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Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

PowerPC has been dead for almost a decade, no? The moment Apple switched over to Intel and deprecated PowerPC, PPC became irrelevant. Beyond the target parties that care about software archaeology, what is the importance of this action?

It may have academic value, but practically speaking, how does this matter?

Just asking the crowd in case there is a perspective I am missing.

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> The moment Apple switched over to Intel , PPC became irrelevant

In a good year, Apple sold about 3 million PowerPC Macs. Sony and Microsoft sold about 80 million PS3s and Xbox 360s each. I think one could make the case that those Macs were of questionable relevance to begin with... (yes I know they used G5 Macs for dev machines)

Also the last three Nintendo consoles before the Switch.. one of which (the original Wii) sold over 100m.

Fair enough, I had no knowledge that this arch was used extensively in servers and in those consoles!

From what I've read, the latest POWER9 servers from IBM are very competitive (on performance, not necessarily price). Newer chips that run PPC ISA support ppc64el (little-endian mode) so that porting software is significantly easier. gcc has a mature backend for this instruction set so it's a simple recompile in many cases on Linux.

PPC machines are also required if for some reason you're still running AIX, IIRC.

> PPC machines are also required if for some reason you're still running AIX, IIRC.

It's probably a way of making more money out of those legacy customers

(yes because if you're still running AIX you're deep down in legacy territory, and you might just want to look at recompiling your stuff for Linux but chose to suffer instead)

100%

IBM will let you run your ancient apps, and on mainframes even apps back as far as OS/360.

But you have to pay for it.

You're missing servers. Power9 is cheaper but similar performance to Intel Xeons and Google has invested quite a bit into using Power servers (although we don't know if they actually do).

I'm sure all the effort Google put into being able to compile google3 for Power resulted in significant price concessions from Intel, which I imagine was the point of the project in the first place.

What's google3?

It refers to all of Googles code. And in this case the possibility to run it on PowerPC servers.

Sorry for the jargon. google3 is the name of their perforce repository that contains all of their backend code, everything that runs in their datacenters.

Was there a google1 and google2?

Original was just "google". There was also "google5" but not 4.

As a simple Google search would reveal, PowerPC is still in use in the embedded market.

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