Hey,
since 2 weeks I own a top-new iMac 21,5'' to replace my iMac G4 I bought in 2009 to get experience in OS X. I think everybody knows that 2005/2006 Apple changed from PowerPC to Intel.
But what happened to the PowerPC, did the development end? I don't know a G6-System or whatever. Wikipedia tells me the that the CEO decided to rename the PowerPC-Architecture and to develop it further but not for the Desktop-PCs and Laptops.
So what happened till now?

It's kind of obsolete now. It's being widely used in Playstation 3 (Cell CPU) and in some supercomputers - most notably BlueGene. Other than that, new Amigas have PPC. That's it, I believe.

I thought it was abandoned since Apple was the only major user of the platform...

PowerPC really isn't used, however IBM POWER, which the PPC was based off of, still is used.

As well as the XBOX 360. The Wii's GPU is PowerPC too I think if I remember correctly. Lots of devices are powered by PowerPC.

That said, it's highly unlikely that 360's replacement will use PowerPC, and I think it's fair to say that PPC is dying a slow death.

x86 and ARM are the architectures of today.

The PowerPC architecture is still made by IBM and still used in servers and ASIC solutions (such as the Xbox360, Wii and Playstation 3). The name PowerPC may not be used anymore but IBM's POWER series still includes the full PowerPC instruction set, so it still lives on. A lot of networking hardware uses PowerPC CPUs today, although a lot more power efficient than the ones we're familiar with from the Amiga/Macintosh era. The PowerPC legacy is today continued in the POWER architecture. C'mon people, less guesswork and more research .

But PowerPC as the main CPU in a computer is long gone today as the architecture can't keep up with x86 and ARM development.

As for the "new" Amigas they are just basic PC clones using x86 CPUs (the last I heard about it anyway, but that seems to change every month these days). The Amiga names has been handed over from company to company and been washed out and tarnished (personal opinion as an old loyal Amiga fan) and is today a good memory for old Amiga users, and a trademark name for companies to try to squeeze a few bucks out of. Just the same happens with the Commodore name as well as the C64 name (as the 64x brand which today is just a mere x86 PC in a vintage Vic64 shell).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Architecture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64x

Lots of good history there .

@mrpijey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOne_X1000

It's quite new and uses PPC.

There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam460ex
It can run AmigaOS as well.

PowerPC is still used in Wii and Wii U and embedded devices like NAS hardware ( NetBSD calls their port "Sandpoint"), older set-top boxes and routers also had them.
PowerPC based Thinkpads are a bit rare.
Apple's own routers first used a embedded AMD 486 then a AMD(!) MIPS and later a Marvell ARM running a non free NetBSD port, not iOS.
The best fast and quiet PPC computers were Power Mac G4 upgraded to 7448 chips using 1MB full speed cache.

I remember Windows NT for PowerPC, which never really caught on... were there even any applications for PowerPC?

When it was introduced, it simply could not break the fierce competition of processors at that time, and I'm surprised Apple held on it for so long.

Dependency Walker (it even was for the never leaked AXP64 Windows):
http://www.dependencywalker.com/
WinImage 3.0:
http://www.winimage.com/download.htm

I remember there was a website with some Windows tools compiled for all NT releases (PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha), but I cant find any link to it.
EDIT: found it:
http://www.tenox.tc/out/

The PowerPC architecture/instruction set itself strictly ceased to exist around 2006. It was replaced by Power ISA which incorporated PowerPC and POWER together. For all intents and purposes though, Power ISA is just the new name for the PowerPC architecture.

The architecture itself, or a close variation, will likely be found in next-gen games consoles (Not sure why people seem to think manufactures are moving away from POWER, it's very suited to gaming and expected to feature in the next-gen consoles). And it's other main use today is in high performance Unix servers. It is still very much alive today however.

The ISA is just the Instruction Set Architecture , a specification listing supported CPU instructions and modes.

Maybe the Wii's CPU, but the GPU is ati I think, at least 'ATI' is printed on the side of my Wii.

The Wii is well documented.
The Wii uses a custom ATI chip similar to the Gamecube.
PS3 has a Chip similar to GeForce 7XXX and the XBOX360 to Radeon R600.

Wii U is supposedly PPC, as the Wii and Gamecube were, and the 360 is, and from what I've read some of the units inside the Cell processor are very similar to PowerPC. I think that some of Cisco's new equipment is still PPC (100 Gbps routers), and the platform is still under active development. It's just not in too many consumer devices.

The Cell is a 64-bit PPC similar to the G5 Macs coupled with 8 special processor units but games can use only 6 of them.A disadvantage for running other operating systems is that PS3 uses special XDR RAM chips and only 256MB.

One vector unit that is disabled to sell chip with one defective SPU but can be reenabled and the other is reserved for crypto.

In case anyone is still reading this thread, I just found out that the CPU in the Curiosity rover is PPC.

And I forgot it was me who uploaded Internet Explorer 3.01 for PowerPC to the FTP. D'oh!

At least there are some applications, even if it's only very little.

By the way, could Windows NT 4.0 run on a PowerPC Mac, if installed from the PowerPC Setup files? Also, could it support Win32 applications written for the x86 architecture? A while back, I used to wonder about this quite a lot, especially amidst all the rumors that I kept hearing about people getting Windows to run on a Mac, which is why I'm asking.

Windows NT 4.0/PPC needs a computer which is PReP compliant. Apple did not sell PReP-compliant computers, so the answer is no.


No, Windows NT/PPC does not support x86 Win32 applications. It only supports DOS applications by using a built-in emulator. However, Windows NT/Alpha was able to run x86 Win32 applications, by using a program named FX!32.

I am suprised nobody mentioned the main applications,

IBM builds super computers on the BlueGene platform which is based on zounds of 1.6 GHZ POWER processors.

The POWER architecture is able to offer good thruput and good consumption. I have a suspicion that its design may favor the kind of between process communications favored by super computers.

Furthermore, it may have the ability to beat the Intel MIC, if they can get the Cyclops CPU running faster.

The POWER architecture lives on by offering good bang per buck, but the limitations on corespeed have not been resolved. On a per-core comparison it does worse then intel.