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?
No (Score:5, Interesting)
If Mac OS X was on x86 I'd have a x86.
Doesn'r buy anything... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ick, no! (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember asking, once upon a time (Score:2, Interesting)
Just slap your favor flav of linux on whatever system you want, forget Windows, forget MacOS. And forget vendors that wont follow the lead to platform interoperability.
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.
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.
Re:Remember Windows NT for Alpha? (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
Amiga All The Way (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously!
The Amiga will never die.
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.
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.)
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.
That would make Max OSX = to Windows? No.... (Score:2, Interesting)
That said... Windows runs on THOUSANDS of configurations. OSX is designed to work with specific hardware. If OSX started supporting multiple chipsets, RAM, video cards, etc... it would not be NEARLY as stable as it is today -- that's just a simple fact. And I'm not saying it can't be done... but Apple simply doesn't have the resources to do it. They don't have the manpower nor the capital to start supporting drivers for each piece of hardware on the market, like Microsoft does.
However, if a way was found around the budget and human constraints for Apple (perhaps other capital, more investment, etc), then this could be feasible in the future. And to that end, would be great for the end-users because it would cause both companies to innovate and develop software APIs that are friendly to developers of all kinds. For me, a Mac is useless because I am a heavy gamer and not much else -- and for that, the Mac lags behind in both variety and support of games. If however, Apple's OSX API was better to develop for than say, Direct X, and allowed more functionality and less code -- developers could make it happen.
And that's what I'd LOVE to see. I don't care about it being Mac or Windows -- if it doesn't play my games, it isn't worth shit. Period.
Re:Isn't this what .NET's for? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How to put this... (Score:3, Interesting)
This was on MOSR a while back I believe.
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.
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 could never get a demo (and we had Sun workstation vendors falling all over us to give us hardware at the time).
It is currently there and perhaps even runs well (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know why Microsoft decided to go with PPC, although I suppose it has to do with the Altivec vector unit and the fact that the G5 is a damn fine CPU, better for graphics, but it means that PPC G5's might very well become cheaper in the near future (at least the older one in the XBox2) and it means that MS would not have that much difficulty to port the rest of Windows to the PPC and it also means that game developers would have slightly less hassle and more experience developing for Mac OSX.
But would Microsoft actually port and sell the whole Windows over to PPC? I don't think so. Who would buy it? People who use PPC now use it because that's what Macs come with and what Mac OSX runs on. If they wanted to use Windows, they would buy a PC. I doubt that the entire software market would suddenly jump at this, given that the major thrust is in x86 Windows software.
In any case, I am fantastically happy with OSX on my PowerBook, so Microsoft can do what it wants.
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:2, Interesting)
You just need an NT4 CD from Microsoft, and the special boot diskette, an image of which is available from an IBM site.
Re:Intel's reaction (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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...
I have a NT 3.51 PPC machine on my desk! (Score:2, Interesting)
http://downloads.activestate.com/unsupported/Perl
It is actually a desktop case (not tower) and makes a nice monitor stand! Not good for much else.
Re:Why would anyone think this would happen? (Score:2, Interesting)
Or Apple's 68K-PowerPC recompiling emulator; which worked brilliantly, very fast, and is still part of OS X's "Classic" subsystem. Its only shortcoming is lack of FPU emulation.
But seriously folks, a new architecture should be just a recompile. It is, for NEXTSTEP, NetBSD, SunOS, ULTRIX, and many others (very often Linux), all systems for which the underlying architecture is entirely hidden. (If you don't believe me, go try them: I've used more than one architecture on each.)
Who on earth started promulgating the idea that hiding source code was a useful thing to do?
Forget Intel what about the EU (Score:3, Interesting)
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: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.
NT4 ran on consumer PPC hardware, dual 604-120 (Score:3, Interesting)
NT4 ran on consumer PPC hardware. Around the mid '90s I recall ads for dual 604-120 Windows NT boxes. Byte magazine had reviews and pointed out that the dual 604s scaled much better than dual Pentiums.
Backwards compatibility (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Windows XP Modified Runs on PPC G5 now (Score:3, Interesting)
More importantly... no one has mentioned that the XBOX 2 deployment box is running on Apple's Power Mac G5 with mod version of XP for XBOX2 development.
Now lets reopen the discussion flood gates...
http://editorials.teamxbox.com/xbox/858/The-Xbo
http://editorials.teamxbox.com/xbox/860/The-Xbo
Re:Why would anyone think this would happen? (Score:5, Interesting)
Although, looking at this page [winnetmag.com], I may be slightly mistaken..
