To be fair to Apple those changes were done pretty cleanly and for good reason.
68k was cheap and plentiful. It had lots of competitors using it. They could learn from each others successes and failures too.
PowerPC performed much better and made design changes that made much more sense long-term. But then it wasn’t built for the mobile era. Apple tried to reel it in but the other titans behind POWER overruled them so Apple had to migrate away.
By this point, x86 had caught up with many of the advantages power had and had a better path for the mobile market ahead of it so Apple went that route.
Finally, intel’s x86 was just not going to keep up with the efficiency demands of mobile. It consumed too much power. It was expensive. It ran hot. Intel was not delivering on their promises. And Apple could see what was coming for Intel years before others admitted it.
Meanwhile they already had incredible ARM chips in their phones. The PAsemi boys they bought up were put to the task of making a more general purpose ARM chip and they pulled it off.
So now Apple is on ARM and it’s serving them very well.
Apple isn’t playing planned obsolescence here. They are evil in plenty of other ways but in terms of planned obsolescence Apple is one of the more reasonable companies. These migrations solved a problem for Apple each time. They are very expensive. They are incredibly risky. Honestly it was miraculous they pulled off the jump to ARM successfully.
PowerPC performed much better and made design changes that made much more sense long-term.
There were also volume production issues and architecture advancement issues.
Essentially, they couldn’t get volume guarantees and they were at the mercy of a much slower improvement cycle than they would have liked.
PowerPC was absolutely an excellent top-tier processor, and the current Power11 line absolutely smokes anything else out there from either Intel or AMD, at the cost of being 100-200× more expensive. Like, think $30,000 USD for a single entry-level workstation, or $70,000 USD for the high-end one.
Apple, are we on CPU architecture 3 now ?
4
Macs started out on Motorola 68k processors, then made the switch to PowerPC, then to x86, and now ARM.
To be fair to Apple those changes were done pretty cleanly and for good reason.
68k was cheap and plentiful. It had lots of competitors using it. They could learn from each others successes and failures too.
PowerPC performed much better and made design changes that made much more sense long-term. But then it wasn’t built for the mobile era. Apple tried to reel it in but the other titans behind POWER overruled them so Apple had to migrate away.
By this point, x86 had caught up with many of the advantages power had and had a better path for the mobile market ahead of it so Apple went that route.
Finally, intel’s x86 was just not going to keep up with the efficiency demands of mobile. It consumed too much power. It was expensive. It ran hot. Intel was not delivering on their promises. And Apple could see what was coming for Intel years before others admitted it.
Meanwhile they already had incredible ARM chips in their phones. The PAsemi boys they bought up were put to the task of making a more general purpose ARM chip and they pulled it off.
So now Apple is on ARM and it’s serving them very well.
Apple isn’t playing planned obsolescence here. They are evil in plenty of other ways but in terms of planned obsolescence Apple is one of the more reasonable companies. These migrations solved a problem for Apple each time. They are very expensive. They are incredibly risky. Honestly it was miraculous they pulled off the jump to ARM successfully.
There were also volume production issues and architecture advancement issues.
Essentially, they couldn’t get volume guarantees and they were at the mercy of a much slower improvement cycle than they would have liked.
PowerPC was absolutely an excellent top-tier processor, and the current Power11 line absolutely smokes anything else out there from either Intel or AMD, at the cost of being 100-200× more expensive. Like, think $30,000 USD for a single entry-level workstation, or $70,000 USD for the high-end one.
Exactly. There’s a reason power isn’t going away.