If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch?

An anonymous reader asks: "This question was posted on Ask Slashdot about a week ago: 'If Mac OS X Came to x86, Would You Switch?' This makes me ask why not have Windows run on PowerPC? Windows/PPC would not necessarily have to run on Apple hardware, or at least not exclusively on it. I'm sure their friends at IBM and Motorola would be happy to provide chips to anyone that wanted to make computers to run this new OS. Microsoft could dust off the code from NT4/PPC, add some code from Virtual PC to get Windows/x86 compatibility, and have it up and running in about the same amount of time it would take Apple to get Mac OS X running on common Intel hardware." An additional question comes to mind, however: If Microsoft made this move, how would Intel react?

Comments

Cost?

[Klar]

Personally, if I was going to buy a mac, I would use the mac stuff with it.. I mean you are paying extra for the look and feel of being on a mac. If you are just gunna use windows, why not just buy a PC--if I'm not mistaken they are a fair bit cheaper.

Re:Cost?

[John Harrison]

You aren't answering the question. The question was about PowerPC hardware. This needn't be Mac hardware. IBM has provided open PowerPC hardware architecture specs that anyone is free to implement. There is probably a bad one-button mouse joke to be made here. I will resist.

Of course the question mentions that this question was asked and answered in the past, when IBM produced PowerPC machines that ran WinNT. Notice that there are no such machines (or OS) being produced anymore. Not enough people found the hardware to be an advantage to make it fly.

Re:Cost?

[Ibanez]

Well of course, as mentioned in the question, it wouldn't mean buying a Mac. Don't forget, there are other systems that use the PPC. Actually, did you read anything other than the headline? Half the question was devoted to making sure no one had this *slightly* obvious question.

And of course, having Windows on PPC would probably sell more chips, creating lower prices (of course, this is in theory...:D)

Blake

Re:Cost?

[denobug]

if the volumee is up, the price of CPU will go down. Especially if we are talking about double, triple, or even exponential growth.

Of Course, this won't happend overnight. Many don't see the reason as well. From the control industry's stand point, however, many PC's basic features is here to stay:

There are only a few companies designing industrial strength softwares and many of them are building their foundation on MS's architecture. Reason? Simple, customer wants it. Why does customer want it? Simple, it is easy to maintain (or at least people with less expertise can do some part of the maintainence). It is easier to find some different venders for the WinTel combo and negotiate prices than anything else out there. Now that you have many pieces out there, why re-invent the wheels when you can get a reasonable price licensing other's software?

So why bring PPC in? PPC right now can be more expansive, but I believe it is a much better architecture. It also runs cooler, compare to the 3+GHZ Intel chips. Power consumption is key since not only do you have to pay for electricity, but you also have to pay for backing up those power usage in control environment. The few PC based control system I've seen try to use mobile cpu to achieve the balance of speed, faster development, and power usage. Howver, I believe with adequate R&D PPC can reap more benefit balancing all three aspects. x86 is not designed to conservatively use power in principle. It is designed to save some power(yeah right!) only because it has to. Why does company want a 550W power supply for each PC in the future? This simply don't make any sense to me. My Desktop uses more power than a halogen lamp and it is still allowed by the city ordanance? give me a break. I want my lamp!

Intel seems to see this and decide to walk away from higher GHz for now. But afterall I think PPC has a good chance to prove people it works well for them.

Silly idea it seems. But it CAN have significant impact. You just never know.....

Re:Cost?

[Arker]

First off, I think 'no contest' is an exagerration. There's a premium on the Macs, for sure, but it's really not such a huge one. By the time you add on the stuff that comes standard on the Mac but not on the competition the margin is a lot smaller than it used to be. And that's in the desktop realm - for laptops, Apple actually seems to have the advantage these days.

Secondly, you're completely right that the problem they're facing is one of volume, 'economy of scale.' Apples production is way too small to compete with the x86 world there. But, they've gone more and more to things like PCI and AT disk drives lately, which mitigates that to a large part. Many of their components do come from the commodity hardware world these days, and benefit from that economy of scale. Mostly what's left is the processor. And with IBM using the PPC chips in more products, with Linux working well on them, even the production of PPC chips is starting to come around - it's not just Apple using them, and the volume is growing and shows every sign it will continue to do so. At the same time, the x86 world is stagnating a bit - most folks in the western world that need or want a computer have one, and there's really no rational reason to upgrade - any machine made in the past 5 years is 100 times as powerful as it really needs to be to handle the average users demands anyway.

