besides macs what else is ppc used for


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Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Only through emulation...but why on earth would you want to.

i figured people could just buy mac os x instead of buying an imac

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besides macs what else is ppc  used for

Hmm, lets see. It is used for embedded controllers quite often (including some of our recent space probes!), and IIRC, it is also used in the Game Cube. PPC chips are also used in the Pegasos computer, as well as the Briq. Just like the Motorolla 68K line of chips before it, they are used all over the place. I even worked on a radar when I was in the navy that was based on a Motorola 68000 CPU.

edit: Oh, I left off one computer (that I know of). The BeBox was a dual processor PPC computer, but of course, they aren't made anymore.

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can windows xp run on a computer with a ppc processor, natively

The last version of Windows that had a PPC port was Beta 3 of Windows 2000. Windows NT 4 (and possibly 3.51, but I'm not positive on that) also had a PPC port. Unfortunately, these did not run on Mac hardware, only on CHRP certified hardware (mostly IBM's PPC computers).

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True. Though the powerpc for Xbox Next and the Gamecube are just that, the cpu and a few other things, everything else is truely different.

The XDK kits for Xbox Next are G5's though, thats kinda cool.

Gentoo can run on powerpc I think, that would be interesting.

You can't run MacOSX on a PC because the Mac's hardware is all digital and all PC hardware is anolog (as in signals and what not).

That is why macs are so expensive, because it's all digital and very expensive stuff.

Still I want to get my hands on that G5 in the animation room at college :):):)

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Erm I'm pretty certain that x86-32/64 is 100% digital... what the heck in them wouldn't be??

and the x-box will be running PPC??? What's your source on this?

Also, I think that the Motorola line of surfboard cable modems are PPC, and I'm sure that (in theory) you could compile the kernel/boot manager in the stolen windows 2000 source-code to run on PPC couldn't you?

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You can't run MacOSX on a PC because the Mac's hardware is all digital and all PC hardware is anolog (as in signals and what not).

That is why macs are so expensive, because it's all digital and very expensive stuff.

Oh dear, you're in for it I'm afraid :no:

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You can't run MacOSX on a PC because the Mac's hardware is all digital and all PC hardware is anolog (as in signals and what not).

That is why macs are so expensive, because it's all digital and very expensive stuff.

Sorry, but analog computing isn't on the desktop yet. It's pretty much research-only at this point and doesn't have that much of a future anyways.

The reason you can't emulate PPC on x86 (and therefore not run OS X on a PC) is mainly because of the number of registers on each CPU type. A register is basically a *really* fast memory slot for the CPU to temporarily store something. Your RAM, while tons faster than a hard disk, isn't all that fast, so the processor uses registers to do calculations without waiting on RAM all the time. The PPC instruction set defines more registers than the x86 instruction set (I know I'm off, but I think it's something like 32 General Purpose registers versus 8). Becuase of this, you can't fit the extra registers in PPC into the one that x86 provides. So, where do you store them? Uber slow memory, of course! Unfortunately, that's the big shortcoming in emulating PPC on x86. It's kind of like fitting a square peg into a round hole, and the square peg is 4 times the size of the hole :D

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You can't run MacOSX on a PC because the Mac's hardware is all digital and all PC hardware is anolog (as in signals and what not).

That is why macs are so expensive, because it's all digital and very expensive stuff.

That may be the most incorrect statement ever made. DC/AC circuits is a good class. Look into it.

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