Picking up the pieces: John Siracusa mourns the Power PC [via]:

I can think of two reasons, both of which probably contributed to the end result. First, it seems like IBM promised Apple something that it failed to deliver: a 3GHz G5 one year after the 2GHz G5 was announced. Steve Jobs stood on a public stage and declared it a fait acompli […] Now Jobs is angry at IBM, and an angry Jobs is not pleasant to deal with. […]

And IBM doesn’t really care who wins [the console wars] because they get paid for every single unit sold: Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft. What’s 5 million Macs a year compared to 20 million game consoles? And over 5 years, IBM can sell the “same chip” (maybe with fabrication refinements that save IBM money anyway) up to 100 million times.

[…]

Many a “PC weenie” has been won over to the Mac side by the allure of strange, new hardware. For CPU geeks, its the same. Look no further than our own Hannibal whose slow ascent to PowerBook glory was guided by a fascination with AltiVec, plentiful registers, and an orthogonal ISA. Sure, x86 has the market-share and usually the speed, but is it elegant? Does it turn the CPU geek knobs all the way to 11? Is it sexy? No, not really. In fact, it’s pretty darned ugly. […]

It will pain me to know the contortions that instructions are going through in an x86 CPU inside a Mac.

See also the definition of AltiVec, before it’s dead. And I know most of my readers are annoyed at my quoting long geeky articles about Apple and stuff, but it’s not so easy and quick for me as it seems, since I have to make a French translation each time (Heavens know why, for the past couple of weeks I started translating quotes again, in order to feel useful or something).