Well, I think you have to start from the fact that PowerPC is a different ISA, software for x86 is not compatible with PPC without slow emulation. So... the answer to the 'why didn't more people use these?' question is really 'who was starting new platforms using new ISAs in the mid-1990s' and the answer is... not many people? (And some people who tried, like Be, rapidly gave up)

In particular, the DOS/Windows/etc world has always been tied to x86. Sure, you had NT for PPC, NT for MIPS, etc. But those never went anywhere.

The other thing is that this makes comparing the performance very tricky. Sure, if you have Photoshop filters running very optimized x86 code vs very optimized PPC code, that's a good benchmark. But otherwise, since you're running largely different software, how do you really compare the performance?

More importantly, I think this all needs to be situated within the context of the CISC/RISC debate in the early 1990s. Everybody expected CISC architectures like 68K, x86, etc to reach a dead end and RISC to be the future. This is why folks like Sun abandoned 68K for SPARC, while Apple foolishly partnered with IBM on PowerPC. Apple naively assumed that a big chunk of "post-x86" IBM stuff would use PPC and therefore they wouldn't be stuck on their own bespoke thing if they partnered with IBM. (If Motorola had just gone what Intel would end up doing with 68K, my guess is that you'd still have a vibrant ecosystem on 68K today.)

What ended up happening is that Intel's massive economies of scale and industry-best transistors basically let them engineer a way to use RISC principles while maintaining compatibility with a CISC instruction set. And as a result, they were able to increase x86 performance, especially performance per-dolllar, from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s by an insane amount. Keep in mind that Intel took the P6 architecture from 300MHz to 1GHz in about three years. And over time (with some help from the Itanium debacle that was happening in parallel), every RISC ISA used in desktops/workstations/servers fell behind and most were effectively abandoned except for legacy systems.

My sense is that PPC chips were generally faster up until the early days of the PIII, then they were tied for a little while, then by 2003-4ish, massively falling behind except the G5 IBM server CPU. By 2006 Apple was switching to x86 and diehard Mac were like 'huh? how is this so much faster than PPC? and consuming much less power in the process?'

The other part of the story is business. Steve Jobs pissed off the Motorola CEO by cancelling their Mac clone licence. PPC chips, especially for laptops, were effectively bespoke designs for Apple in the late 1990s. And yet Apple was paying less per chip than Intel was charging Dell and co. for x86 chips. And that's why investment stopped - in a high-fixed-cost business like semiconductors, you can't keep up if the other guy has 20X your volume and sells that volume at a higher price than you.

I used both G3s and PCs regularly at the time. I don't have any objective measure, but the G3 computers felt like absolute dogs at everything from productivity to basic web browsing. But I feel like part of that was that OS9 was tragically bad. Also, I would have been using Internet Explorer on PCs and Netscape on the G3. Netscape was a lot slower than IE. So I suspect a lot of my view of it was hindered by software.

IMO PPC was attractive exactly twice, once when there was the ~200Mhz "free for all" where there were 200Mhz on socket 7 option 200Mhz on PPro and Intel announcing slot 1 at 233... you were gonna have to pick a platform and the PPC looked as good as any other. Then around 2000 when it looked like the P4 was a massive screwup.

A lot of the rest was Jobs reality distortion field.

Short answer: for certain types of workloads performance per clock cycle favored the PPC. Of course you'd have to have the same software running on both systems to do a direct compare (and have the software be optimized for both platforms for that compare to be fair), but especially during the G3/G4-era, you'd have to have a much higher-clocked Intel CPU to best the PPC. Apple moved back over to Intel after the G5, in time to make use of the Core2's, and that was a smart decision. The P4 was such a disaster on the PC side, it wouldn't have made sense before then anyway.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/04/28 … est-is-for-macs

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-10-20, 14:58:

IMO PPC was attractive exactly twice, once when there was the ~200Mhz "free for all" where there were 200Mhz on socket 7 option 200Mhz on PPro and Intel announcing slot 1 at 233... you were gonna have to pick a platform and the PPC looked as good as any other. Then around 2000 when it looked like the P4 was a massive screwup.

