The PowerPC Has Still Got It (Llama on G4 Laptop)
7 comments
·November 12, 2025pizlonator
That's awesome!
I think that's the 12" G4 - still my favorite laptop ever, in terms of looks and form factor.
markgall
I still have my old PowerBook G4 from 2005, with some not-that-old Debian currently installed. Every time my main laptop goes out commission, I get the G4 back out and use it for a few days. It's good enough for most of my work, though modern web-browsing is a challenge. (Maybe one that somebody has solved, I haven't dug at all.)
jchw
I am pretty sure Apple did not design or manufacture PowerPC chips at any point, so I'm not sure how that would be considered "custom" silicon.
And anyway, the source article seems a bit more interesting.
https://www.theresistornetwork.com/2025/03/thinking-differen...
DogRunner
Apple didn't design the PowerPC or make custom variances. Motorola and IBM did it. Especially Altivec was added by Motorola, and IBM didn't like to add it to their PowerPC CPUs when Apple asked for help, when Motorola had the 500 MHz glitch bug back in the day.
There is a nice coverage on this topic at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tld91M_bcEI (Why the Original Apple Silicon Failed)
buildbot
Interesting, that article says llama.c not llama.cpp. I actually got llama.cpp going on a G4 awhile back, I guess I should write that up.
Edit - I just can’t read, original article was llama.c
Gotta push my powerpc llama.cpp fork now for sure!
anon291
There's nothing mysterious about AI. It's matrix and tensor ops which have been used for decades now. Hardware is pretty good at such things because memory accesses are nicely arranged.
Oh someone else is as silly as I am? I hacked this together a few months ago as well! I guess I should have written it up.
I’ve been getting llama.cpp going on various weird, old systems as I can and qwen3.c where llama.cpp has no hope. So far, I’ve tried various sparc generations (IIi, IIIi, Fujitsu M10, and an Oracle M7), a C8900 PA-RISC, some riscv boards, an Alpha 21264, POWER 9, and many X86 and ARM systems of course.