P.A. Semi PA6T PowerPC

Re:P.A. Semi PA6T PowerPC by aidenn0 on Monday June 06, 2022 @12:28AM (#31637246)

Had Apple adopted a chip from PA Semi, PA Semi could not have been acquihired for the same price for certain, which could have significantly been worse for the Apple ARM chips. In hindsight it's hard to see that it could have worked out better for Apple in the long term, but being passed over by Apple was bad news for PASemi.

The PA6T was absurdly better perf/watt than what Freescale was offering at the time, and IBM had already signaled it was was no longer interested in making any Power chip that wasn't designed specifically for its own mainframes.

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Re:P.A. Semi PA6T PowerPC by lproven on Monday June 06, 2022 @08:10AM (#31639447)

Kinda sorta.

IBM made POWER for its own RISC workstations and servers: originally the RT/PC, later RS/6000, now IBM p Series.

Not mainframes, which have a different CPU architecture altogether.

Part of Apple's insight was that laptops were at that time (i.e. 2006-2008) becoming more important than desktops. It had G5 desktops but only G4 laptops.

IBM said it wasn't going to be doing any laptop chips, and that was a factor pushing Apple away from PowerPC. PA Semi could have been an alternative path, though.

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