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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?
"You can't polish a turd"
No
Oh, you're serious.
Sorry!
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Mac OS X is 90% of the reason I have PPC.
If Mac OS X was on x86 I'd have a x86.
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.
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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.
Once more, people are overlooking an oft ignored market base:
Masochists.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
would you root for them?
Ok, so in 1996, NT4 came out on x86, which was the first step that Microsoft really took into making Windows a real OS.
It ran on PPC, Intel, Alpha and MIPS. That's a lot of architectures. Now, think about it: One of the things about Microsoft is, generally speaking, they have no soul. If they make money selling a product, they'll sell it. Now, that's not to say they won't STOP selling any product that's not making money (*cough*XBOX*cough*) just to drag their competition to the ground, but they also won't turn down cash for ideological reasons.
The fact that when Windows 2000 came out reflects that no one really used NT 4 on anything other than Intel hardware. Now, this might be because the hardware developers never really were 100% behind MS, or it might be because someone that was shelling out cash for an Alpha or a MIPS workstation (but I do remember there being a drop-in MIPS chip that would work in a socket.... 5? Pentium board?) wanted a better OS, or any other reason.
The fact is, you can say that PPC might be a faster processor platform today, with a higher bus speed and better performance per clock, but its close. Very close. I don't think MS would be able to polish a PPC version of Windows as much as they have the Intel version, meaning you might take a relative performance penalty... and there isn't a price advantage in PPC over x86.
So yeah, the previous failure, combined with the pitfalls of a new version listed above make a pretty strong case for "no."
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.
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I'm still waiting for Windows on x86 to have full efficiency.
If Microsoft made this move, how would Intel react?
They would panic, of course ! The whole x86 architecture is ugly as hell, and the IBM PC architecture even more so, so low level programmers would propably open a bottle or two and party if we could ditch our x86's for PPC's :-)
The 8086/8088 (to which even the Pentium 4 tries to be backwards compatible with to some degree) was a hack at Intel to get a 16 bit processor to market fast and was meant to have a very short lifespan. Intel was developing a way better processor then (can't remember its number, could anyone fill it in ?). So they took the Z80 processor and extended it. You see the relation even today in the register namings.
I wasn't aware how much the x86 really sucks until I began programming the Motorolla M68000 in the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis as a hobby a few weeks ago. That processor is about as old as the 8086/8088 but has so many cool and useful features that the x86's doesn't have even today (like the eight address registers and the postincrement/predecrement features which make it trivial to set up eight stacks at once, just to name two features).
And then IBM came along. They wanted to get a "cheap" computer to market fast, and used Intels 8086/8088. And like the processor, the whole IBM PC was meant to have a short lifespan.
Unfortunately the PC became a success, and so its lifespan had to be expanded artificially and backward compability had to be put in. This is true for the Intel processors as well as the whole PC architecture. As time passed by more and more things were added without really fixing the underlying problems.
I think computers could be cheaper and more powerful if we'd had a better mainstream processor and computer architecture, one that was meant to live long and thus was better designed. But this is just a dream, I'm afraid...
You can't polish a turd
Oh yes you can! See?
And I remember on the old Ripley's show (circa 80's) a farmer that made jewelry out of chicken droppings.
R(k)
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
Apple has regular builds of it's code OS, Darwin, on both Intel and PPC hardware. This is available to anyone here.
It's been said that Apple still build all of their apps on Intel-based Darwin, therefore keeping an eye on portability, while giving them a chance to see where optimisation could break other platforms.
Apple had to change processor in the past and wants to keep it's options open, this time around. Besides, don't forget Mac OS X is basically a souped-up OpenStep, wich ran on both 68K, PPC and Intel hardware. (Oh yeah... Sun hardware too for a while).
I can't say that either of those adjectives would be my first choice for describing XP.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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 at present is mostly based on the 32-bit Intel architecture. Microsoft did its worst dirty tricks in the last dying days of the segmented 16-bit architecture, using DOS dominance to get market share for its 32-bit attempt. It's going to have to chose between AMD-64 and Intel-64 anyway, or support both, and binary application developers will need to make the same choice, so I guess the submitter would argue that PPC-64 (which has been around longer) is a viable option. However, there's a big movement away from software that's tied down to one platform or another, which is good for Linux, Java, and all the other OS, hardware and software vendors, programmers, and users.
The limited adoption and big troubles implementing Wine suggests to me that there would be little interest in a Microsoft port of Windows to yet another architecture. Windows 95 was probably the most-memorable MS-Windows version ever, and yet Microsoft has had to fragment even that identity to keep up its sales, starting with that crazy desktop in XP. The claim that Windows has excellent backward compatibility is bogus, too; for instance, the copy of TeraTerm that I carry around on a floppy has never worked on any NT2k or later system I've touched, and the default installation of Microsoft Word can't read files created by any version of Microsoft Works. I could contiue this rant...
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.
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Ever heard of the H.A.L.? Not the computer from the movie "2001", but the Hardware Abstraction Layer. It's what let NT run on x86, PPC, and MIPS. The HAL is still there in XP and W2K3, but they only have the x86 version available these days. If there was an economic reason to bring Windows to PPC, it would be fairly trivial to do so...
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Okay, get off the OS idealogy wagon for a second, and entirely off which hardware is better. Now start thinking about barrier to entry and business models.
Name the OSes that run on x86. Now name the OSes that run on PPC.
Any low level geek can name three, and lots of computer users these days can name three as well, and even more can name two, even if they have contempt for it, be it for reasons they don't understand.
1) Windows
2) Mac OS
3) Linux
Now linux is intimidating for the average user. Most people won't bother to install it. It runs on both, but the cost to entry is too high for the average user. It costs no money, but way too much time.
Now look at the remaining two. One only runs x86, one only runs PPC. For 90% of the populace, the only choice is windows on x86. Most people don't think they have a choice. I'm dealing with more and more people that have problems with computers and bring them to me to fix. I have a way of making windows a little more secure, but that's only because I know and use features and free software which most people don't even know exist. Most require a complete wipe and reinstall.
Now think about a hardware switch to PPC. Intel dies but Dell and the others adapt over 5-10 years. Windows chugs along.
Then there are people like me continuing to reinstall windows in that time.
"Hey, yanno this is the third time you sent this to me. Maybe you should think about another OS. I got a copy of Mac OS X here if you'd like to try it. In my professional opinion its more secure and will save you money and time." No need to buy any new hardware"
And maybe this action won't kill microsoft over night, but it will erode markets share, and microsoft cannot abide eroding market share of any amount.
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I remember back in '96-'97 timeframe hearing from a number of Sun vendors about experiments with NT on Ultrasparc, but could never get a demo (and we had Sun workstation vendors falling all over us to give us hardware at the time).
:-)
That's because Sun played Microsoft for a bunch of fools. Microsoft realized that Sparc was *the* platform to support at the time. As a result, they were falling over themselves when Sun offered to sign an exclusive contract to develop NT for the UltraSparc.
After the papers were signed, McNealy laughed as he happily sat on the port of NT and used his newfound legal authority to prevent Microsoft from bringing it. That's why there was a port for MIPS, Alpha, and PPC, but no port for Sparc.
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Microsoft has a minimalist port of Windows right now for the G5 Mac as a development environment for the new X Box. This is because IBM and Microsoft are developing a processor for the new XBox based on the POWER architecture which will be similar to the G5 used in the 64-bit Macs.