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[–] viperguy 0 points 13 points (+13|-0) ago  (edited ago)

NOT THE BEGINNING. Motorola 68k was only from Jan 1983 to 1991

they used MOS 6502 in the beginning, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502 , then 32 bit 68K motorola designs until they started using their own single chip cpu design for many years starting in 1991 called PowerPC after buying design called "Power" and enchancing it for 9 different companies operating systems.

The PowerPC was MANUFACTURED using apples design at chip foundries of IBM and Motorola.

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

Its not what people think of as "motorola". In fact most of the big money went to IBM foundry for Apple, not Motorola

Apple and Intel made special agreements to have Apple get first dibs ALWAYS on high end Intel cpus and then dropped PoerPC in a rage, when 8 partners stopped using PowerPC and the only operating system using it was Mac OS but the foundries were busy using Apple's money to make powerPC video game consoles.

THIS PISSED STEVE JOBS OFF! So he wanted IBM and Motorola (Freescale now) to wither and die for their backstabbing. They tried to make millions of PowerPC chips for Sony PS3 (PowerPC 7 core Cell) Nintendo Wii and XBox 360 (PowerPC 970 chip)

So instead of Apple paying 110 dollars for a good PowerPC cpu, as normal, that APPLE CO-DESIGNED, Apple had to watch chip foundries sell powerPc chips for NINE DOLLARS to :

Nintendo Wii (Espresso PowerPC)

Sony PS3 (Cell PowerPC)

XBox 360 (PowerPC 970)

Steve jobs knew he could fuck them all over and make the chip price SKYROCKET if Apple switched overnight away from PowerPC.

So steve jobs fucked over them all and had macs start using Intel chips in 2006 :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_transition

So its only been 12 short years that macs have been using Xeons and other intel chips.

Apple can easily swap between chips because its architecture allows "Fat Binaries" and 99% of mac software is compiled with Apple's own toolchain the last 10 years and assembly code is rare.

Now , apple has its own GPU (80% complete) and its own 6-core ARM CPU (in all Iphones) http://www.idownloadblog.com/2017/09/11/iphone-x-a11-six-cores/

If they swapped back to PowerPC I would be ok with that. Or a arm chip that emulated 68K. But switching to A11 arm will annoy programmers. It is the fifth incompatible cpu swap. But it is just a simple compilation in apple's xCode (free buggy compiler).

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[–] malloryquinn ago 

The PowerPC is more POWER than anything Apple. The proof was in AIX, and who actually used the damned things.

Motorola fucked up the 88000, and got Hoodwinked into the PowerPC consortium. What a cluster fuck.

Remember Pink? Talgent? OS/2?

PowerPC had IBM's stench all over it, and it was doomed from day 1. Acorn could make the ARM, but Apple came up dry in terms of an OS, or anything complicated like a CPU.