Not sure PPC was looking that promising in 2000 - this is around the time that Apple started sticking two PPCs in almost all the Power Mac G4s even though OS 9 didn't support multiprocessing simply so they could get more CPU power for Photoshop and other things that did support multiprocessor.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-10-20, 14:58:

A lot of the rest was Jobs reality distortion field.

It's worth noting - Jobs inherited PPC. PPC decision was made in 1991 under Sculley.

When he was at NeXT, he went from 68K to x86. Now, of course, NeXT also gave on making its own hardware at the time so... that could have affected the thinking, obviously the world was full of generic x86 boxes in the early 1990s in a way that you didn't have generic PPC/SPARC/etc boxes.

Not sure how much of a love for PPC he really had, or whether he just tried to make the best out of a bad decision he couldn't undo without first migrating everybody off OS 9.

There's a story floating around on the Internet about the early days of Project Marklar (OS X for x86), and apparently when Steve Jobs found out his underlings had a near-ready-to-go x86 port of OS X as a skunkworks project, he was... quite excited.

Although, it's worth noting - we call it a bad decision, but the transition started in 1994. I do not think Intel's flagship processors in 1994 would have been able to emulate 68K code at the speed that the PPC 601 could. My sense is that in 1994, the PPC 601 was substantially faster than the 90-100MHz Pentiums. At least theoretically, obviously, if equivalent software had existed for both - in practice, a heavily emulated OS certainly hampered the PPC. You see the same thing on the Sun side - Sun got a lot higher performance dumping 68K for SPARC in the early 1990s, and who knows when x86 started catching up to SPARC on the lower end - maybe in 1998 or so? That's the thing - the x86 juggernaut really ramped up 5-10 years after all these decisions were made.

smtkr wrote on 2024-10-20, 14:14:

I used both G3s and PCs regularly at the time. I don't have any objective measure, but the G3 computers felt like absolute dogs at everything from productivity to basic web browsing. But I feel like part of that was that OS9 was tragically bad. Also, I would have been using Internet Explorer on PCs and Netscape on the G3. Netscape was a lot slower than IE. So I suspect a lot of my view of it was hindered by software.

What sort of G3? Beige G3 PowerMacs had too many compromises for a high-end system, iMacs were low-end and felt it. Only decent Apple G3 IMHO was the Blue&White PowerMac, which was 'too little, too late' - and OS9 really didn't help. I did however run YellowDog Linux on a 400MHz G3 iMac for a while and it was more than equal to my Linux P2-400 system. Nice and snappy and responsive. And rock solid stable. So OS9 played a big part indeed.

leonardo wrote on 2024-10-20, 15:17:

Apple moved back over to Intel after the G5, in time to make use of the Core2's, and that was a smart decision. The P4 was such a disaster on the PC side, it wouldn't have made sense before then anyway.

I was talking with someone on Reddit r/VintageApple about this a few months ago; this person was at WWDC when the x86 DTKs running P4s (90nm Preshots I believe, maybe 3.6GHz?) were announced and displayed on the floor. And his view was that actually, Intel made sense even in the P4 days - the thing that sold him and others on Intel was that you had the P4 in the same case as the G5, except the G5 had ridiculously exotic cooling systems and the P4 had, I think, mostly an Intel stock air cooler and some basic fans. And the P4 was already faster, at least running non-emulated code.

Apparently this fellow (and others he was with) had believed in PPC until they saw that, then it was just... wow.

C2D's massive architectural improvements over P4 were just the icing on the cake.

