POWER and PowerPC
POWER started in IBM’s RS/6000 workstations in 1990. A year later IBM, Apple, and Motorola derived PowerPC from it — the architecture that carried every Macintosh until Apple moved to Intel in 2006, and most of the mid-2000s game consoles besides. The two lines converged back into one ISA, stewarded since 2013 by the OpenPOWER Foundation, and the specification is now open.
The modern end of the family is POWER9 and later, which runs little-endian Linux and is the rare server platform whose firmware the owner can audit and rebuild from source. The older end is big-endian, and keeping current software on it is work: mainline Linux still boots on a Power Mac G5 if you persist, while the Efika’s distribution packages have quietly disappeared from the mirrors.
In this family
ppc64le— 64-bit little-endian, the mode modern Linux distributions target on POWER8 and later.ppc64— 64-bit big-endian, the PowerPC 970 (Apple’s G5) era.powerpc— the 32-bit line, big-endian, still common in embedded parts like the MPC5200B.
In the lab
- Apple Power Mac G5 A PowerPC 970 workstation.
- Genesi Efika PPC A small 32-bit PowerPC board built around the MPC5200B.
- Raptor Computing Talos II A POWER9 workstation with owner-controlled firmware.