If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch? 906
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?
Obligatory Quote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:3, Funny)
Wrong! (Score:5, Funny)
You can't polish a turd
Oh yes you can! [coprolites.com] See? [artisticjewelry.net]
And I remember on the old Ripley's show (circa 80's) a farmer that made jewelry out of chicken droppings.
Re:Wrong! (Score:5, Funny)
Come back in a couple million years and we'll be ready for it. 8^)
Ummm.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:5, Informative)
NT Runs on G5 Mac Hardware Now (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NT Runs on G5 Mac Hardware Now (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:5, Interesting)
NT was developed on the Intel i960, a RISC processor. Intel never went anywhere with it, tho' the i860 is still used (for example, for RIP in printers). One of the design goals was to be platform independent, hence the HAL. NT shipped on x86, Alpha, PPC and MIPS. There was also a SPARC port that never made it into commercial distribution.
The problem was that MIPS and PPC, at the time, were in the middle as far as performance went. People who wanted to run NT for ordinary desktop workstations bought x86, because it was cheap. People who wanted to run NT for CPU-intensive apps (CAD, FEA, CFD, etc) bought Alphas. There was simply no demand for people who needed a little less power than Alpha at a price higher than x86, so Microsoft stopped selling those editions.
Let me make this very clear: the market decided that it did not want a multiplatform OS.
There's no technical reason that MS couldn't release a version of NT on PPC. You might say that there's a case to do that now that Alpha is history. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all if MS continues to do builds of NT on PPC just to maintain the ability to do so (a common practice in large scale projects is to build on another platform that you don't ship on, just to keep the codebase clean). But, the fact is, the price/performance of PPC versus x86 simply means that there'd be no advantage to running NT on PPC, and all the disadvantage of less ISV support.
So in conclusion, people would switch if a) PPC had as big a performance gap over present day x86 as Alpha did over x86 back in the day and b) there was some ISV support for it.
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years ago, we had a spare DEC Alpha, and decided to run a data warehouse on it. We put Windows NT and Microsoft SQL Server 6.5, an assload of RAM, and two full shelves of fancy 10,000-RPM disks, with a catastrophically-expensive RAID controller.
You'd think that performance would be pretty snappy.
Maybe it was just the talents of the administrators (SQL 6.5 had a lot of stuff that you could tweak), but we could never get the performance of this seven-foot-tall behemoth to particularly exceed that a standalone i386 server.
But it did have this cool picture of cowboys that came up when you booted it. Which we did a LOT.
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:5, Informative)
I run that same box as a dual-boot machine, running the beta 3 release of Windows 2000/alpha (yep, they released Windows 2000 beta for the Alpha, but killed the project right before the final release) and Linux. For a while, the Win2k/alpha box was my main desktop machine. I never had a problem running any i386 apps, from Office to Netris, on the Alpha since Win2k/alpha had fx!32 integrated into the system. (you'll recall that fx!32 was DEC's binary translator-cum-recompiler, which was a really ingenious little tool to recompile i386 binaries into native Alpha code).
My MIPS Magnum, with its little R4000PC and 128 megs of RAM, also runs NT 4.0 on occasion, although it spends most of its time in NetBSD. The MIPS Magnum was in fact based on the Jazz architecture, which Microsoft developed in-house specifically for writing NT. As mentioned, MS wrote NT for MIPS on this Jazz platform, and later ported it to i386, PowerPC, and Alpha. SUN and Intergraph also wrote a proof-of-concept port of NT to Sparc hardware, but that port was never released publicly.
The MIPS Magnum/Jazz was not a bad hardware architecture for the time, and impressive if only because it is the only hardware platform I'm aware of which Microsoft designed.
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:5, Funny)
Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why Windows XP works so well is because it runs on such a wide array of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding XP to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the PPC world, where a machine could be using one of dozens of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Mac OS developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. Windows developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of Windows that ran on PPC hardware ran on a tiny subset of the available PPC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with Windows, you were SOL.
That little fantasy you all have of buying "Windows for PPC", running it on some store-bought shitbox you purchased from the Apple store, and having it work as well as an x86 runs Windows XP today will NEVER come to pass. Apple has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.
Do you think Gates could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PPC capable of running OS X today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Microsoft uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of Windows XP for PPC would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on
~DarkEdgeX
Re:Again, BINARIES? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:4, Funny)
How to put this... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How to put this... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How to put this... (Score:3, Interesting)
This was on MOSR a while back I believe.
Re:How to put this... (Score:5, Informative)
You have to also remember that the Alpha, MIPS and PPC platforms were aimed at a much different market than the Intel boxes. The Pentiums of the day just weren't up to snuff (this started to change once the PII started the MHZ escalation from 300-500mhz), and things like the Integraph TDZ series hit the market.