VivienM wrote on 2024-10-20, 15:35:

Although, it's worth noting - we call it a bad decision, but the transition started in 1994. I do not think Intel's flagship processors in 1994 would have been able to emulate 68K code at the speed that the PPC 601 could. My sense is that in 1994, the PPC 601 was substantially faster than the 90-100MHz Pentiums. At least theoretically, obviously, if equivalent software had existed for both - in practice, a heavily emulated OS certainly hampered the PPC. You see the same thing on the Sun side - Sun got a lot higher performance dumping 68K for SPARC in the early 1990s, and who knows when x86 started catching up to SPARC on the lower end - maybe in 1998 or so? That's the thing - the x86 juggernaut really ramped up 5-10 years after all these decisions were made.

I don't know how fast the 601 got, but on the best UAE code, I think a P100 could do about a 6mhz 68000 ... but doing the Amiga's custom chips at the same time slowed it down to more like third to half speed of an A500.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-10-20, 15:52:

VivienM wrote on 2024-10-20, 15:35:

Although, it's worth noting - we call it a bad decision, but the transition started in 1994. I do not think Intel's flagship processors in 1994 would have been able to emulate 68K code at the speed that the PPC 601 could. My sense is that in 1994, the PPC 601 was substantially faster than the 90-100MHz Pentiums. At least theoretically, obviously, if equivalent software had existed for both - in practice, a heavily emulated OS certainly hampered the PPC. You see the same thing on the Sun side - Sun got a lot higher performance dumping 68K for SPARC in the early 1990s, and who knows when x86 started catching up to SPARC on the lower end - maybe in 1998 or so? That's the thing - the x86 juggernaut really ramped up 5-10 years after all these decisions were made.

I don't know how fast the 601 got, but on the best UAE code, I think a P100 could do about a 6mhz 68000 ... but doing the Amiga's custom chips at the same time slowed it down to more like third to half speed of an A500.

And the 601 running Mac 68K code... I think could do close to 20MHz 68LC040, high-end 68030 performance.

Which I think was part of the value proposition - if you had graphics designers who were still using their super-duper-insanely-expensive IIcis/IIfxs from 1990-1991 in early 1994, the PPC machines could run their existing 68K software faster than their existing Mac IIs. And for those who were rocking Quadra 800s, well, I suspect they weren't really expected to buy the first-gen PPC machines but rather get the second-gen machines once Photoshop/Quark/etc were PPC-native. Also worth remembering - there were PPC CPU upgrade cards for all those machines and I think a lot of professionals with PPC-native software bought those in the second half of 1994, early 1995.

I'd say the G3/PPC 750 was the only truly competitive chip of the bunch. It was clearly faster than a Pentium II clock-for-clock and ran a heck of a lot cooler, especially compared to the 2.8V Klamath processors. I think it was even cheaper than the Pentium II to boot, at least during the Klamath days.

But when x86 finally received the shot in the arm it so desperately needed in floating point (with the Athlon) and meaningful SIMD (with the P4), it was pretty much over for PowerPC. Sure, video encoders optimized for AltiVec allowed the dual G4 and G5 towers to remain somewhat competitive in very specific use cases for a little while longer, but they clearly lagged behind x86 in most other areas. Especially by the AMD64 era.

VivienM wrote on 2024-10-20, 16:17:

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-10-20, 15:52:

VivienM wrote on 2024-10-20, 15:35:

Although, it's worth noting - we call it a bad decision, but the transition started in 1994. I do not think Intel's flagship processors in 1994 would have been able to emulate 68K code at the speed that the PPC 601 could. My sense is that in 1994, the PPC 601 was substantially faster than the 90-100MHz Pentiums. At least theoretically, obviously, if equivalent software had existed for both - in practice, a heavily emulated OS certainly hampered the PPC. You see the same thing on the Sun side - Sun got a lot higher performance dumping 68K for SPARC in the early 1990s, and who knows when x86 started catching up to SPARC on the lower end - maybe in 1998 or so? That's the thing - the x86 juggernaut really ramped up 5-10 years after all these decisions were made.

