Originally intended for personal computers, the architecture is well known for being used by Apple's desktop and laptop lines from 1994 until 2006, and in several videogame consoles including Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, and Nintendo's GameCube, Wii, and Wii U. PowerPC was also used for the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars and a variety of satellites.

IBM soon realized that a single-chip microprocessor was needed in order to scale its RS/6000 line from lower-end to high-end machines.

Furthermore, Apple had conducted its own research and made an experimental quad-core CPU design called Aquarius,[2]: 86–90  which convinced the company's technology leadership that the future of computing was in the RISC methodology.

[2]: 287–288  IBM approached Apple with the goal of collaborating on the development of a family of single-chip microprocessors based on the POWER architecture.

The PowerPC chip was one of several joint ventures involving the three alliance members, in their efforts to counter the growing Microsoft-Intel dominance of personal computing.

It allowed the company to sell a widely tested and powerful RISC CPU for little design cash on its own part.

It also maintained ties with an important customer, Apple, and seemed to offer the possibility of adding IBM too, which might buy smaller versions from Motorola instead of making its own.

If the new POWER one-chip version could be made bus-compatible at a hardware level with the 88000, that would allow both Apple and Motorola to bring machines to market far faster since they would not have to redesign their board architecture.

Microsoft released Windows NT 3.51 for the architecture, which was used in Motorola's PowerPC servers, and Sun Microsystems offered a version of its Solaris OS.

Workplace OS featured a new port of OS/2 (with Intel emulation for application compatibility), pending a successful launch of the PowerPC 620.

The building is named after the site in Arthurian legend where warring forces put aside their swords, and members of the three teams that staff the building say the spirit that inspired the name has been a key factor in the project's success thus far.Part of the culture here is not to have an IBM or Motorola or Apple culture, but to have our own.Toward the close of the decade, manufacturing issues began plaguing the AIM alliance in much the same way they did Motorola, which consistently pushed back deployments of new processors for Apple and other vendors: first from Motorola in the 1990s with the PowerPC 7xx and 74xx processors, and IBM with the 64-bit PowerPC 970 processor in 2003.

Around the same time, IBM exited the 32-bit embedded processor market by selling its line of PowerPC products to Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC) and focusing on 64-bit chip designs, while maintaining its commitment of PowerPC CPUs toward game console makers such as Nintendo's GameCube, Wii and Wii U, Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360, of which the latter two both use 64-bit processors.

Power.org operates under the governance of the IEEE with IBM continuing to use and evolve the PowerPC processor on game consoles and Freescale Semiconductor focusing solely on embedded devices.

IBM continues to develop PowerPC microprocessor cores for use in their application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) offerings.

At the time the G4 was launched, Motorola categorized all their PowerPC models (former, current and future) according to what generation they adhered to, even renaming the older 603e core "G2".

An operating system will see a warped view of the world when it accesses external chips such as video and network hardware.

Fixing this warped view requires that the motherboard perform an unconditional 64-bit byte swap on all data entering or leaving the processor.

This was done so that PowerPC devices serving as co-processors on PCI boards could share data structures with host computers based on x86.

This allowed the chip to be used by IBM in their existing POWER1-based platforms, although it also meant some slight pain when switching to the 2nd generation "pure" PowerPC designs.

The accelerator cards also included either a Motorola 68040 or 68060 CPU in order to maintain backwards compatibility, as very few apps at the time could run natively on the PPC chips.

Utilizing the portability platform yielded by the secret Star Trek project, the company ported the essential pieces of their Mac OS operating system to the PowerPC architecture, and further wrote a 68k emulator that could run 68k based applications and the parts of the OS that had not been rewritten.

This was a deliberate design goal on Motorola's part, who used the 603 project to build the basic core for all future generations of PPC chips.

In 1993, developers at IBM's Essex Junction, Burlington, Vermont facility started to work on a version of the PowerPC that would support the Intel x86 instruction set directly on the CPU.

Profitability concerns and rumors of performance issues in the switching between the x86 and native PowerPC instruction sets resulted in the project being canceled in 1995 after only a limited number of chips were produced for in-house testing.

Aside the rumors, the switching process took only 5 cycles, or the amount of time needed for the processor to empty its instruction pipeline.

[12] The first 64-bit implementation is the PowerPC 620, but it appears to have seen little use because Apple didn't want to buy it and because, with its large die area, it was too costly for the embedded market.

To create it, the POWER4 core was modified to be backward-compatible with 32-bit PowerPC processors, and a vector unit (similar to the AltiVec extensions in Motorola's 74xx series) was added.

All variants include a separate RISC microengine called the CPM that offloads communications processing tasks from the central processor and has functions for DMA.

[15] Aeronautical Development Establishment tested a high-performance digital flight control computer, powered by a quadraplex PowerPC-based processor setup on a HAL Tejas Mark 1A in 2024.