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Forums - Nintendo - Clearing up a major misconception about PowerPC

captain carot on 06 February 2015

Well, OP said Power architecture as a whole is not dated, which is right. So close thread?



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Alby_da_Wolf on 06 February 2015
Tachikoma said:
thread intended to clear up the confusion/misconception around powerpc, buncha people posting their googlesmarts further buried the topic in the sands of obscurity, this isn't how "clearing up" things works guys.


We made a lot of examples and got dragged away with scenarios and alternatives that could have been, but weren't, to help OP show how weak implementations (deliberately, for cost, power consumption or reliability sake, or unavoidably, like in the case of IBM abandoning mainstream models development) doesn't imply a weakness of the architecture itself. But yes, we diverted quite wildly. 



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radha on 06 February 2015
WolfpackN64 said:

I know this is in the Nintendo Discussion, but that's because they still use PowerPC chips in their console.

Nearly everytime a topic handles the internals of the Wii U, some comments talk about the "dated PowerPC architecture". This is complete bollocks. The Wii U chipset is derived from a dated PowerPC chip (Espresso, derived from Broadwell, derived from Gecko, derived from PowerPC 750), that is correct, but the PowerPC Architecture itself is NOT dated.

The PowerPC architecture saw the light of day in 1992 with the current form Power ISA v2.07 released in 2013. For comparison, x86 started in 1978 with the most recent implementation x86-64 or AMD64 being 2003.

There, needed to get that of my chest.

Is dated becuase is not refreshed as often as the x86 is and becuase it has been abandoned by all major PC manufactorers. So is indeed dated.



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captain carot on 06 February 2015

Power architecture never was about PC in terms of any other OS than MacOS at all. At least from no major manufacturer. AFAIK not even OS/2 got ported.
Today Power is something for high performance computing, definitely not dated.

The PPC 750 is another thing though.