Clearing up a major misconception about PowerPC

[Alby_da_Wolf]

captain carot said:

@Silvergunner:
At that time AMD had low power and they had had the better CPU's for several years right until Core. Intel likely paid. Like they paid shops to keep the amount of AMD systems low and likely paid manufacturers.

As for the low clock G5, they wheren't more hot than other CPU's. And no, it was not promised. It's something you make contracts about. And if one brakes that he usually has to pay.

Xenon did not need more power than comparable CPU's. And the ROD was basically an issue with leadfree solder. The hotter part was the GPU though, which is why the heatpipe construction and other measures where taken. Especially with the GPU being under the discdrive and having a flat cooler. Cell is another story, having one PPE and the SPE's.

Apples Mac line was to small to make IBM money for tons of CPU versions. That is a plain fact. They where a minor customer demanding very much.

@curl-6: Espresso likely has no integer SIMD. If there really where no changes made it can do paired single floating point and that's it.

There's a small possibilty for minor improvements, basically because it could fit in for a shrinked triple core PPC with eD-RAM cache. The eD-RAM needs much less space than SRAM cache of the same size.

But as far as we know there's just the basic design IBM made for Gekko 14 years ago with much more cache.

So, no integer SIMD, very limited FP-SIMD, a dated FPU design. I still would be fine with that if Nintendo went for a 1.6GHz quadcore. Still would've been a very small, relatively cool CPU then.

 

Edit: AMD had top CPU's for years. And the low power embedded versions still are good. But they fell behind Intels performance and high end CPU's years ago. And Intel can spend 10 times the money for R&D.

Basically PowerPC was initially far beyond x86 in performance per Watt, but its implementations aimed at desktop and portable PC markets gradually fell behind because IBM lost interest in developing those versions.
While the choice of cheap and not very powerful versions of AMD APUs and old PowerPC versions by Sony, MS and Nintendo basically depends on their needs about component costs and power consumption, and, in Ninty case, on a strategy that accepts to get just the minimum computing power needed, with the added benefit of Wii BC for free, while focusing on new features, an improved old PPC just offered all Ninty needed at the minimum possible cost, with low power consumption and possibly high reliability and low SW development costs too.
This tells us that OP is right, because these examples of PPC CPUs aren't proof of any failure or shortcoming in the POWER architecture itself, but maybe just in IBM marketing, as while I don't agree with you about Apple being a MINOR customer, I agree with you that it was so demanding and it wanted its total purchases divided in so many different versions and speeds to make profit margins for IBM very low despite good total sales numbers (this is where console makers are customers radically different), but I agree with silvergunner too when he says that ditching Apple was a marketing mistake anyway.