But you were still talking $10K-$20K graphics workstations.
Re:How to put this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's my question: Would it be possible to run NT/PPC on PowerMac hardware through a MOL like virtualization layer? I don't know how useful this would be, but it might be fun. (Actually, I can think of a couple of uses for it, like recompiling existing Win32/x86 apps to Win32/PPC and running them on the Mac, albeit in an NT virtual machine. It would, however, run at native CPU speed.)
Re:How to put this... (Score:5, Informative)
You are full of shit.
Cutler and a number of members of the original NT base team were deeply involved in VMS: true.
Code was stolen, appropriated, or otherwise taken from DEC in any way: utterly false.
An out of court settlement between DEC and Microsoft: fantasy.
How do I know this? I personally witnessed the original NT kernel code being written and checked in to the source tree.
At best, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
At worst,
Re:How to put this... (Score:5, Informative)
There are a couple of errors in this. First of all, Cutler was never involved with the Alpha port of VMS. He was involved with initial development of VMS on the original VAX platform, but was working on Micah/Prism project before the Alpha era started.
Micah/Prism (one was the OS, the other was the hardware - I never can remember which was which) was a new OS/hardware combo that was intended to replace VAX/VMS. Eventually Micah/Prism was axed in favor of persuing VMS on Alpha/AXP. This move upset Cutler enough that it made him easy pickings to be recruited by Microsoft to head the development of OS/2 NT, the intended replacement of OS/2 which went on to become Windows NT.
It is the Micah/Prism code (plus overall aspects of its design), not VMS, that Cutler is alleged to have lifted for use in NT, although no one has ever admitted to this in any official capacity.
Since the OS for the Micah/Prism project was a from-scratch rewrite (borrowing a small number of internal design elements from its VMS ancestor) was still in its early stages when it was killed, still very immature and flawed. Had the VMS kernel formed the basis for NT, Microsoft would have had a robust, secure, and scalable server OS a decade ago, instead of being about 3/4 of the way there only now.
As DIGITAL splashed on its OpenVMS website for a few hours back in the late 90's (before being quietly yanked by management), "OpenVMS 7.0 is today what Microsoft wants NT 8.0 to be."
Re:How to put this... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't really know where you get your information from, but a whole lot of it is simply incorrect.
"Windows NT" was originally a new design for OS/2, which Microsoft codenamed "NT" for "New Technology". When Microsoft dropped out of the OS/2 development effort, they went it on their own under their existing Windows brand, hence "Windows NT".
Usage of "NT" in the product name proved a bit problematic from the start, because "NT" was a registered trademark of Northern Telecom (now Nortel). Which is why every box of Windows NT sold has a disclaimer on the box stating that fact.
The dropping of the "NT" moniker was more of a marketing decision than anything else (I don't know if they were paying Nortel for the right to use "NT" or not, although this also could have been a factor).
NT was designed from the start to be a cross-platform operating system. Microsoft collected partners to handle various ports (much or the PPC port was actually written by IBM). At the time it was being released, the belief was that Intel had hit a ceiling, and that everyone was going to make a big move over to RISC-based architectures. Microsoft wanted to hedge their bets and be ready in the event the Intel-based system market crashed. Of course, it didn't, and the non-Intel NT's withered away.
Of course, it didn't help that the people who actually owned PPC, Alpha, and MIPS-based systems already had much better operating systems (AIX, OpenVMS, Irix, etc.) with a large number of available applications, whereas NT on these platforms had next to no available software, and was a poor and unproven OS (it took years for NT to gain any significant traction even on Intel systems).
It should be noted that OS/2 on the Power PC suffered a similar fate. IBM didn't have the cajones to push CHAP PPC systems, and only ever released OS/2 for PPC to a few selected customers they had a contractual obligation to release it to. They talked a big game about pushing Power PC systems on the desktop, but in the end made no effort to do so.
Yaz.
NT is not "New Technology" (Score:4, Interesting)
The moniker "New Technology" was retrofitted onto Windows NT long after the product had been shipped. Originally the code was developped on the Intel i860 CPU, which was called N10 (N-Ten). The "NT" derived from this CPU. Windows 2000 says it is being "build on NT technology", which is utter nonsense, if you look at it as "New Technology technology".
The same goes with Windows CE, with CE standing for nothing. Some Microsoft guys just thought it sounded cool.
Re:How to put this... (Score:4, Insightful)
.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:How to put this... (Score:4, Interesting)
This I can vouch for. I worked for a company for a short time that had a dual processor Motorola StarMax running NT4.0 as some kind of server that was semi-public, and they were using the PPC architecture because it severely reduced the utility of the box to anyone who would break into it.
I would imagine that the only Mac that could run it natively would be the PowerPC 4400, which was based on the same architecture as all of the cloned Macintoshes.