So I don't think the economy of scale problems, and hence the price problems, are nearly as big right now as they have been in the past, and I think they're getting smaller, not larger.

That said, if they ported Windows to PPC it wouldn't make me switch to windows. Would it make me switch to PPC? I already have a mixed bag, one Intel, one AMD, one PPC. If a Windows port to PPC resulted in increased volume for IBMs production lines, that would result in greater economy of scale and thus lower cost, and increase the odds that the next box I'd buy would be PPC. But I'd sure as hell never put windows on it.

Re:Cost?

[SmittyTheBold]

(Disclaimer: I have no statistics, this is all "common knowledge" and educated guesses. I'm not in the mood to look things up at the moment.)

I think the economy of scale is what works in Apple's favor with laptops. They're a leading manufacturer of laptops, so they have a volume at least on par with any x86 laptop company. When it comes to portables, commoditization is less of a factor. Laptops are mostly "custom" hardware that's specific to a model. As such, especially considering their limited variety of products, they get as much of a benefit of volume as other companies do. In the desktop market, however, there are very distinct advantages to x86 parts.

In addition, the more-efficient nature of the PPC platform has to work in Apple's favor when it comes to things that force other companies to engineer more expensive solutions, such as dissipating excess heat and providing extra battery power.

This is already an option

[compactable]

... if I want to run a crappy system on PPC architecture, I can simply fire up System 7. Windows not needed - Historical Mac software gives me all the crappy I need - peddle that filth elsewhere ...

Intel's reaction

[kbs]

Intel would have to sit there and bear it, since Microsoft has more command of its market than Intel would. If you recall back around '98 Intel had been developing graphics software to encourage people to use more processor power, and Microsoft basically told them to stop since it wasn't Intel's place to write software... Microsoft basically threatened to stop developing for Intel, and since at that time AMD was starting to gain market share, this scared the shit out of them. Suffice it to say, Microsoft is the dominant player in the WinTel relationship.

Re:Intel's reaction

[Branka96]

Yes, Intel is really afraid of Microsoft. That is why they have invested in companies like Be and RedHat.
Of course Intel is also developing software for Linux, like their C/C++ compiler.
And to really show who is their daddy, they develop graphics drivers for Linux.

This is hilarious!

[ravenspear]

I am in disbelief. Was the poster actually serious? Who would give a fuck?

I mean, those that use PPC (mostly Mac and PPC Linux users) use it becasue they don't want to use Windows. What conceivable reason would they have to switch to Windows? Hell, what reason would M$ have to port Windows to a platform where they know that no one will buy there product.

This is just dumb. Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:This is hilarious!

[bob beta]

I mean, those that use PPC (mostly Mac and PPC Linux users) use it becasue they don't want to use Windows.

We're talking like grownups here, i.e. a PPC chip built into some sort of system and a Windows port to run on it. Not platforms jocks flaming each other on *.advocacy newsgroups.

And I suspect a lot of Apple PPC users (and admins of RS/6000 boxes) would be mighty offended at the notion that their choice was essentially an anti-Windows one.

In a word...

[example42]

No. OS X is a great OS and I choose to run it in my PPC hardware (Powerbook). It fits my needs perfectly. I choose to run Windows on my gaming system (AMD CPU) and Linux on my servers. I don't see any advantage to running Windows on PPC hardware. I think the performance gain would be minimal to nonexistant over x86 with Windows, and the initial invest in hardware would be much more costly. I choose my OS based on my needs for that particular system. The platform it runs on is incidental.

Already done. It's called Microsoft Virtual PC.

[postbigbang]

It works. Don't do games on it, and don't run it with low memory. There are a few gotchas, but they're minimal. It's not as slow as you would want to believe, and it occasionally gets bogged down but it's tennable. It's like running on a 900mhz box when run on a ppc32/PowerBookG4. It costs a few bucks, and you still have to buy Norton or McAfee, etc. But it's otherwise as useful and harmless as XP. Oh, except you need to buy an XP license for it, too.

muuuh.

