DrunkenBlog

Apple and x86 Questions, Part 5

I'm slowly but surely making it through the rest of the Pentium-switch questions that were sent in, and yes, I know this is taking forever but we'll get through them.

I basically threw them all into a .txt file separated by some line breaks (It's still about 24k in size), and just grab a few in between working on other things, so it's going to take awhile...

John Siracusa mentions that one of the things that drew people to Macs was the elegance of the PowerPC architecture. X86 has become a bit of a kludge over the years and decades, which AMD64 tries to fix a bit. Dave Taylor on the other hand says 'who cares?' as long as your apps run and you can get work done: OS X is what's important and the ISA doesn't matter.

My friend was asked how he now feels about the recent purchase of his G4 PowerBook. He responds (search for "Mon Jun 06 15:24:51 2005"):

"I feel fine. OS X is Unix. It remains Unix no matter what architecture you run it on. All I care about is having a computer that's easy to use and allows me to do my work. A specific architecture or brand was never a requirement for happiness."

I'm curious as to what your feelings regarding this are.

David Mag.

Ah, Mr. Siracusa, whom I know in a peripheral way and chat with from time to time. Now, I'm not going to tell you that he's an anal-rententive freak that makes Steve Jobs look low-key, but I will say there are two kinds of people: Normals and Siracusas, and John Siracusa is at the extreme end of the latter category.

A CPU geek is often associated with someone who is just into CPUs and learns what they can about them, and I could probably be lumped in there, but he is just something altogether different: He gets off on having something with a PowerPC in it more than he gets off on whatever benefits he may derive by using that particular chip.

Now, we all can identify with this in a way. I'm one of those people who, if I have a window that is 50 pixels from the top of the screen, I want it to be 50 pixels from the side of the screen too, otherwise I get bothered, so you can imagine why the Mac OS X Finder and I go round and round (6 years, and remembering window placement is still a crapshoot? wtf). I know people who want certain ingredients in something they're eating, because they swear it makes it better, even if they'd completely fail to tell the difference under a blind taste test.

So, there is nothing wrong with it per se, but the fact Siracusa is a step away from certifiable when it comes to things like this needs to be accounted for, otherwise things can look skewed.

Now, there are also some Siracusa's who have some serious beefs, because they have to program at a very low level and the difference between dealing with the PowerPC ISA and the x86 ISA is a horribly stark contrast for them. They're screwed, but they'll get over it if they are building software for the Mac base, because:

• They don't really have any other choice

• As a software developer, you want Apple to sell more machines so, you know, you have people to sell your software to.

The other side of this that has to be accounted for are the Mac users who have used the PowerPC as a validating bullet point for why they were using Mac hardware, no matter how far behind it is. And yeah, sometimes you really do have to come up with reasons why you're sticking with it, even if for only your own head, especially when you've incorporated it as part of your identity or self-worth, and the PowerPC was latched onto by a lot of these people.

They're generally the ones that were running around spewing "MHz Myth! MHz Myth!" without really knowing the specifics of what was going on. I'm pretty sure a lot of them still think a 1.5 GHz iBook will outrun a 3GHz Pentium 4, and it was absolutely hilarious to watch how confused they were that things like Halo or DOOM 3 wouldnt' run well on the Mac.

I've mentioned these before, becaue they didn't really know what to do with themselves for awhile, but they'll get over it and latch onto something else because they sorta have to. It's just basic psychology, and while I jokingly said they'll become Intel fanboys making fun of those who are using AMD, who knows.

I've said this before, as have others, but while the PowerPC was a dramatically superior architecture it was starting to fail the double-blind taste test. Previously, its lower thermal and wattage footprint allowed Apple to do designs others couldn't while keeping up battery life and such, even if it might have to make a tradeoff in say, speed. You could tell there was a PowerPC inside, because nothing on the x86 side could really get you the performance it had while keeping the battery life and form factor at the levels they were at.

If x86 has a solution with about the same thermal and wattage footprint, to the point where as a user if you aren't told what's in it you can't tell the difference, and the x86 solution has dramatically faster performance... Well, what does it matter if the x86 chip is less 'elegant' when it comes to what you're actually using?

Now, some people do care about these things, I just expect the vast majority of people don't, and certainly the vast majority of the people Apple wants to switch don't.

If someone tells me the coffee in Cup A was created from uber-special beans of some fantastical quality grown on the side of some ancient mountain with organic soil, but it tastes just the same as Cup B which was grown on top of a landfill, or if Cup B actually has better flavor, I'll opt for Cup B and just put a picture of that special mountain up on the wall.

Apple's hardware is going to get more boring in the sense that they have to play by the same thermodynamics as everyone else, but they were just about there anyways, and, you know, when most of your hardware you're peddling can't deal with the big new video codec you're pushing, while 90% of it on the other side of the fence can, something has to give.

A question I can't help but wonder is just how long Apple will continue to support the PowerPC based macs that are out there? I seem to recall the 68k systems were supported for a while after powerpc systems started shipping, but not very long by industry standards. (or maybe my definition of 'industry standards' is skewed by the part of the industry I work in.)

Aside from the impact to the existing userbase, there is the second teir food chain effect the answer to that question also has for the Linux crowd. While this move is pretty much going to KILL what little momentum was starting to build behind ppc64 linux, it does have the interesting side effect of putting some number of realtively cheap ppc64 boxes into the eBay food chain a while after Apple stops supporting the systems with OS/X. (Which I'll admit is hardly a bright point, but as a fan of the ppc64 architecture it's about the only even mildly "not dark" point in this whole situation.)

Anyway, that's a question that I doubt I'll be able to get an answer to, but you might be able to. Cheers,

Chris A.

