are any apple G4 powerPC processors used by US military or us fed gov?

[JOHNGALT99]

are any apple G4 powerPC processors being used by US military or us fed gov? I know the army is allmost exclusively intel in the field and out. I am writing a report at work and thought I would run this by you guys. I found a few being used to drive air borne displays and one in the UAV the global hawk.

thanks for you help from DC

 

[addragyn]

NASA runs a bunch of Macs. They also have a cluster @ JPL. You can see them sometimes on the NASA channel when nothing is on and they're just running a feed.

The Navy bought a bunch of Xserves last year for image processing on subs.

 

[thorin]

US military or us fed gov?

That's only a couple million employees + servers. Without a doubt there's a mac or two in there somewhere.

Thorin

 

[WalkingDead]

Now we know why the shuttles are keep blowing up. Anyways, how typical of our government organization? Always paying more for less.

Originally posted by: addragyn
NASA runs a bunch of Macs. They also have a cluster @ JPL. You can see them sometimes on the NASA channel when nothing is on and they're just running a feed.

The Navy bought a bunch of Xserves last year for image processing on subs.

 

[thorin]

Actually I recall when ISS first went in to operation/service it had a number of problems with MS Winblows that made the press.

Thorin

 

[Eug]

George W. uses one.

The Navy did buy a bunch of G4 Xserves, but they're running Linux.

NASA does computational fluid dynamics calculations on Macs, and they love the G5.

A lot of the Mars lander guys run PowerBooks judging by the photos.

 

[JOHNGALT99]

thanks guys,

I just found out that some will be used in the joint strike fighter cockpit display system

 

[addragyn]

"Anyways, how typical of our government organization? Always paying more for less."

Puhlease. The G4 is very powerful in signal processing applications. This is science, being a fanboy has nothing to do with it. Nor will it change the fact.
"On our codes a dual 533 G4 and Altivec code is 6X-faster than a dual 1 GHz PIII (we don't have a GHz G4 yet)." beowulf.org

Or maybe you meant paying more for less admin staff, less antivirus sw & less worms?

The thing is hardware is always the smallest cost in the equation. It's the service, support, integration & licensing contracts. The US Govt. is Microsoft's biggest customer. The Dept. of Homeland Security spent 100 million for MS licenses. EDS won a 6.9 billion dollar contract for the US Navy intranet. EDS is an all MS shop.

You wanna talk about spending more for less? Imagine if the .Gov used an OS with no server client cost structure (Linux, OS X) or if they plowed some of that money into a Linux for them and all their citizens instead of spending billions on licensing fees year after year. The hardware costs are freakin' negligible.

***

W & his PowerBook

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: JOHNGALT99
thanks guys,

I just found out that some will be used in the joint strike fighter cockpit display system

Yeah, but I don't think that's gonna be any way related to Apple.

PowerPC G4 chips are used all over the place, but they're made by Motorola. Apple just is a Motorola customer for chips.

The comments about the Navy and NASA using them is with actual Apple-made hardware.

 

[Regs]

"Amercian Space craft, russain space craft. What difference does it make, THEIR ALL MADE IN TAWIAN ! " -

 

[Gunnar]

this thread must be a joke. Anyone have any idea how widespread the PowerPC embedded line is? This is how a company like Motorola can stay afloat without a desktop processor. The "G" thing is an Apple convention, you might want to refer by the numbered cores that Motorola assigns (74xx).

Any word on if Power processors are powering cell phones? I have no idea...