Re:Why Apple ditched PowerPC, and what it says about Apple d...
by ido on Sunday June 21, 2020 @01:32AM
(#23590081)
That's exactly when motorola dropped the ball (as the article mentions) - a year before they were still more or less head to head, but once amd & intel started reaching for the 1 ghz barrier they left motorola & ibm behind.
Somehow the various RISC vendors managed to remain competitive for a bit longer at the top end[0] - maybe it was easier to compete at the high workstation/server/supercomputer end than at consumer hardware?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#/media/File:Proc... - x86 only started dominating well into the 2000s.
Re:Why Apple ditched PowerPC, and what it says about Apple d...
by musicale on Sunday June 21, 2020 @05:12PM
(#23595454)
> The G4 Powermac came out in '99
"We are starting to see some great games come back to the Mac, but this is one of the coolest I've ever seen...this is the first time anybody has ever seen it, the first time they've debuted it...Halo is the name of this game, and we're going to see, for the first time: Halo."
-Steve Jobs, MacWorld 1999
So yeah, the G4 was perhaps winning the IPC battle, Intel and AMD were more than making up for it with higher frequencies.