post music: fava - sarah ft. smote, becca jane grey (keeno remix)
Okay so this might actually be a bit of retro bait, but it's actually real and I've realised it the more I look at it.
I have a Power Mac G5. It's the most powerful model, the A117 from late 2005 with the quad core configuration. It was the subject of a cooling mod I did a while back involving modern 92mm PC tower coolers. I'm shocked to this day that I was actually able to pull this off, and the G5 still works happily even today. It has a dual-boot configuration with Mac OS X Leopard and Adelié Linux and even the Plasma desktop (though Plasma 5) runs super smoothly.
It rarely gets turned on and used. Not that I don't want to or anything, but I just haven't found a reason to turn it on. The last time it got turned on to do actual work was when I did The Browser Marks last November. Since then it's come up a couple of times to check a few things and run an occassional Adelié update, but beyond that it's sat to my left powered down.
Sometimes I think about why I don't use my G5, and what I've come up with is one reason with two parts: if I need to do something that requires lots of power, I'd just use my regular machines in Atago and Takao; and if I want to do something with PowerPC, I've found the G4s that I have are good enough.
Let's start with the former. My regular machines are.... probably overkill even for what I do, but if I need the power, they're there.
Atago is a Xeon variant ThinkPad P51 which recently received a touch display upgrade because the hinges on the old display cracked and cooked the whole folding thing. With a Xeon E3-1505M v6 and perpetually running Quadro M2000 Mobile graphics because Linux, Atago can surely handle my every day editing, mailing, video watching, chatting, and even things that are best left not mentioned here.
Takao is a dual CPU high-end workstation from the 2016 color scheme. With a sorely unbalanced 28 total cores of two Xeon E5-2690 v4s and a paltry GTX 1650 it has a lot of CPU horses and not a lot of graphics horses. Despite this it's my main gaming and streaming rig. Eventually an A770 or something will go in there when it's not completely unfeasible.
There's not a lot that Takao can't do that my G5 can. Like I'm pretty sure I can even throw PowerPC emulation at it and it could even be passable. It can also do it while being more efficient at it. Full-tilting my G5 draws almost 500 watts on its own, which doesn't sound like a lot when high-end gaming rigs of today can easily push four digits, and even Takao has a thousand-watt block of a supply, but also I only need a tenth of that supply to get as much performance out of my main desktop than out of my G5. It's just not that powerful or power-efficient.
And then there's the heat. My G5 is currently out of service for the summer. If I dare turned it on now during the heat of summer which this post comes, the ambient temperature in the Lab would spike five degrees F instantly. This is probably part of the reason why the PowerPC Challenge happens in the winter. Enthusiasts' power bills aren't hit nearly as hard when their giant honkin' old Macs double as the home heating system.
Besides all of that, there are also the amount of G4-class machines around here that accomplish just about all I want to poke around with in PowerPC. My machine of choice is almost always either my final run PowerBook G4 with not a lot of speed but still plenty in 65 watts of power, or my final run Titanium PowerBook G4 if what I want to do is in pre-OS X. I make DJ studio sets with the former. It's more than capable of that. I'm pretty sure my G5 could do it too but my PowerBook will do it and do it with less power consumption and not all that noticeable performance hit. Ableton Live will run on it in 2025 the same as it did in 2009. And for older games, I have an eMac. Unreal Tournament never looked better.
I guess where the G5 could slide in to is with software compilation, but I can't justify that more than potentially rolling a cross-compilation setup on Takao or even my previously unmentioned M4 Mac mini-- a machine that craps out roughly 100x the performance of my G5 with roughly 10% of the power usage.
I do like my Power Mac G5, though. The entire line may have been a lemon, but it represented the last hurrah of not just the PowerPC architecture, but the architecture wars as a whole-- back when everything wasn't just an Intel.
At least, until Apple dropped their Silicon.