[FrenZon]

I think most Windows users (myself included) don't care what hardware they use, as long as it's fast+cheap and all their apps/games run on it. I doubt that a PPC platform would be much faster/cheaper than x86 (even if you did magically manage to port Windows to it at full efficiency), and if it was, Intel/AMD would change so that it wasn't.

To sum up: I'd switch if there was a point. However there doesn't seem to be too many points.

The reason the OSX on x86 discussion came up is because people want the OS they think they want on the hardware they know they like. Asking a bunch of Linux nerds if they want to run the OS they don't like on the hardware they aren't entirely familiar with isn't going to provoke a huge discussion.

Re:muuuh.

[Vombatus]

Fast, Cheap, Reliable

Pick any two

Why would anyone think this would happen?

[lseltzer]

There was NT for the MIPS, Alpha and PPC, and they all failed miserably in the market. Windows users see no value in running on anything other than the volume-leading processor architecture. There's no value in it.

Re:Why would anyone think this would happen?

[Kenja]

Go look at an NT4 CD. It has MIPS, Alpha and PPC installers on it. In fact, NT4 was first written on MIPS and then ported to x86. There was a big marketing blitz from NEC for their MIPS workstations where they urged people to buy the computer NT4 was developed on.

However, at the end of the day these platforms couldn't run the software people wanted without jumping through hoops like Digitals binary translator. No apps, no interest.

Not possible.

[DAldredge]

There isn't enought PPC production capacity to even supply 20% of the x86 market demand.

Re:Not possible.

[haruchai]

Are you sure? Both IBM and Motorola manufacture Power PC chips - I'm sure they could meet demand.
In any case, the demand won't suddenly jump to equal that of the Wintel market so they'd have time to ramp up.
The fact that the PPC production isn't the equal of x86 doesn't mean that it isn't feasible. How long did it take AMD to gain a foothold. Or the clone manufacturers, back in the early days of the x86 PC?

I Used To Think So ...

[Mad Martigan]

When I was in college (I'm a second-year grad student now) was right about when Apple starting producing the G4s and I thought, Wow, those machines rock. They look nice and they are super powerful. It's too bad I don't like the MacOS. When I got to grad school, I bought a Powerbook laptop and it was the best computer-buying decision I ever made. Once I actually sat down and spent some time with OS X, I realized that I liked it much better than any flavor of Windows. So, no, I wouldn't switch, and I'm glad I spend the time to learn OS X instead.

Why?

[ImTwoSlick]

I'm left to wonder what benefits would prompt anybody to switch to PPC running windows. I know the benefit for users running OSX on x86 would be the increased range of hardware for users to select from, but is there anything special PPC has over x86 that would warrent such a switch?

Virtual PC

[erick99]

I am assuming that if a Mac user needs a Windows application to run on their machine they use something like Virtual PC. Otherwise, I wonder what the point would be of running Windows on a Mac or PowerPC machine when the folks that own those probably have a strong preference for a non-Windows OS.

Re:But why...

[ozzmosis]

Big Endian which makes a huge difference depending on what you're doing. For example most multimedia applications.

Remember Windows NT for Alpha?

[k98sven]

You probably don't.

The biggest thing Windows has going for it is the massive number of existing applications. But a different processor architecture would require porting. But unless the platform catches on, noone is going to port.

So why would anyone switch? This is pretty much the fate of the old Windows-Alpha port. Very few apps got ported (PuTTY is one of the few I know). Besides, most people were using Alphas as server machines, for which the software they needed was already available on the competing Unixes.

So.. no.. I don't think Windows could ever haul itself off the x86 platform. Too many legacy apps which are x86-specific.

Only if the PPC were commoditized

[drinkypoo]

Otherwise the processors are going to cost more than x86 chips and there'll be no point. We don't run windows because we have the superior architecture you know.

analogy

[flacco]

this is like asking if you would like dogshit any better if it were spread on a ritz cracker instead of a graham cracker.

Switch? Not entirely...

[MP3Chuck]

But it would be cool to dual-boot OSX and a WinOS, perhaps for gaming or whatever...

