Reply to post: Re: and the little one said "roll over"

Re: and the little one said "roll over"

@James O'Shea,

After the Motorola 68xxx, when Apple went with the PowerPC, it was the AIM alliance. A was for Apple, I was for IBM and M was more Motorola. IBM played a huge role in the PowerPC architecture since it was based upon the POWER instruction set, but it is not like Motorola did nothing. Motorola did have a better AltiVec/Velocity Engine than what IBM had. Even when Apple left Motorola for the G5 to replace the G4 on the desktop side, what IBM put in the G5 wasn't as good. Motorola had years of perfecting it and IBM had an older design even though both shared the same ISA for it. The design was just better from Motorola and it was not until more recently that VMX (what IBM calls it) has been added officially into the PowerPC ISA. So now all PowerPC designs have AltiVec/Velocity Engine/VMX and IBM has improved upon it.

Apple used Motorola as they had experience and Apple were the ones that invited them to the party with IBM. IBM approached Apple, which in turn invited Motorola. It technically was a win for all three parties. Apple got a new processor out of it. Motorola got a new processor design for little investment and got to keep Apple as a customer. IBM had another source for processors if need be gave their architecture much more exposure. It led to the G5/PowerPC 970 which was based on the POWER4 which the PPE portion of the Cell processor as well as the triple cores in the XBOX 360.

Did Apple have a choice to leave the PowerPC? Motorola was not making much progress in faster processors; so Apple was over-clocking them. IBM couldn't get the power consumption down on the G5/970 and couldn't get to 3GHz like Steve Jobs promised. So Apple was stuck. Motorola was more interested in the embedded market anyway as that is where they were making most of their money, not selling processors to Apple. IBM wasn't making a ton either on the G5/970. So investing heavily in it was not a top priority nor new manufacturing techniques to control the heat and power requirements. If Apple stayed with Motorola for the laptop processors, the G4 was going to be about the same speed a few years later and if they stayed with IBM for the desktop processors, then maybe get to 3GHz a few years later as well. Apple was stuck and Intel already had a team dedicated to trying to get Apple to switch. So Apple did what they had too.

Look at the PowerPC processors from Freescale today. The e6500 is a rather new processor and they added AltiVec back into the design and at least they now have quad cores with hyper-threading and virtualization support. It is designed for the embedded market and for host processors, they are still selling the 74xx line but they at least have a dual-core option now and you can get up to 1.8GHz. The G4 was the 74xx line which they call the cores e600 these days. So where would Apple be today, maybe over-clocking a 7448 from 1.8GHz to 2GHz and having dual cores?