I don't know how fast the 601 got, but on the best UAE code, I think a P100 could do about a 6mhz 68000 ... but doing the Amiga's custom chips at the same time slowed it down to more like third to half speed of an A500.

And the 601 running Mac 68K code... I think could do close to 20MHz 68LC040, high-end 68030 performance.

Which I think was part of the value proposition - if you had graphics designers who were still using their super-duper-insanely-expensive IIcis/IIfxs from 1990-1991 in early 1994, the PPC machines could run their existing 68K software faster than their existing Mac IIs. And for those who were rocking Quadra 800s, well, I suspect they weren't really expected to buy the first-gen PPC machines but rather get the second-gen machines once Photoshop/Quark/etc were PPC-native. Also worth remembering - there were PPC CPU upgrade cards for all those machines and I think a lot of professionals with PPC-native software bought those in the second half of 1994, early 1995.

Do you think that early versions of Mac OS X were specifically built around PPC with later versions of the OS being built in transition to intel or do you think the developers were already planning for a potential intel crossover while developing for Mac OS 10.0?

also, what made mac OS 9 so terrible?

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-10-20, 23:26:

Do you think that early versions of Mac OS X were specifically built around PPC with later versions of the OS being built in transition to intel or do you think the developers were already planning for a potential intel crossover while developing for Mac OS 10.0?

Remember that Mac OS X derives from the NeXT acquisition which would've been running on x86 before it even got ported to PowerPC, not the reverse.

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-10-20, 23:26:

also, what made mac OS 9 so terrible?

Cooperative multitasking, no memory protection, and significant portions of code ran under 68k emulation, although I believe some of the tail end software that required 8.6+ could bypass some of that stuff. So the technological limitations of it were a blend of some things characteristic of Windows 9x and even some characteristic of 3.x... in 2002 in some cases (iirc X was unusable pre-10.1)

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-10-20, 23:26:

Do you think that early versions of Mac OS X were specifically built around PPC with later versions of the OS being built in transition to intel or do you think the developers were already planning for a potential intel crossover while developing for Mac OS 10.0?

So... Mac OS X is based on NeXTSTEP, which was always portable. Used to be 68K, then x86, then ported to PPC when Apple bought the company.

My sense is that Apple was committed to PPC at the time they started developing OS X. But that portable underpinning stayed, and that's how you get that one guy volunteering to port the newest changes back to x86. And as the clouds darkened on PPC, well, that one guy's project became more of an official thing, until eventually they made the leap.

But you have to understand the problem with PPC:
1) Apple was paying too little for what were effectively custom chips for them. .
2) Motorola seemed to have no interest in making a new generation of chips following the G4 family. It would have been clear by 1997-8 that Macs and IBM workstations/servers would be the only market for general purpose PPC chips going forward (PPC was quite successful in embedded systems though). Keep in mind that the G4 family stuck around in various forms for seven years, during which time Intel land went from 450MHz PIIIs to 2.4GHz dual-core C2Ds.
3) They found some salvation with IBM by reusing IBM's 970 server CPU as the G5, but the thermals were horrible, the clock rates weren't increasing, and... IBM had no interest in designing a laptop chip (at least at a price that Apple was willing to pay) just as Apple's business was clearly moving towards laptops.

In effect, the wisest solution given where they were in 2004-6 was to give up on unique hardware and start differentiating themselves solely based on software and design. The early Intel MacBooks were basically... the same... as PC laptops with the upgraded wifi cards that almost no one got from Dell. As their sales improved, they started investing in unique things like the retina screens.

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-10-20, 23:26:

also, what made mac OS 9 so terrible?

The classic MacOS grew out of a platform designed around a 128K, floppy-only, single-tasking machine with effectively no networking. It had no real multitasking, very bad memory management (you had to specify before running it how much memory an application could use), no protected memory, an extension model where you could have extension conflicts that crashed the system, etc.