History would probably repeat itself

[Radical Rad]

Microsoft could dust off the code from NT4/PPC

You are obviously aware that they tried to make a go of NT on several other hardware platforms already. In addition to PowerPC there was also MIPS and Alpha. If I remember correctly, MS was dropped by one vendor and the other two were dropped by MS. There just wasn't enough of a demand for NT on workstations to pay for the development even with the cash cow of Windows on x86 PC's. So I guess my question to you is if they failed before what makes you think they could do well now?

Good news/bad news

[Waffle Iron]

The good news:

Windows users would enjoy big a big boost in security because most of the exploits for holes in the OS wouldn't run on the new architecture.

The bad news:

None of their apps or device drivers would run either.

(OK, maybe most of the apps would run under emulation, but that's never going to be particularly fast or trouble-free.)

Why? Nobody did the first time around.

[AJWM]

The NT4 disks came with Windows for x86, MIPS, Alpha, and PPC.

It didn't succeed then, it sure wouldn't now.

OTOH, I wouldn't mind if I could get a commodity PPC platform to run, say, Yellow Dog Linux on. The x86 architecture um, how to put this delicately, leaves something to be desired.

Strange assumptions...

[johansalk]

I'm sure their friends at IBM and Motorola would be happy to provide chips to anyone that wanted to make computers to run this new OS.

You're making it sound like IBM is really eager for someone to ask for their PPC processors. Well, guess what? Apple has been practically begging IBM for enough PPC processors for their computers, and the processors were in such short supply that they had to repeatedly delay critical product launches for many months. It happened with the new G5 Imac, and it happened with the bigger G5s.

Re:Not without Apple

[IntlHarvester]

You have no understanding of Apple's relationship to PowerPC.

Apple originally switched to PowerPC because they thought it was going to become a popular "PC" chip outside of the Mac world. They wanted larger economies of scale than the old 68K line had, and they thought that Windows NT and OS/2 was going to bring that. They were wrong of course, and PPC became mainly an embedded chip.

Larger customer base for PPC => More investment in the architecture => Apple not falling years behind in hardware specs like with the G4.

Besides, if Microsoft and IBM decided to bring out Windows for PowerPC again, there probably is very little Apple can do to stop it.

Remember Windows NT for PPC?

[Senjutsu]

There was a port of Windows NT to the PPC platform, as well of the Alpha. It was such a miserable failure that WinNT Alpha looked like a roaring success by comparisson.

So, no, no one did care when Windows came to the PPC last time, so I doubt they'd give a flying fuck now, either.

Re:No

[Otter]

Mac OS X is 90% of the reason I have PPC.

And the quality and polish of Apple's hardware is the other 10%. The processor architecture is of zero concern, except maybe as it pertains to battery life and heat.

Here's What I See

[MBCook]

OK, I haven't read any other comments yet, and I'd like to moderate this (I just got points) but I just HAVE to weigh in.

The main question is, switching to Windows from what?

If I have a PPC and I have to run Linux, I might switch. I REALLY like Linux, but the fact is that Windows "just works" a little bit more, and while I do most of my gaming on consoles, if the games appeared, I would seriously look at buying a copy. For all our complaining, Windows does have a lot going for it. I could always dual boot anyways. A true copy of Office could come in handy.

If I have a PPC and it's a Mac with OS X... I don't see why ANYONE would. It's got the great design of the Mac and stability and CLI goodness of Unix. And OS X already HAS Office, so that point is moot. The only thing that I could think of would be the games, and Apple could push more on that (better hardware (GFX cards not 6-12 months behind x86) would help). Dual boot, MAYBE.

From Linux, decent chance. From OS X, nope.

That's how I see it.

Re:Obligatory Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't, and that's why I wouldn't use OS X if it came to the x86 either :)

Re:How to put this...

[bob beta]

NT4 never came out on a hardware platform that MacOS would run on.

NT4's PPC port ran on RS/6000 workstations, not plastic cased consumer hardware. I ran it, on a lark, on an RS/6000 Box for a short period, before reinstalling AIX.

