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On MorphOS it's used more than you perhaps may think, but for stuff being discussed here (video encoding/decoding, rendering, etc) it is a big and important performance booster.


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If I interpret Andreas Wolf's benchmarks above, it says that the X5000 has a slight upper hand for most (non-SIMD) integer operations. For floating point and memory speed, it seems to be the other way round. And SIMD, Floating Point and memory are kind of essential for many day to day things, like codecs encoding/decoding and other "multimedia" situations, not to mention rendering, image processing, etc.

And then the G5 has the benefit of much higher clock frequencies on top of it all, so...

You may of course like/want an X5000 for several reasons, and you may even prefer it over a G5 system for some reasons as well. But I don't see how the X5000 wins over G5's in performance, I don't see how it would be a "G5 killer".

And then you factor in the price in the equation...

Looking at it through 2017-glasses, I'd say the X5000 is about on par with all other PPC stuff from more than a decade ago. Who cares what is slightly faster or slower in one or another area of measurement, when the situation in total is so off the charts behind? The rest of the world moved several dimensions ahead since these performance levels at all were relevant in desktop computing.

Here we are now, looking at how G4's and X1000 and X5000 can decode 720p x.264 streams, and the G5 can do it in 1080p. While the rest of the world is at 4k and x.265. My phone films in 4k. All films of my children, family activities etc. You know. It's everyday stuff now, not science fiction. My next monitor will be 4k. 720p isn't really funny then.

Of course there are better/smarter ways to decode video streams, by letting the GPU offload the CPU for example. But the need for CPU grunt power doesn't go away. It's still needed for a lot of other things in everyday computing. PPC is hopelessly left dimensions behind.

In my eyes, the move to x64 is urgent.