I've noticed old PowerPC macs tend to be pretty cheap. Are they worth using for anything after installing Linux?

I hear this all the time, but what does this actually entail?

ARM will never be competitive because planned obsolescence is part of every business that uses it. It has no standardization. It has no standard OS (the phrase "Board Support Package" is cancer in itself, and RISC OS is a toy). It needs to die.

Nah, plebs are just locked into Intel because of Windows. The "Performance" you speaks ofs is a very blinkered definition.

What do you want to do? They look nice, the hardware is alright enough, unless you're really obsessed with media consumption or use a lot of shitty web-apps you'll probably find it usable.

I've heard support is decent, OpenBSD is also supposedly pretty good too.

10.4 with classic mode offers the most versatility however thanks to its larger software library and most importantly a web browser specifically targeted to and optimized for the architecture.

If you're looking at the one you posted specifically, it was either a high-end or upper mid-range config of the DDR-era G5 that should be good enough for most stuff, just don't expect miracles, depending on what you wanted to do with it. But for $120, it's not too bad, at the very least it would be a fun toy to play with.

Doubt most of them could actually give you anything meaningful other than philosophical drivel or nitpicking trivial speedbumps that were documented and solved decades ago. The other posters ITT were right to highlight that PPC doesn't really live up to the hype, it was quite lackluster towards the end, but that's not really much of a reason to knock it anymore since it's all old as fuck and cheaply acquired now anyway. It's still, as said, exotic, and they did and will continue to perform adequately to reasonable user expectations.

Yeah, because that was why NT 4 was so successful on PowerPC and Alpha, right, and RT tablets sold like hotcakes too?
There's a multitude of reasons for the Intel "lock-in", the most important being that it's established and plenty fast/well-featured enough, as well as the software that runs on top of Windows, not simply Windows itself.

IMHO what is really boils down to is RISC (MIPS, ARM, SPARC, etc.) v CISC (x86). The thing is, there isn't really CISC anymore. Most modern 'CISC' processors are RISC with a translation layer slapped on so they can keep using the CISC instruction set.

I don't really like to see it that way, x86 is still very much a "CISC" architecture to the programmer, regardless of what methodology it employs to execute what you feed into it. Breaking things down into simpler parts isn't really the only part of RISC anyway, there's nothing stopping you from doing that on a "pure CISC" design, after all.

But overall, I'm still with you, there really isn't much of a difference anymore, modern RISC isn't all that "reduced" or simple anymore (on the desktop and in the datacenter) and modern CISC integrates plenty of good RISC-isms. The debate is pointless and dead.

But regardless, it's still a totally different platform, and not all RISCs and CISCs are alike even if they share the label. Even if it doesn't make a shit of difference to the end user abstracting it away, it's still novel to think about.

Modern RISC processors are more CISC like, while modern CISC processors and more RISC like

Both paradigms are meaningless now

The G5 Powermacs make nice electrical heaters for small rooms. I am not joking. They have high airflow, don't sound too bad, and the high-end models idle at ~230W and can use ~600W under load.

Use one to mine alt-coins, or run [email protected]/* */ and you can stay warm in style.

i used apple g5 with ubuntu 12.04, worked great... but every other linux distro with ppc support wont install because of some shitty errors... I installed FreeBSD then and i couldnt compile xorg because it was broken and i had to wait for developers to fix... and then i dumped g5... i am now on thinkcentre

nice, did you measure those on your own systems or are you getting these from somewhere?

kind of want to buy myself a Kill-a-Watt and take measurements on my shitbox stash

No.

Get the case and make a nice hackintosh, that's what I've always seen them used for.

youtube.com/watch?v=GFkASvU1azw

pick one, G5 mods look like trash unless you really put effort into them

stick your shitlake gaymer build into a lian-li clone case if you want to be a hipster

I got the numbers from memory. A friend of mine used a few top-end G5s in his graphics design studio, back in the days.

That's because the future is VLIW. Now we wait for a compiler made by God. Terry, pls.