It was a cold desolate world out there. I had Windows NT and the default IE 2.0 web browser. I couldn't find a single other program that would run on the box. It isn't like NT4 and Alpha, where DEC developed an emulation layer to run x86 binaries on NT/Alpha. There wasn't a Damned thing, anywhere online for NT/PPC.

Ummm..

[way2trivial]

Sorry

Re:Dual Boot?

[Megane]

The only advantage that I see is the possibility of dual booting. This would solve the age old problem of "not having enough games on the mac".

I think you're missing something. The games still won't run. They're compiled for x86 CPUs.

The problem isn't the operating system, it's the CPU.

From a PPC fan...

[metalligoth]

I run PPC, and let me tell you... If M$ started allowing fat binaries out of .NET for PPC and a significant number of programs started appearing for PPC, and they made a version of Windows that could be used inside OS X much like OS 9 or X11 are, I'd actually give money to the beast for the first time in a long while.

Now for why it won't happen... Companies would stop programming for the Mac. They'd only program for Windows, saying, "well, it runs on Windows for PPC, so get that!", and then the entire Apple platform would die out. Then Microsoft would be a near-total monopoly again (except for Linux being there, of course...) and then they might actually lose in an anti-trust case. Microsoft would then be broken up and slowly die against Linux. Well, slowly, but less slowly than they already are. This situation alone will prevent NT for PPC from ever coming back.

Oh so many people missing the point.

[Yaztromo]

You know, this question really doesn't have anything to do with Apple. It's a hypothetical question based on a processor architecture, and not necessarily Macintosh-based computers. Both IBM and Freescale sell Power PC microprocessors, and technically any motherboard manufacturer can design a board for a PowerPC, and buy the CPUs from either manufacturer, much as how they currently design boards for either Intel or AMD processors.

Why? Well, because the Power PC architecture doesn't have all of the nasty cruft that Intel-based systems have. Like IRQ nastiness that people keep designing around. Or the fact that they boot up in real mode, and need to be switched into protected mode as part of the boot process. Or all of the various BIOS limitations, like the fact you can't address beyond the first 1023 cylinders of a hard drive during IPL. Of the . Or the x86 instruction set and registers.

The cost of this cruft is both cost and power. As cheap as Intel-based hardware is (due to the economies of scale), it could be cheaper if it didn't have to contain hardware and code to work around the many limitations of the architecture. It would also be quite a bit faster than it currently is.

Windows on Power PC would be a boon for users, if either (or both) IBM and Freescale could ramp up production sufficiently, and if every Intel Windows user were willing to give up their current software investments (or if such a Windows system run Intel binaries).

Of course, Windows itself would still suck :).

The things keeping people from making such a move aren't technical -- they're economic and social.

Myself, I'm composing this on a PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X. I have little or no desire to run Windows on any architecture. I doubt if you'd find too many existing Power PC users who wish they could run Windows as their core OS -- it's Windows users who should want to run to run their OS of choice on an affordable Power PC architecture.

Yaz.

Windows' compatibility is not present on PPC

[gotr00t]

If windows did come out for PPC, it would not be able to use the huge library of software avaliable for its x86 counterpart.

I believe that the one solid merit of Windows is its compatibility, just like the customizability of Linux and BSD, and the user interface of Mac. If it was not avaliable, I see no reason to use Windows at all over Mac OS.

It's already x86 (sort of).

[recharged95]

"If Mac OS X Came to x86, Would You Switch?"

Duh, that's why I run FreeBSD.

Seriously, when the KDE is "industrial strength", there would be no need to move OS X. And that should be soon (please?)...

Re:cool...

[totoanihilation]

Most likely because of economies of scale. In the current state of affairs, a PPC board w/ CPU will cost you more than the equivalent x86 system, simply because there are more of them being sold.
That, and it's hard for a manufacturer to get into building some Desktop PPC motherboards when the market is so small. People who want PPC either want it to run MacOSX, in which case they'll get a Mac, or they want to run Linux, in which case they might as well get a Mac or PC. Back in the day, there was the BeOS which ran on PPC hardware as well, but we all know how that ended :(
As for Amiga, well, I haven't heard from them in a while... I wish them the best! We really need a new player here :)

PS: In theory, OSX will run on pretty much any PPC hardware with the proper hacks... It can currently be done using MacOnLinux, but it'd be nice to get around that :) Mind you, it's against the EULA... But that hasn't stopped anyone before ;)

Again, BINARIES?