Also, it did not play well with the Internet, TCP/IP, etc. Had all kinds of cool filesystem features like resource forks and data forks, type/creator codes, etc that were wonderfully clever, but... required special encoding, etc to travel over the Internet.

I love the classic Mac OS as a retro platform, I think its historical significance is tremendous, and I think many of its quirks and features were ahead of its time and brilliantly hacked-together. But by the mid-1990s, the classic MacOS was a creaky disaster.

VivienM wrote on 2024-10-21, 00:00:

So... Mac OS X is based on NeXTSTEP, which was always portable. Used to be 68K, then x86, then ported to PPC when Apple bought t […]
Show full quote

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-10-20, 23:26:

Do you think that early versions of Mac OS X were specifically built around PPC with later versions of the OS being built in transition to intel or do you think the developers were already planning for a potential intel crossover while developing for Mac OS 10.0?

So... Mac OS X is based on NeXTSTEP, which was always portable. Used to be 68K, then x86, then ported to PPC when Apple bought the company.

My sense is that Apple was committed to PPC at the time they started developing OS X. But that portable underpinning stayed, and that's how you get that one guy volunteering to port the newest changes back to x86. And as the clouds darkened on PPC, well, that one guy's project became more of an official thing, until eventually they made the leap.

But you have to understand the problem with PPC:
1) Apple was paying too little for what were effectively custom chips for them. .
2) Motorola seemed to have no interest in making a new generation of chips following the G4 family. It would have been clear by 1997-8 that Macs and IBM workstations/servers would be the only market for general purpose PPC chips going forward (PPC was quite successful in embedded systems though). Keep in mind that the G4 family stuck around in various forms for seven years, during which time Intel land went from 450MHz PIIIs to 2.4GHz dual-core C2Ds.
3) They found some salvation with IBM by reusing IBM's 970 server CPU as the G5, but the thermals were horrible, the clock rates weren't increasing, and... IBM had no interest in designing a laptop chip (at least at a price that Apple was willing to pay) just as Apple's business was clearly moving towards laptops.

In effect, the wisest solution given where they were in 2004-6 was to give up on unique hardware and start differentiating themselves solely based on software and design. The early Intel MacBooks were basically... the same... as PC laptops with the upgraded wifi cards that almost no one got from Dell. As their sales improved, they started investing in unique things like the retina screens.

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-10-20, 23:26:

also, what made mac OS 9 so terrible?

The classic MacOS grew out of a platform designed around a 128K, floppy-only, single-tasking machine with effectively no networking. It had no real multitasking, very bad memory management (you had to specify before running it how much memory an application could use), no protected memory, an extension model where you could have extension conflicts that crashed the system, etc.

Also, it did not play well with the Internet, TCP/IP, etc. Had all kinds of cool filesystem features like resource forks and data forks, type/creator codes, etc that were wonderfully clever, but... required special encoding, etc to travel over the Internet.

I love the classic Mac OS as a retro platform, I think its historical significance is tremendous, and I think many of its quirks and features were ahead of its time and brilliantly hacked-together. But by the mid-1990s, the classic MacOS was a creaky disaster.

in my opinion, the contrast between mac OS 9 and mac OS X is quite impressive as improvements made by mac OS X were quite exponential. i also commend apple for allowing early OS 9 applications to be usable in mac OS X under a classic environment.

Perhaps the Classic Environment was part of the reason to stay on PowerPC too.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2024-10-21, 00:40:

Perhaps the Classic Environment was part of the reason to stay on PowerPC too.

Oh, 200%.

Apple was in a weak position in those days, especially with big developers. They needed a way to migrate the platform to OS X that would be successful so that the big developers like Adobe went along. That's why they had Classic, why they had to add the Carbon APIs, etc.

Throwing an ISA change in the middle, especially at a time when x86 wouldn't have had the ability to emulate PPC without a significant performance loss, would not have helped.

