Re: Why couldn't POWERPC keep up with intel?
Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2013 10:34 am
I'm kinda sad and disappointed Apple didn't opt for Dec Alphawashu wrote:The 68040 was faster than the horribly designed 603 based PowerMacs, not all powerpc chips. As I said above, the 603 was really slow even for the time, it was a budget low power chip. Then on top of that Apple crippled them further by putting them in really shitty machines that slowed them down even more.dan wrote: so 68040 macs were faster than powerpc?
The 68040 was usably faster than the early 601 machines as well, but that was mainly because of the code emulation needed. With native code a good 601 machine was faster than a good 68040 machine.
For 604 and above, the powerPC was faster.There were, but they were extremely rare. Apple was moving to powerPC so the upgrade chips did too.were there 68060 upgrades?Because:why not stay w/68k then?
a) The 68K was at the end of the line. Apple was too small at the time to keep Motorola interested in continuing to develop it.
b) RISC was "the future". The Alpha was kicking ass and taking names back then, it didn't matter that the rest of the RISC camp were no faster than the good CISC chips.
c) PowerPC offered the closest "drop in" replacement. It could emulate the 68K reasonably well and in some cases could use most of the same hardware, at least poorly. Apple saved craploads on R&D by taking the easiest path they had.