[GFLPraxis]

Again, did anyone think about binaries? Windows/x86 binaries wouldn't run on Windows/PPC. Now, they could add on an emulation layer, and since the entire OS and API's wouldn't be emulated, it'd be a heckuvalot faster than Virtual PC.

If they could make it fast enough and use the graphics card...fast enough that a 2 GHz G4 can emulate at LEAST a 1 GHz P3, or a dual 2.5 G5 can at least outrun a 3 GHz Pentium 4, and can use the graphics card, it might be worth switching, since you could play most Windows games and run most programs (even ones that use the graphics card).

Additionally, it'd have to be able to dual boot with OS X without a ton of work.

Re:Again, BINARIES?

[agallagh42]

Ah yes, obviously those ports are happening fairly quickly thanks to the HAL. The tricky part is either recompiling all the applications, or providing an emulation layer for backwards compatibility (or both).

Only if PPC were cheaper than x86

[supabeast!]

I buy PPC systems for one reason only: that's what OS X runs on. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay three times for a PPC CPU what an x86 CPU of equivalent speed costs and then run an OS that runs on x86 on it.

Of course, if someone started selling PPC CPUs for less than x86, AND PPC mainboards were not selling for more than comparable x86 mainboards, AND if the commercial software I use were available (We all know that any useful OSS gets ported to everything anyway...), then I might consider it.

In other words, NO.

Re:Ick, no!

[arminw]

...Since you really can't run the current Mac Os X on that G3...

We run the latest version of OSX 10.3.5 on an upgraded (RAM and HD) old purple G3 iMac. We don't do games, graphics or video, but it works great for browsing the web, the kid's homework and as an iTunes server for our home network.

XP on PPC

[Anonymous Coward]

What could possibly be an advantage to doing this?

I've used NT 3.51 on MIPS/ARc, and I must say, it's a lot like using NT 3.51 on a 486. Whoopdedoo. I doubt there would be any difference today with XP on PPC. Other than the vital, unrelenting clueless of a large percentage of Microsoft's userbase. Can you imaging how many store returns, support calls, and other costs would be incurred every time a comsumer bought product X for the PPC and tried to load it on their PC.

And emulation. Fah! Emulation, bintrans, dynamic recompilation. Neat shit. Not a consumer grade item.

There is absolutely no economic advantage to a Microsoft PPC move. If Apple ever starts the long-rumored downward spiral, they may try to bail out with full commoditization. And may have ported the OSX gui to x86 + Darwin waiting in the wings. That is to their advantage.

Evidence that Microsoft would never consider this move. The XBox. For reasons of time and monetary constraint, Microsoft chose to hack together an x86-based gaming console instead of porting to a custom CPU. Likewise with the embedded market. I don't know if anyone thinks XP embedded is worthwhile (esp. with VXworks, Lynx, and QNX to compete with), but Microsoft didn't trouble to port a Windows subset to any other BSP's either.

We already have a test for this question.

[enigmatichmachine]

linux is available in serveral flavors for both ppc and x86. so, the answer is simple, who prefers to run linux on mac hardware over generic x86 boxes? i think the answer is that most people prefer cheap hardware.

Re:How to put this...

[Foolhardy]

Like .NET, IL and the JIT?

.NET apps are compiled to an intermediate language (IL) that is portable across architectures, like Java bytecode. When the program is loaded, the IL is compiled into native code on demand (by the JIT). Currently, executables also contain a pre-compiled version for x86.

I'm not saying by any means that Microsoft is first at this or that their method is perfect: only that MS does in fact have a plan to make it easy to create cross-platform apps where the developers don't have to worry about the target platform much.

Re:But why...

[Hoser McMoose]

It makes a huge difference if your code (or more likely your compiler) was written by an incompetant monkey.

Otherwise it's a total non-issue. Data is loaded by cache lines that are 64 or 128 bytes in size in pretty much all modern processors. If there ever was any difference in performance from big endian vs. little endian (there wasn't except for above-mentioned incompetant-monkey code) then this completely erases it.