Also, don't forget that the classic environment relied at least partly on the 68k emulator. The classic OS cannot exist without the 68K emulator. Imagine the mess - trying to emulate PPC to then emulate 68k in the middle?!?

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-10-21, 00:14:

in my opinion, the contrast between mac OS 9 and mac OS X is quite impressive as improvements made by mac OS X were quite exponential. i also commend apple for allowing early OS 9 applications to be usable in mac OS X under a classic environment.

I didn't use Macs at the time of the OS 9 to OS X migration, but my understanding is that OS X had huge performance issues in its early days and it mostly really only become 'good' performance-wise with the move to Intel and multi-gig amounts of RAM. I've found it fine on retro machines at least with SSDs and plentiful RAM.

As for the classic environment, that wasn't a luxury. That was a must. A platform is defined by its software compatibility - without the classic environment, something running OS X was not a "Mac". It would have been another failed platform with no third-party app support like Be.

(And really, other than Be, I can't think of an example of a PC OS from the 1990s or later without some backwards compatibility. Even non-x86 NT had some kind of x86 emulator I believe. OS/2 had DOS/Win3.1 compatibility.)

in my opinion, the contrast between mac OS 9 and mac OS X is quite impressive as improvements made by mac OS X were quite exponential.

Hm, yes. I for one I loved the Aqua design of v10.0 to v10.2 the most, before brushed metal was everywhere. ^^
(That's because Mac OS GUI tried to match the looks of contemprorariy Macs, such as iMac G3, DV, Power Mac G3 Blue-White).

But Mac OS 9.2 wasn't bad, either. It was a bit like Windows Me, maybe. Clumsy, sluggish and a bit overweight..
On bright side, it had experimental stuff like RAVE API, Quick Draw GX, text-to-speech and a voice recongition (passwords).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvAhHQ6-0NQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXzD_oTL4XA

i also commend apple for allowing early OS 9 applications to be usable in mac OS X under a classic environment.

There are two mechanisms, essentially, which ensure backwards compatibility.

Carbon API, which is supported on both Mac OS 8/9 and OS X and which has a subset of the old Mac OS API.
Mac applications compiled for Carbon API run on both platforms, even on Intel-based Mac OS X up until 10.6.8 (through Rosetta).

The Classic Environment, which is a VM that runs a special version of Mac OS 9.2.x.
Special, insofar because it is patched a little bit for VM use.
Classic Environment uses Mac OS X for i/o, which for example can result in better HDD performance than possible with Mac OS 9 on native hardware.
Unfortunatelly, Classic has no 3D support and doesn’t allow direct i/o access.

So it's best if the Mac remains to be able to boot into Mac OS 9.2, too.
Mac OS 9 has a built-in Motorola 68000 emulator and can run all Macintosh applications way down to 1984.
In theory, at least. If applications are well behaved.

Edit:

Also, it did not play well with the Internet, TCP/IP, etc. Had all kinds of cool filesystem features like resource forks and data forks, type/creator codes, etc that were wonderfully clever, but... required special encoding, etc to travel over the Internet.

Hm. That's not wrong, but my memories of the 90s and 2000s were a bit different.
According to what I remember, the classic Mac OS used to be the reference for internet browsing. Originally on Netscape Navigator, then IE 5.x.
But maybe that's just because I saw website screenshots in magazines being taken with Mac OS back in the day? Hm.
Or maybe it's because I've watched The Net (1995) and Hackers (1995) too often!? 😅

Anyway, Windows 3.1x surely wasn't being too useful for browsing the internet back in the day, at least. Too unstable and too weak.
While our ISP technically shipped with Windows 3.1x software to access the internet, it was Windows 95 which we ended up using.
Probably because programs like Netscape Navigator 2 or Internet Explorer 3 on Windows 3.x reacted rather sluggish.
Probably because they allocated a lot of memory to implement Java VM or plug-ins for QuickTime, Real Audio. Not sure.