s belonging to the PowerPC/Power ISA architecture family have been used in numerous applications.
Personal Computers
was the dominant player in the market of personal computers based on PowerPC processors until 2006 when it switched to Intel-based processors. Apple used PowerPC processors in the Power Mac, iMac, eMac, PowerBook, iBook, Mac mini, and Xserve. Classic Macintosh accelerator boards using PowerPCs were made by DayStar Digital, Newer Technology, Sonnet Technologies, and TotalImpact. There have been several attempts to create PowerPC reference platforms for computers by IBM and others: The IBM PReP is a system standard intended to ensure compatibility among PowerPC-based systems built by different companies; IBM POP is an open and free standard and design of PowerPC motherboards. PegasosOpen Desktop Workstation is an open and free standard and design of PowerPC motherboards based on Marvell Discovery II chipset; PReP standard specifies the PCI bus, but will also support ISA, MicroChannel, and PCMCIA. PReP-compliant systems will be able to run OS/2, AIX, Solaris, Taligent, and Windows NT; and the CHRP is an open platform agreed on by Apple, IBM, and Motorola. All CHRP systems will be able to run Mac OS, OS/2-PPC, Windows NT, AIX, Solaris, Novell Netware. CHRP is a superset of PReP and the PowerMac platforms. Power.org has defined the Power Architecture Platform Reference that provides the foundation for development of computers based on the Linux operating system. List of computers based on PowerPC:
Blue Gene/L and Blue Gene/P Supercomputer, keeping the top spots of supercomputers since 2004, also being the first systems to performa faster than one Petaflops.
System p with POWER5 processors are used as the base for many supercomputers as they are made to scale well and have powerful CPUs.
Roadrunner is a new Cell/Opteron based supercomputer that will be operational in 2008, pushing the 1 PetaFLOPS mark.
Summit and Sierra, currently the world’s first and second fastest supercomputers, respectively.
Apple
System X of Virginia Tech is a supercomputer based on 1100 Xserves running Mac OS X. First built using stock PowerMac G5s making it one of the cheapest and most powerful supercomputer in its day.
Cray
The XT3, XT4 and XT5 supercomputers have Opteron CPUs but PowerPC 440 based SeaStar communications processors connecting the CPUs to a very high bandwidth communications grid.
released a Personal Digital Assistant reference platform based on PowerPC 405LP. This project is discontinued after IBM sold PowerPC 4XX design to AMCC.
Game consoles
All three major seventh-generation game consoles contain PowerPC-based processors. Sony's PlayStation 3 console, released in November 2006, contains a Cell processor, including a 3.2 GHz PowerPC control processor and eight closely threaded DSP-like accelerator processors, seven active and one spare; Microsoft's Xbox 360 console, released in 2005, includes a 3.2 GHz custom IBM PowerPC chip with three symmetrical cores, each core SMP-capable at two threads, and Nintendo's Wii console, also released in November 2006, contains an extension of the PowerPC architecture found in their previous system, the GameCube.