Do you want to use an older machine just for the experience of using an older machine? Then go ahead, just don't expect it to compare to modern machines (IIRC the highest end dual processor Powermac G5 benchmarks worse than that Asus C201 Chromebook that had libreboot ported to it). I don't really know if PowerPC manages to be much better than x86 for freedom purposes, especially with the computer being a Mac.

given the fact that ARM makers have been known to skew popular benchmarking suites by accelerating specific trivial operations that doesn't really mean much

either way it doesn't really matter for shit if you're running proper software on it and not trying to bloat it out, the only thing they're shit at is heavy javascript

that's just a shoddy assumption based on meme spouting, as far as I'm aware there's no shady x86-esque "management engine" to speak of in any desktop PPC systems or anything to a similar effect, and as far as PPC hardware goes Macs are probably the closest to "free" you can get since they use Open Firmware similar to Sun boxes rather than whatever proprietary shit IBM probably loaded on POWER Intellistations

Some benchmarks show you the scores for the individual operations that they do so you can throw those out. Also, the best powerpc G5 processors are still 11 years old and competed with single core Xeons and Opterons, and I would guess that all of those have aged just as poorly if you need power.

Actually it's based on my experience with a Macintosh SE. The thing is so locked down that in order to use a *nix OS you have to run it on top of System 6 (or whatever other version) most of the time.

Really not a fair comparison as Intel first released their management engine just months before Apple discontinued the last of their PowerPC based computers in 2006.

I'll have to look this up some.

It's not locked down at all. It was just never designed to run anything other than System. The reason you can't run just *nix is because the toolbox is hardwired to load to RAM upon boot. You have to passthrough from Toolbox to *nix. It's like this with every mac until Apple implemented Open Firmware.

at least give us something to pick apart here, I wouldn't even be surprised if your claims were actually true, but I still don't see it mattering for shit, nobody's expecting a supercomputer here, and newer G5s run perfectly well offline and online if you don't go overboard on javascript

you might as well be telling me all brand new dual-socket workstation PCs are shit because you couldn't install slackware on an e-machines all in one in 2000, the SE is a minimum 12 years older than even the oldest G5s, built on an entirely different architecture for an entirely different purpose by what was practically an entirely different company

it's not even really a valid point against contemporary hardware either, vanilla 68k compacts were extremely simple boxes that weren't built to run anything but what they were designed for, pretty much anything post-68020 doesn't have this problem at all, fuck Apple even maintained their own 100% SysV UNIX (trademark) for quite a time as well as an official (semi?) Linux distribution

don't even really understand what you're saying here, I'm just pointing out that it's generally accepted to not be as maybe-backdoor-laden as newer chips

Geekbench for example. They don't have benchmarks on the PowerPC G5 series though and I really don't think there are any benchmarks that put the G5 against modern hardware. My claim was just from comparing Xeons and Opterons that the G5 was supposedly comparable to to an old laptop with an AMD Athlon 64 x2 (don't remember the exact model number) from 2009 I have sitting around, then later on comparing that Asus C201 against the same laptop on Geekbench.

I'm just saying neither were the older x86 processors that the PowerPC G5 competed with at the time Apple was using it.

that's... really nonsensical, you're building an assumption on a chip by looking at a bunch totally unrelated chips and totally different systems with varying software stacks on one of the most gamed benchmarks in existence

not contesting that at all, just trying to say that it's probably not a bad choice if you're looking for something at least a little "free"

That isn't PowerPC, it's POWER8
.

Should have specified the first comparison between the older Opterons and Xeons and the Athlon 64 x2 were from PassMark as I don't think any other place still lists that old of processors, not Geekbench. I know comparing processors that way isn't the best but I figured it would at least be accurate enough to judge one processor being better than another if a significant difference is shown some point along the way.

My PowerPC computers are ~5k miles from me, but I'd like to see sunspider, and others, run in TenFourFox, on 2.3GHz DC (not DP) G5, then on Firefuck with a 2.3GHz Athlon 64 X2..

Also, GeekBench sucks, Apple paid them off to skew it in favor of the Conroe CPUs. In the real world, almost no applications produced such gains by moving to C2D CPUs.

Doesn't Gentoo have a PowerPC port?

Most distros have a PowerPC version, and for those that don't its really just a case of compiling for the instruction set in much the same way one would compile for ARM.

Not really
Power consumption to performance ratio is abysmal, and the performance isn't good enough to use as a main computer in 2016.
They aren't all that expandable or compatible with hardware, better than a modern mac but worse than a PC from the same year.

Get an older G4 and boot OS 9, the feeling of speed and elegance is unparalleled as are the crashes.