Someone wrote to Greg Stigers:

> Avoid the Motorolas like the plague, at least get a PowerPC one. It's
> the de-facto standard. Many applications are no longer supported on
> Motorola platforms. Some others ship with "fat" binaries with both
> Motorola and PPC support (Reflection comes to mind).

I had responded that I thought perhaps the person was thinking of the
Mac clone from Motorola called "StarMax" which was sold a few years ago.

The reason for THIS note is just to say that Patrick Santucci convinced
me that this was not the case.  Specifically, the writer must have thought
that Motorola made only the older CISC processors (680x0), while someone
(IBM) makes the RISC (PowerPC) processors.

While IBM does this, and does it well, Motorola is heavily involved in the
PowerPC chip development as well.  In fact, their version of the G4 (the
one that Apple selected) contains what Apple calls the "Velocity Engine"
(known
by Motorola as "AltiVec").  It's the 128-bit vector processor that can boost
performance for those apps written to take advantage of it.

--Glenn