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.
X-Box could be the missing link (Score:2, Interesting)
I really look forward to seeing what is going to happen with the next generation X-Box hardware and software.
Personally; I happily use a powerbook running OS X, and would rather not have Windows computers in my life. However, if there were a PowerPC version that would run natively on my Powerbook, there may be scenarios where I might consider dual-booting, depending on the software that became available to me by doing so.
Re:Obligatory Quote (Score:2, Interesting)
IA64 is dead (not a joke, not as in BSD is dead!) (Score:2, Interesting)
HP knifes Itanium, cans IA-64 workstations 09/24/2004 [theregister.co.uk] Although I can't back this one up for obvious reasons, I've seen an internal IBM roadmap for xSeries and IBM BladeCenter (there is btw a PPC blade, the JS20) which was hammered out with Intel to concentrate a while on IA32 Xeon until Intel finishes switching over to the AMD-64 model. In addition to this IBM uses AMD Opteron processors on certain blades.
The AMD-64 is a much better choice for the X86 world because it simply expands on the existing model by making registers 64 bits wide much in the same way the 16-bit 8086/80186/80286 registers ax-dx were expanded to 32-bit registers in the 80386 eax-edx. IA64 "Itanium" never really caught on in the X86 world because it did not really relate to the X86 model and in order to get any significant performance out of the chip Intel compilers and toolkits were needed.
You still however have to choose between AMD-64 and PPC, though
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:Again, BINARIES? (Score:1, Interesting)
Quickly? That must explain why Windows still isn't available for x86-65 or IA64 unless you sign up to MSDN, while Linux, *BSD and other Unix-like OS's have been running on that hardware for years now.
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:2, Interesting)
One reason why MS would want to do windows on PPC (Score:3, Interesting)
And I'm sure it bugs them that Apple is still around, an albeit small thorn in their side. What if MS made a slick looking stylish PC running windows on a PPC? Something to compete on the same level with iMacs? They're already doing hardware with the XBox. Aside from the DRM issues, what if they made an "X-PC" that was a suped-up XBOX with PPC (isnt the new xbox using PPC already?) but meant as home media / pc combo? Put it in a pretty box, make it play xbox games, and run Windows and
Re:Backwards compatibility (Score:2, Interesting)
Speaking of backwards compatibility, I have a story that tops yours. Back in 1988 or 1989, my dad would type his research-papers with a proprietary system called Mass-11 that ran under plain DOS (his PC was an 8088 clone), export them to ASCII files, and run them through TeX. Just a month or so ago, we tested the programs on his Windows ME box, and it seemed to do everything he might want; however, we didn't try printing to the printer he used to use, because he also has MikTeX [miktex.org] (which can print to his DeskJet or PDF) installed on that system. I've also run the program on an NT 4.0 box, so I doubt it would have any problems on XP Pro. That's a 15-year program useful lifetime. Of course, my dad would probably be better off just making sure he's exported everything he might possible want to copy and then junk the program.
If a program stuck to the standard C library or the documented DOS API, it probably kept working from then 'till now; same thing for Windows program that stuck to the core API. However, in the DOS/Windows/Visual Basic/.NET programming milieu there's long been an attitude that one needs to use obscure or undocumented APIs to produce good programs. Sure, some of this came from sources outside of Microsoft, but even today articles [microsoft.com] on MSDN tend to encourage writing to the latest-and-greatest version of Windows using non-backwards-compatible toolkits or still-developing platforms. (This one, for instance, talks about "Avoiding the Win32 API"!). Now, oficially .NET is an ECMA standard, just like
JavaScript, but even MSDN encourages Windows-centric ways of doing things (which is bad because of this question [go-mono.com] about Registry support, for instance). I guess the documentation for gets() [microsoft.com] has an OK warning to use fgets() instead, but I think the "BUGS" section of the corresponding UNIX manpage [ed.ac.uk]
is better.
I wouldn't, but I know some who would (Score:3, Interesting)
Being that the laptop was intended for use in class, the loud fan could be rather distracting/embarrasing. So instead she switched over entirely and got an Apple. It surprised me that she was so willing to switch to a different OS (and one-button mouse etc), but she's doing rather well. Still, I'd imagine that if windows were available for mac she would have gone with that for familiarity, as would many others in a similar situation.
Still, this gives me hope for alternate desktop OSs. If a student is willing to swap architecture and OS just because of noisy fans, perhaps with improvements the alternatives (Linux,BSD, etc etc) may gain more support. Certainly though, many would regard a switch to OSX as an improvement from XP - regardless of the change in design/use.