I think I covered a good chunk of your question in Part Three of this series, but it's also worth pointing out that 'support' can vary wildly from running well to well, it installs. Apple will support the PowerPC systems as long as it makes legal and fiscal sense, although do be aware that 'fiscal sense' doesn't mean you look at how many PowerPC machines are out there that could buy their OS or software upgrades.

It becomes a complex equation where Apple tries to decide whether not supporting the older hardware well can give you the push you need to buy new hardware. It's worth noting this really occurs because Apple's hardcore base exists in a bit of a bubble, otherwise a lot of their artificially-crippling and abandoning of their hardware just wouldn't fly. I.E., if another company made iBooks or portable computers in the same vein that ran OS X, yet Apple was crippling the video card on the iBook via software so it would only do video mirroring to try to 'push' you towards the Powerbook, it would have a real problem on its hands.

Basically, it's an unanswerable question, because only Apple knows the actual variables in the equation or its sum, which means you need to count on the warranty only, which means about three years with a little fudge.

Perhaps I'm paranoid, and you may well be able to get more from it, but with modern Apple machines, you're going to be pushing it. Sure, add in some fudge, but once you cross the warranty line, the parts are so expensive that combined with the labor it'll be a tough call. I'm not talking about a hard drive or RAM or the battery on the motherboard, but rather what happens when the little pump on the liquid cooling system goes or something weird goes on with those uber-precise fans.

Here's something I wonder about. What about the possibilities of "home upgrades" with Intel chips? If say Mini will come with Celeron-type processor, do you think it would be possible to put in a Pentium-type one at home and get a better machine.

IV

I wouldn't count on it, as discounting things like putting a hotter chip into a case that is heavily engineered towards a specific thermal footprint, Apple has been moving heavily towards 'disposable' machines that are very unfriendly towards upgrades, to the point where buying one brings back memories of learning about conspicuous consumption in grade school, and I doubt we'll see it change unless there is some big environmental push for them to do so.

I've been thinking about this and talking to some people in industrial design circles and such, and well, planned obsolence rocks from a corporate point of view but is horrible on the environment, and to make a corporation move away from something that is great from a fiscal point of view would take a lot of pressure.

And yes, all-in-ones or disposable computers are horrible for the environment, simply because there is generally zero need to replace your entire Mac just because one aspect of it is too slow or having problems, but that's generally where we are.

I develop audio filters as a hobby (Not for a living, yet!) and heard Altivec would be good for this. My software runs under Linux and FreeBSD, and was considering a Mac Mini to test and if things go well upgrading. Is this a nail in the coffin of Linux on the PowerPC?

h.t.m.

This is going to be a tough one, as Linux PPC is in for a rough ride even though it hasn't always been smooth. I.E., I can't say how impressed I've been when slapping Ubuntu Linux on an iBook, especially an older one, but the inability to say, use wireless due to Apple's choice of WiFi cards has certainly crimped it.

Linux on PowerPC isn't going to go away, it's just going to become a much more targeted and sequestered community, because the one thing Apple brought to the table here were (relatively) cheap mass-produced PowerPC machines. If you still want to work with the PowerPC for some reason (I.E., it does something you need, or you are writing for PPC chips in the embedded market and it made for a cheap development platform), you'll still have options, they'll just be few and far between and they'll be pretty expensive.

IBM still makes workstations, and probably won't stop making them for awhile. They've poured a ton of money into Linux, and are going to keep doing so because of their high-end servers and workstations. They've been pushing their 'Power Everywhere' initiative, and you never know, something may well come out of that. Some company, somewhere, could decide to throw a PowerPC 970 into a box and make a go of it in the future.

On the Freescale side of the equation, a company named Genesi has been making lower-powered PowerPC boxes that run Linux and MorphOS for quite awhile. They are heavily tied to Freescale, and their machines reflect it, and will probably continue to be so for quite awhile. I know people who have these for playing or because they do custom software for the PowerPC, and they're decent, just underpowered by modern standards, and a bit pricey. Pieter Van den Abeele of Gentoo Mac OS and Gentoo-alt fame has been doing a lot of work with them.

From what I know, because of its relative cheapness, rigging a Mac Mini was becoming a popular way to write software for the PowerPC in embedded markets, or getting into Linux on the PowerPC, and losing that will be a blow.

So, Linux on PowerPC won't be dead by a longshot, because of the higher-end hardware which IBM and others are pushing -- as well as embedded markets -- but as a personal computer user, your biggest challenge in using it will be getting hardware with a PowerPC chip in it that is relatively current and that you can afford.

You also have to realize that not having real access to cheap and plentiful PowerPC hardware is going to take a toll on the magic elves creating and improving the software on the PowerPC side of the equation. Before, they could get into the game relatively cheaply, and stuff like the Mac Mini helped that, and once they were here they had a base of Mac users who could make use of their software if they so chose.

It was already a struggle, but PowerPC support was improving steadily and noticeably. However, with x86 support in various distributions already so far ahead of the PowerPC, I doubt it'll be able to keep up in a real way as some of the new tech in the user space of Linux comes online (akin to Quartz, etc.), or at least the level of optimization you'll see on the x86 side.

I know, I'm way off of your original question, and you'll have to forgive me for indulging myself about Linux on PowerPC. It's sad, because I think Ubuntu on a PowerPC iBook runs like a dream minus the WiFi issue, but those are just the breaks I guess. It's going to be interesting to see what IBM's Power Everywhere initiative spawns, as well as what Freescale is able to do, as right now the PowerPC has been removed from the general personal computing space.

Altivec is cool for what you do, and you might even see some boost, but moving to PowerPC for Linux for what you do -- assuming you want others to make use of it also -- would be a bit of a red herring right now with Opteron or Athlon64 support for Linux being as good as it is, and where those machines will be in the near future compared to the alternatives.