(c) 2010 by Darek Mihocka, founder, Emulators.com. July 16 2010 [Part 32] Fedora 13 and SONY drop PowerPC This is the most shocking and disappointing news of the year so far for me. The PowerPC processor, the microprocessor of the Sony Playstation 3, the Xbox 360, the Wii, and many generations of Apple Macintosh computers, has been demoted to second class citizen status.

The officially dropped PowerPC support from the recently released Fedora 13 Linux release. Fedora 12, Ubuntu 10.04, the new Debian 5.05, and a handful of other older distributions such as Yellow Dog remain as the solely supported Linux releases for the great PowerPC processor. Sony did much the same, dropping the 'Other OS' option in the PS/3, locking people out of the one truly useful reason to own a PS/3 - it's ability to run Linux, surf the web with Firefox, and function as a terrific development platform. I myself have been running Fedora on my PS/3 since the Fedora 8 days. The PS/3 offered a way to test out code sequences and try code optimization techniques on something just about as different as any mainstream PC can get - big endian integers instead of little endian, 64-bit registers, in-order pipeline - long before the recent revival of the Pentium processor (in the form of the Intel Atom) or the ARM processor which powers today's cell phones and iPads. With Microsoft never releasing the 'rumored' Helium (), Sony was the only company to give people a legal and easy way to run Windows and just about any other software on a $300 game console. I am immensely pissed off about these two sad developments.

PearPC 0.5.0! Submitted by Seppel on July 13, 2011 - 18:37, GMT +0200. It took a whole lot of a while but here is finally the 0.5.0 release. This is the first release with AMD64 support.

I have been writing PowerPC code for over 17 years now, since I first got to see prototype PowerMac hardware at Microsoft in 1993 while working on ' Visual Studio for Macintosh Cross-Compiler Edition'. Yes, there really was such a retail product, two of them actually, one targeting 68040 Macintosh development and the other targeting PowerPC. Long before Xbox 360 and PS/3, not only was Apple using PowerPC to run Mac OS on, but Microsoft Windows itself ran on PowerPC-based IBM PCs. Outlook for mac contact groups. The 1990's were anything but a sure thing for Intel and x86, and I for one was convinced that PowerPC was the logical 64-bit successor to 32-bit Pentium based PCs. Best greeting card software for mac.

The design of the PowerPC chip is so clean, so well thought out, that even back in 1993 the PowerPC instruction set already thought out hardware virtualization correctly (which AMD and Intel processors still can't agree on today with their competing versions of VT), already thought ahead to 64-bit wide registers and 64-bit addressing and how 32-bit and 64-bit code could even be mixed together in the same process. PowerPC design was years ahead of its time. No wonder that much of my 15-year career at Microsoft spanning the past two decades involved working on the Macintosh cross compilers, Mac Office, and the Xbox tools. The slow death of the PowerPC points out once again what I started saying right back in part 1 of this blog, technically superiority doesn't mean success in the marketplace. Sony learned this the hard way in the Betamax vs.

VHS battle two decades ago, and so it is a damn shame that they are active and willing participants in dropping the PowerPC Linux support from the PS/3. Remembering the mighty PowerPC The other shame about the demotion of PowerPC is that the PowerPC G4 and G5 were damn good processors at the time. The local Mac user group here in Seattle,, recently had a liquidation sale to dump its 'old' Mac hardware. By 'old', they meant machines from the 2005 timeframe, like the Mac Mini and the 'lamp shade' iMac G4, the forgotten generation of iMac that came between the original bubble shaped iMac and today's flat-screen iMac.