Eek - abstract questions!

[Apostata]

Really, this article is the techno-geek equivalent of some guy laying on the roof his car at night, stoned, and wondering if the trees have people in them.

Interesting question, yes. A little 'speculative' though.

non

[butane_bob2003]

running OS X on x86 hardware can benefit you thusly: killer OS, inexpensive hardware.
On the other hand, there is no benefit at all (none, zero) to running any version of Windows on an Apple chip. Windows would be equally as bad running on an expensive G5 as it would on any other chip.
This is like asking "Would people buy a Jaguar designed and built in Detroit even though they remain as expensive as ever?". The answer is no, not many will, and fewer will like it.

No...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have too much x86 Windows apps to run (games). So it would do me no good, unless they rebirthed some of those old apps that DEC had when the Alpha and RISC boxes came out, that could transmorph VAX-based binaries to RISC binaries as they ran, RISC to Alpha, etc.

isn't this vapourware?

[RMH101]

anyone seen anything other than the screenshots?

Re:Obligatory Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

"Let me make this very clear: the market decided that it did not want a multiplatform OS."

No, the market decided that it did not want a multiplatform Windows...

Re:How to put this...

[Antique Geekmeister]

Check the lawsuit history, and do check the memory management code. It's DEC code, baby. Cutler and his merry gang of pirates simply copied it from their own work. Just because someone in the cubicle next to you is merrily producing code and submitting it at meetings doesn't mean it's not stolen. You need to actually read the coede.

Cost, Performance, why buy a Mac?

[argent]

By the time you add on the stuff that comes standard on the Mac but not on the competition the margin is a lot smaller than it used to be.

IF and ONLY IF you want precisely that set of "stuff". I don't want a built-in monitor on my desktop Mac, and I don't want a huge dual-capable tower with multiple cooling zones either. I already have a better monitor than Apple ships on the eMac or most of the G4 iMacs, and I can't afford a flat panel.

So to buy a new Mac to replace my Beige G3 (the last Mac Apple made that had the kind of tradeoffs I'm looking for) I would have to pay a huge premium for "stuff" I don't want.

for laptops, Apple actually seems to have the advantage these days

I can get a new 15" 1024x768 Windows laptop for under $1000. I can get one with a 15" screen that can display 1280x1024 for the same price as a 14" iBook with a 1024x768 screen. If you look at the 15" Powerbook I can get an IBM Thinkpad with the best keyboard on the market that'll display 1400x1050.

Aside: DAMN, I wish Apple would do another joint venture with IBM and produce a Thinkpad that ran Mac OS X. The Thinkpad might look like a Volvo next to the Powerbook's Delorean lines, but it's a hell of a lot nicer piece of hardware to actually use.

The advantage to Apple, and what keeps me using my upgraded Beige G3 (G4/466 + Radeon 7000) instead of the 1.7 GHz P4 Intel box I "downgraded" from (and that cost less than this pre-iMac Mac and its upgrades) is the OS. I can't imagine why anyone would want to run Windows on anything but an x86: the whole point to Windows is the applications, and even the best just-in-time recompilers aren't going to make anything but a real x86 cost-effective.

Trust me on this, I've still got an ARC-console Alpha in the lab at work. DEC's recompilation technology was insanely great, and the Alpha is a wonderful target for recompilation because of its low overhead instruction set and massive register bank, and it wasn't enough to make an Alpha run x86 code competitively.

I can't imagine buying a PPC-based machine to run a Windows desktop (the XboX 2 is a different story, of course, again because of the applications). Mac OS X makes the price premium (the very real premium) worth it, but spending more to run Windows slower? I don't think so.

If Windows came to Itanium, would you switch?

[argent]

Sorry, I mean "Windows has come to Itanium, who's switched"?

Think about it. Intel has spent YEARS pushing the Itanium architecture harder than anyone could possibly afford to spend pushing PPC. HP's Itanium boxes are finally getting to the point where the idea of them taking over from Alpha and Precision Architecture on UNIX servers isn't actually insane. How much impact are they making on the desktop, after all those years of aggressive promotion?

They've been so unsuccessful even getting people to think seriously about it that AMD's been able to steal a march on intel with a 64-bit extension to the x86 architecture.

