PowerPC
PowerPC (Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing) is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) architecture created by the 1991 AIM alliance, consisting of Apple, IBM, and Motorola. The PowerPC architecture was designed for, and has been used in, a wide variety of computing platforms, including desktops, laptops, servers, game consoles, and embedded systems.
History
IBM developed the POWER architecture in the late 1980s following research into developing a RISC ISA of their own. In 1991 the AIM alliance was formed, seeking to act as a counterweight to the growing consolidation of the PC market at the time. This lead to the development of the PowerPC ISA, taking a subset of POWER instructions and adding additional ones, with the goal of establishing an ISA that would best serve the consumer PC market. 1994 saw Apple release the Power Macintosh 6100, the first PowerPC computer on the market. Motorola and IBM both had machines of their own, but solely targeted institutional and corporate use. These machines followed one of either two different reference platforms: PReP, the PowerPC Reference Platform and CHRP, the Common Hardware Reference Platform. Apple themselves, despite working on both, didn't use either directly and instead borrowed ideas from both standards.
Outside of AIM, adoption in the 1990s was limited to a few companies that made Macintosh clones, and the short-lived BeBox computer that served as the original platform for BeOS. The next decade saw an almost simultaneous death and rebirth of PowerPC in the consumer sphere, while Apple dropped PowerPC after multiple failures to make a CPU for a theoretical Powerbook G5, the Nintendo Gamecube, all three major consoles in the seventh generation, and the Nintendo Wii U would use PowerPC.
One last interesting, and as of this writing still active, use of PowerPC is in the RADXXXX CPUs, first developed by IBM and currently manufactured by BAE Systems Electronic Systems. These are radiation hardened PowerPC CPUs that are for military and aerospace use, and have been used in many satellites, space probes, and Mars rovers.
Platforms Using PowerPC
PowerPC architecture has been utilized in numerous platforms across various domains:
- Desktops and Laptops
- Apple Power Macintosh 6100
- Apple Power Macintosh (Old World Firmware)
- Apple Power Macintosh (New World Firmware)
- AmigaOne
- BeBox
- IBM RS/6000 workstations
- Game Consoles
- Nintendo GameCube
- Nintendo Wii
- Nintendo Wii U
- Sony PlayStation 3
- Microsoft Xbox 360
- Servers and Workstations
- IBM AS/400
- IBM System p
- IBM iSeries