.com/macpro/performance.html

And the results: The 8-core Mac Pro is in most test just 1,6~2,6 times faster than the Quad G5 even though

there're newer processors with higher FSB and so on....

Then you'll see that the performance increase is not that high.Apple can not argue with arguements like:

"The old PowerPC processors are simply not fast enough for our new "paste here" technology."

 

That's why I think that Apple will have to support at least G5 CPUs.

 

Adam

1.Apple drops support for their products like it's nothing. Look at Ipods for one. And you have to remember, this isn't Tiger. They're not promising that Snow Leopard will run on 7 year old Macs.

2.A beta shows off basic features. Which basic features of any OS, would be performance. So, they need to have the architecture of the platform they support to show off the performance, but to show that it works. Not only is there only intel versions of programs in snow leopard, snow leopard I believe has no kext that supported PPC products or features of a PPC product, like the Radeon X800 which was G5 only. And, Macs didn't cost really any more money from PPC to Intel. So, I don't see why people couldn't afford it now, where as they did before.

3.The only reason why Apple compares the Macpro to the Quad G5, is because the quad G5 is the last ppc computer Apple had.

 

The marketshare for Apple went up since they switched to Intel, there are a lot of intel Macs out there, versus old PPC. It doesn't look good at all for PPC support in Snow leopard, I'm saying that PPC is dropped. It's good that it is too imo. Sure, you lose a bunch of support for a platform, but at the same time you're not limiting the better and faster platform because you're trying to bounce around 2 different platforms.

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  • 2 months later...
VonMagnum
VonMagnum
Posted
Posted

One of the most common traits I've noticed among Mac fans (fan as in "fanatic" as there is no better term for any other platform trait than the typical rabid Mac user than "fanatic" just as I would use "elitist" for Linux users) is a total self-absorption and hatred of all that digress from their own personal platform. In this case, those that have an Intel Mac...or rather those that no longer use a PPC Mac (some may have and use both like myself) tend to hate all things PPC and wish they would die a horrible death and never be heard from again. This desire is born not out of reality (seeing as most fanatic (i.e./aka rabid "fanboy" type) Mac users seem to know very little to nothing about computers in general from my observations over the past two years that I've been using Macs) and thus any such expressed desire that the ejection of PowerPC code is based on some inadvertent belief or desire that it might somehow make their Intel machines 10x faster or at least free up tons of hard disk space due to no longer being forced to carry hordes of PPC code (because we all know hard drives are SO flipping tiny these days and therefore you need every shred of space so we MUST ditch an entire platform and around 1/2 of all Mac users from the latest OS update just to apease the lack of hard drive space on someone's Intel Mac).

 

The star reality is something a bit different, of course. I've got a PowerMac G4 with a 1.8GHz 7448 G4 processor and an ATI 9800 Pro and two 1.5TB Sata drives running my whole house audio system. It, of course, runs Leopard just fine. In fact, if I compare one CPU core of my Fall of 2008 era Macbook Pro 2.4GHz (Intel 2 Core Duo) to my single CPU G4, the Intel core is 1.5-2x faster (and thus with optimized applications, the whole computer is UP TO 4x faster and often much less than that). If I had opted for two 1.8GHz G4 CPUs, I'm sad to say that a brand new late 2008 Macbook Pro would only be a whopping 1.5-2x faster period in pure CPU power (the newer GPU obviously helps for OpenGL, etc., though). To me, that's just freaking SAD more than anything else. I mean for all the hooplah and ranting and raving about how outdated PowerPC technology is, newer Intel chips with 40% more clock speed are only about 2x faster doesn't exactly make me want to run for the Indy 500.

 

Sure 2x isn't piddly nothing and it's over 8x faster than this PowerPC's original 553MHz G4 CPU, but the fact remains that a 2001 era PowerMac is more than useful with a couple of upgrades. A Mini or iMac is not directly comparable because nearly all expansion has to be external and the nearest Tower Apple currently offers STARTS at $2700. So buying a PowerMac for $50-100 online and outfitting it with Sata (and your choice of large hard drives up to 2TB currently each while the PowerMac can easily hold 4 internal hard drives), a decent reflashed GPU like the 9800 Pro, a cheap USB 2.0 PCI card and a CPU upgrade might run you $800, you'd quickly find you have the makings of a good server that runs Leopard just fine and can run faster hard drives than anything the Mini can handle (e.g. I get over 100MB/sec WRITES and even faster reads with my two 7200 RPM 1.5TB Barracuda drives).

 

Of course, I would agree that Hackintosh could be put together for the same money ($800-900) that would run circles around a $2700 4-core MacPro for many applications a normal home desktop user might want to use and that would of course make a far better investment, but I'm assuming that some people will not WANT to do something Apple claims is illegal (I disagree personally) and thus would want to use actual Apple hardware. You could also get a used G5 for slightly more to start and expand in a similar fashioni and have a faster bus.

 

The point is PPC machines are HARDLY "obsolete". When you consider what really makes a modern PC fly is the ability to run GPUs in 2-3 card SLI modes and Apple refuses to even consider supporting such technology for unfathomable reasons (especially considering OpenCL could really push the use of such cards that much further) and the whole idea of having a somewhat faster primary CPU when the GPU is hopelessly outdated (downright {censored} would be what I would call what the white Macbook and previous generations used) and suddenly all this snobby elitism about how old PPC chips seems well, absurd at best.