Windows and the x86 are siamese twins. The only way to get people to switch from the x86 is if you can get an OS, chip, and emulation architecture that lets you run x86 code faster than the real x86, cheaper than the real x86, and cooler than the real x86... and if you do that, you'll sell it as a new implementation of the x86, as Intel, AMD, and everyone else who's built an x86 on a RISC/VLIW core has already done.

No need here

[mwood]

I already have Linux on PPC if I want it, so why would I want to downgrade to MS Windows? It's the *hardware* that offers little choice in PPC-land: every PPC motherboard comes with a Macintosh wrapped around it.

The problem with this idea is that the people who are interested in Thinking Outside the Intel Box are also, by and large, the people who are interested in thinking outside of the Microsoft box. And they already have a choice of solutions. One more is no big deal.

Microsoft would also have to overcome the ill will they generated for themselves with their last foray into PPC territory, which ended with many customers left twisting slowly in the wind. How long will we be supported *this* time, will be the question of the hour.

Re:Obligatory Quote

[Lumpy]

mostly because the motherboards were 5X the price of an intel motherboard and the processor was 4X the price of an intel chip.

nobody will switch for that mich of a price increase.

get me $98.00 motherboards and $100.00 processors and I'll give it a go.

but right now PPC and Alpha motherboards are insanely priced and you have to get specalty shops to sell you the processors at a premium.

My point of view:

[default luser]

Ten years ago, the PowerPC was fresh, and injected some much-needed innovation into a market dominated by old, CISC designs both at the high-end (VAX, etc) and the low-end (x86, 68000).

Unfortunately, the result is the PowerPC platform today has absolutely no inherent advantages. Nearly every modern processor available for the desktop has integrated optimized pipelines and superscalar execution units, plus a whole slew of other advanced features designed to streamline execution flow.

PowerPC, in that same timeframe, has also borrowed many features from the market, and is now much changed from when the first cores were released. But this is not an attempt to revolutionize, so much as it is an attempt to keep pace and stay competitive.

The end result: you have a whole range of chip selections to choose from today, and they're quite varied in what they offer. The PowerPC 970FX stays strictly in the midrange: it has competitive but not leading performance, good multi-CPU scalability, and has a combination of slightly lower power usage and on-the-fly frequency and voltage adjustments.

The thing is, you can find the same features in x86 processors, they're just spread out differently. You can typically get more performance for your dollar from chips from Intel or AMD. AMD has also seen similar improvements in power consumption in the move to 90nm as IBM has seen for the 970FX, so there's more than one competitor offer a good balance of power and performance. The Opteron also offers the most efficient multi-processor bus subsystem ever to grace a low-end server, so there's definitely still competition there. Finally, both Intel and AMD offer chips with on-the-fly voltage and frequency scaling, although it's still not an easy task to find a desktop board for the Pentium M (that will change soon).

So basically, with no performance advantage, Windows on PowerPC would flounder...and hey, it did flounder, way back in the NT 4 days. Funny that, the RISCy Pentium Pro was the final nail in the NT 4 PowerPC's coffin.

Not preloaded?

[Sloppy]

You have to understand: porting Windows isn't enough. It has to come preloaded on the machine or no one is going to use it. Would anyone even run Windows on x86 if it didn't come with the box for "free"?

Right now, the only PPC machines shipping in serious quantities are from Apple, and they already have a better OS, so why would they preload Windows? It just doesn't make sense.

So what PPC machines are there that would/could come with Windows preloaded? No big producers that I can think of, just fringe stuff like AmigaOne, etc.

Re:Obligatory Quote

[Yakko]

The Alpha I ran NT4 on is the fastest I've seen Windows go. Ever. I forget how fast it was clock-wise, but it was probably 500MHz or so.

Sad that it'll be the fastest I'll ever see Windows go, possibly for a few decades. Not even the quad Xeon CPUs nor the Itanium IIs we have here are as fast as the Alpha was (in perception, not clock speed). I mean, I'd login and *BAM* the desktop was right there, ready to use. Dialogs and windows were displayed instantly in response to my input.

This Alpha dated from 1997. The best x86 boxes I've used still are dog-slow perception-wise as a result.