Re:How to put this... (Score:4, Informative)
1) the bondi blue iMac was *MOSTLY* based on CHRP, it had a few changes that made it only run Mac OS. it also had a lot in common with the PowerBook G3 of the era (Wallstreet)
2) the platform that CHRP morphed into wasn't PPCP, but PReP for for PowerPC Refernce Platform. you can still find hardware based on that to this day - see Amiga.
there were also some mac clones that had a little bit of CHRP or PReP in there heritage (they had RS-232 serial ports and PS/2 ports as well as ADB!) but as far as i know they still only ran the MacOS.
Cost? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
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? Sim
Re:Cost? (Score:4, Informative)
Mac fans try to talk about the "great" hardware you get with a Mac, however if you compare a $1,500 iMac G5 vs a $1,500 AlienWare box, there is no contest. The AlienWare box gives you far better hardware that out performs a Mac hands down. Note: I an not talking about the OS, just what you get hardware-wise for your money. Apple, just cannot compete with the x86 market on hardware because of the massive x86 volume.
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Cost, Performance, why buy a Mac? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry!
Re:HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! (Score:5, Funny)
"Oh, wait you're serious. Let me laugh even harder."
(--Bender)
No (Score:5, Interesting)
If Mac OS X was on x86 I'd have a x86.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:No (Score:4, Funny)
No, I coded up a stack of PPC assembly on my mac last weekend, and damn, it felt good to have all those extra registers and nice, simple instructions.
YLFIIntel's reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
In a word... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn'r buy anything... (Score:3, Interesting)
muuuh. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Funny)
Why would anyone think this would happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why would anyone think this would happen? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why would anyone think this would happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why would anyone think this would happen? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, NT was first written for the (nonexistant) i910 processor
MIPS was the first port, largely because of the lack of delivery of the i910 processor.
Re:Why would anyone think this would happen? (Score:5, Interesting)
Although, looking at this page [winnetmag.com], I may be slightly mistaken..
Re:Why would anyone think this would happen? (Score:3, Interesting)
Because Slashdot isn't a part of the real world. It's a collection of tech fanatics who don't understand business at all. Here's what Intel would do if Windows (like MS is really going to spend R&D dollars on this... I've got some ocean front property in Idaho for sale exclusievly for Slashdotters) came out for PPC (IBM) procs: yawn and roll over before going back to sleep.
Re:Why would anyone think this would happen? (Score:3, Informative)
Because Slashdot isn't a part of the real world. It's a collection of tech fanatics who don't understand business at all.
Right, that's why just about every post in this discussion is wondering what the hell kind of crack the story submitter was smoking. The truth is there's a small, insane, vocal minority that the majority likes to hear from so we can all rip them to shreds every so often.
The only thing that the majority seems particularly weak on is science stories. Slashdot knows computers, but sla
Re:Why would anyone think this would happen? (Score:5, Interesting)
Alpha was quite a bit quicker then x86 in it's day; it was a full 64-bit system from the start and the processors were clocked pretty aggressively. NT's x86 compatibility layer for the Alpha actually worked pretty damned good too- it ran 95% of the software on x86 and once you ran the apps enough, they ran pretty quickly. Alphas also weren't outrageously priced.
They just didn't keep up with the x86 boxes in the end, Digital was on the way out, and the Alpha just faded away.
NT for PPC (done before); processors (Score:5, Informative)
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 [amd.com] and Intel-64 [intel.com] 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 [apple.com] (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 [kernel.org], Java [sun.com], and all the other OS, hardware and software vendors, programmers, and users.
The limited adoption and big troubles implementing Wine [winehq.com] 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...
I Used To Think So ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah (Score:5, Funny)
Dell makes an iPod. Sony makes an iPod. Windows is trying to be OS X. Microsoft has a music store. HP licenses the iPod. Hmmm.
Yep. Everybody wants to be Apple.
If the Astros put on Yankees uniforms... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If the Astros put on Yankees uniforms... (Score:5, Funny)
Remember Windows NT for Alpha? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Remember Windows NT for PPC? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Remember Windows NT for Alpha? (Score:5, Interesting)
The big problem with Alpha is that price/performance wasn't *that* overwhelming after the Pentium Pro shipped. Also, there was the inherent risks in running a "Tier 2" platform, even when some uses (like Exchange) really needed the CPU power.
(We had DEC out to demo NT/Alpha for us, and on two seperate occassions their show-n-tell systems failed to boot. So, there probably was a big vendor factor there too.)
Only if the PPC were commoditized (Score:3, Insightful)
analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
Switch? Not entirely... (Score:4, Insightful)
They already tried, they found out the answer. (Score:5, Interesting)
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."
Dual Boot? (Score:4, Interesting)
I know there are other PPC vendors than apple, but it's the one we all think about when discussing these "port this OS to that architecture" questions.
