Re: Why does minecraft need a beefy computer?
I don't mean to nit-pick, but according to Wikipedia, Java was launched in 1995. The PowerPC processor predates that by a couple of years, and in fact, the core PowerPC ISA is over 80% compatible with its POWER predecessor, and could have been written to a lowest common denominator with POWER.
If the underlying hardware were a factor in the design, you would have thought that the JVM would have looked more like SPARC than Intel, although you could argue that it is easier to write simple virtual machine on complex ones rather than the other way round.
I have not looked at the performance figures, but IBM have continued to develop Java on Power systems running AIX, iOS and Linux, and I would expect that these have decent performance, but I don't know where Apple would have sourced their Java for OSX from. At one time, IBM and Apple were partners, but by the time the G4 processor came along, the Apple/IBM/Motorola partnership was pretty much unravelling.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