 

Having said all that, I would agree Apple is exactly the sort of company to dump/abandon PPC users because it KNOWS most fanatical Mac users will NOT go buy a Windows or Linux powered PC but will cave and buy another Mac at incredibly inflated prices (that is due to having no actual hardware competitors for its OS save a brave startup like Psystar) and thus Apple wins wins and wins some more, increasing their 23+ BILLION in cash reserves to ever soaring heights at your expense. Why support users that bought G5 Quads two and a half years ago when you can FORCE them to buy a new machine from you (or have to either go Hackintosh or dump all their Mac software and buy all new Windows software in order to get away from your platform)??? Yes, I can easily believe Snow Leopard will dump all PPC support, but I personally believe it's the wrong thing to do and all the selfish, self-centered fanatics that have glee in their hearts at the thought are the primary reason (not Apple) that I often think about going back to Windows myself. To be honest, I can't stand Apple Fanatics nor can I stand Linux Elitists. They are smug, self-absorbed people who look down on everyone that is not like them. True, Windows has many such people as well, but there are so many Windows users that they tend to make up more of a real cross-section of real world people whereas Mac and Linux users tend to get much higer percentages of the super smug types. This is the worst platform feature by far of those two.

 

BTW, I do not buy a new Mac to replace my PowerMac server because it would be a waste of money as the new machine couldn't do anything the old could not do for the prescribed use of the computer (namely to drive my whole house audio/visual system and act as a 24/7 web terminal). The current PowerMac does great in that role. I'm typing on it right now running 10.5.7. The desire to run Snow Leopard is not out of need in the present, but based on the idea that 3rd party developers (and Apple themselves) tend to stop supporting the previous operating system within a year of the new one's release. How much more so will this be if all support for PPC is dropped in Snow Leopard? Developers would have to choose between offering Universal binaries for Leopard or offering an optimized build for Snow Leopard (or have to maintain separate builds). This will never fly for most of them. They will simply drop all PPC support and thus the so-called "optimized" version of Leopard (Snow Leopard) will have its biggest feature being to kill off 1/2 of all Macs out there as new software will simply stop supporting ALL PPC machines in short order. Thus, all such machines will be stuck running outdated and outmoded software. This is the very definition of computer obsolescence. It'll also drop the overall Mac market share from 9% to 4.5% in one fell swoop as the software support for PPC is dropped by most parties.

 

If Windows7 turns out to be even remotely comparable to Leopard (or even Tiger) in functionality/capability/efficiency (instead of the total {censored} that is Vista) this might just mean the eventual death knell of the Mac and eventually Apple itself. You cannot survive with 5% market share for long. And since Apple chose to jack up prices (even during a recession no less), the idea that they could quickly recapture that 5% loss in usable machines, let alone surge ahead to where they once were in the early '90s (closer to a 20% market share) is laughable at best. They COULD have gotten that share had they offered machines closer in value to other PC makers (e.g. Dell which is actually still assembled in the USA, unlike Apple which chose to both move their assembly plant to China and RAISE prices AND stop offering $1500-2000 range tower desktops since the start of this century. And yet Dells sell for hundreds even thousands less than Apple desktops). The iPhone and iPod have given Apple cachet and Vista gave Apple a big boost and reprieve. None of those will last forever. Apple should have gone for increased market share by offering more competitive products or even teaming up with Dell in the lower price ranges and mid-range tower markets that they seem to have NO INTEREST in selling models for. I'm sad to say that I fear for the future of the Mac. Right now I vastly prefer the OS X operating system to Windows, but that could easily change over time. Apple should rethink its strategy NOW before it's completely too late. Profitability over market share only works if you have a VERY interested market. I don't see that lasting forever. iPhones and iPods (and the cachet they create) only come around so often.

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Synaesthesia
Synaesthesia
Posted
Posted
Apple has said several times that they won't support PPC.
No they haven't said anything like that

 

That said, Snow Leopard WON'T support PowerPC.

 

@Vonmagnum,

Apple is not 'abandoning' PowerPC users, they will still have Leopard working perfectly. And Snow Leopard is just more optimized, no new features so no big deal.

 

Windows 7 is gonna be the death knell of the Mac/Apple? Never! Apple have nothing to worry about. Apple isn't run by a bunch of idiots, they KNOW how to make money. Apple makes more money out of that 5% than Dell does with 20%! They have about $30 Billion to fall back upon, and the iPod & iPhone cash cow.

 

Marketshare is not the same as profitability.

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cain.
cain.
Posted
Posted

I really don't get why some have to define themselves after the OS they use... Just an info: You do not have to change your friends if you change your OS. And I frankly don't get why I should care what other Apple-users are like - does not change me, does not change my happiness with my system.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Lostgame
Lostgame
Posted
Posted

The only reason I'm bumping this topic is to say:

 

Macgirl, I told you so.

 

That felt so good.

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M0rpheus
M0rpheus
Posted
Posted

Well actually, the kernel runs in 32 bit mode and some of the extensions are universal.

 

But yeah, unless just about ALL the extensions were universal, PowerPC's won't run Snow Leo. They will be able to load the kernel (for now, unless Apple forces 64-bit kernel mode) but that's about it, the OS simply won't boot.

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