Re:Dual Boot? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
History would probably repeat itself (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
New Poll (Score:5, Funny)
Why? Nobody did the first time around. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
-1 Redundant (Score:5, Funny)
Really, why was this story even posted? The barrier for entry to Windows is already lower on Intel than PPC. 99% of people buy PPC to get MacOS and have made a decision to stay away from Windows. Maybe for some obscure server configuration or something - I don't know. Ewww. I think I just felt my PowerBook shudder.
It's like going to church and asking the congregation if, next week, they would like to hold a Satanic mass and worship the devil rather than the usual Sunday drill.
NT Did, nobody switched. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody switched, and that was in the days of the gratuitously unstable System 7.5 and Mac OS 7.6, which tended to crash if you looked at them wrong.
I suspect that BeOS has more users than NT for PPC, at least for Macs. And neither OS ran on G3's or later CPU's.
Now, with OS X and VPC, why the hell would I want to run Windows of all things on a Mac? other way 'round I can see, especially with WINE support or something similar (like Mac-on-Linux) to get Windows software compatibility. But even then, I'd probably stick to PPC, as the hardware is generally better quality and definitely better designed.
Intel... (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Wrong about timeframe (Score:5, Informative)
Apple has regular builds of it's code OS, Darwin, on both Intel and PPC hardware. This is available to anyone here [apple.com].
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).
Isn't this what .NET's for? (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't this what
Re:Isn't this what .NET's for? (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows didn't have many buyers for non x86 (Score:3, Interesting)
NT 3.00+ (at least) came for i386[+], MIPS, PPC and Alpha. MIPS and PPC didn't have enough interested buyers to maintain the platform. Alpha held out a bit longer and actually had some followers. Microsoft wasn't stupid, they lost money on the platforms, saw no way to recover it and cancelled non x86 NT. Consider that Microsoft's Xbox2 developer systems are Macintosh G5s with customized NT kernels. It's not like that was hard.
According to rumor, the AIM alliance was formed because Motorola wanted to learn from IBM how to better serve Apple. Apple wanted to have a hand in their next architecture and wanted to get some of the performance from IBM. IBM, everybody understood, was going to take over the world with OS/2 beige boxen running PPC -- this plan changed to NT beige boxen running PPC. But in the 1992/1993 timeframe, when x86 was weakest (just before Pentium), even IBM couldn't muster the market to ditch backwards compatibility. The PowerPC 615 was behind schedule, power hungry and had some legal problems (fundamentally, I don't think it was strategic -- Apple learned how hard it was to get programmers to program native PPC code when they could stick with 68k and have it emulated well enough).
To answer your question: Nobody would buy PPC Windows, because they didn't. There's no backwards compatibility, no program base, and these days nobody actually knows what system they're running on anyway. If you want compute cycles, you either need an Athlon (faster than hell memory access), Itanic (faster than hell double precision float) or Power (8-32 CPUs in one system). If you want a Windows interface, you don't care what you have because the processor wastes too much time waiting for you.
Here's What I See (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The Political Equivelant... (Score:3, Funny)
"Sure, sure... BUT WHAT IF?!"
From a PPC fan... (Score:3, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [win.tue.nl]
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.
I just realized why this won't happen (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Question is redundant (Score:4, Funny)
In reality... (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft, on the other hand, would probably have a nightmare on their hands as I suspect they've not taken any consideration for endianness, 64 bits (No, they still don't have it out in the hands of the public- it's been months now and they knew about amd64, etc. for some time now...)- it's probably all nasty, crufty x86-32 code and using some aborted NT 3.51 code wouldn't help out much...
We already have a test for this question. (Score:4, Insightful)
I would run Windows on a shiny new G5 (Score:5, Funny)
This is like asking... (Score:4, Funny)
Well, come to think of it, if it came down to Lich Nixon or Dubya Bush....
For Shame! (Score:5, Funny)
Masochists.
Re:But why... (Score:3, Interesting)
Mips: MIPS IV Instruction Set Section A.2.1 [sgi.com]
Alpha: Cannot find an authoritative resource for proof, but the way I understand it is that NT was IMPOSSIBLE to run on a big-endian-only CPU, hence the #1 reason it never made it beyond rumor stage on Sparc.
Solaris and Endianness [sun.com].
I remember back in '96-'97 timeframe hearing from a number of Sun vendors about experiments with NT on Ultrasparc, but co
Re:But why... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not possible. (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Not without Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
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 spec
Re:Already done. It's called Microsoft Virtual PC. (Score:5, Funny)
I can't say that either of those adjectives would be my first choice for describing XP.
Re:Already done. It's called Microsoft Virtual PC. (Score:5, Funny)
That's because the poster mistyped. He meant useless and harmful
Re:Ick, no! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.