Can I use my Macbook Pro in a Power Mac G5 ?

[SnowyDaysAlways]

I have a Macbook Pro 15" probably mid 2012 and a Macbook Pro 13" mid 2012. I also have a Power Mac G5 Quad 2.5. I was wondering if i could somehow use the power of one of the Macbooks (after I upgrade the Ram and HD) with the Power Mac. A sort of Frankenstein monster made from the two products.

Ive looked through google and forums but cant find anything talking about this. I apologize if this has already been discussed and would appreciate a link for more information.

If you have any ideas or theories, those are appreciated as well.

 

[Howard2k]

Remember in that movie The Fly where the guy managed to merge a human and a fly. Find him and his machine.

Otherwise, no, not really. You could keep one running "headless" and then remote to it and have it perform your long CPU intensive tasks, but that's probably far more trouble than it's worth.

 

[keysofanxiety]

Nope, there’s no native/current application on OS X that can be used for distributed computing, where you hook together Macs for increased power. I’m sure there was one once with Mac Minis but I could be wrong.

Regardless, even if it was possible, it literally wouldn’t be worth the electrical bill. Plus the performance you’d lose due to I/O & latency with legacy hardware would compound that.

Unless you’re running specific old applications, the G5 these days can’t justify the electricity it draws.

 

[MadDawg2020]

I have a Macbook Pro 15" probably mid 2012 and a Macbook Pro 13" mid 2012. I also have a Power Mac G5 Quad 2.5. I was wondering if i could somehow use the power of one of the Macbooks (after I upgrade the Ram and HD) with the Power Mac. A sort of Frankenstein monster made from the two products.

Ive looked through google and forums but cant find anything talking about this. I apologize if this has already been discussed and would appreciate a link for more information.

If you have any ideas or theories, those are appreciated as well.

It might be an interesting experiment for an expert programmer but otherwise there would little practical use for this.

Even if you were able to somehow able to network the machines in some kind of distributed node, the G5 (Mototola) and MacBookPro (Intel) run on completely different architectures and there is no common operating system between them. The G5 maxes out around OS 10.5 and the MBP would start at 10.7 / 8 depending on the exact model.
The G5 (depending on the exact model) run multiple Motorola physical separate single core processors - along with a jet turbine fan and 10 lb block of a heat sink to cool them, the 2012 era MBP's ran a single duo core (or maybe single core on the cheapest model) intel processors. There are no programs that would know how to handle processing between such different architectures. Assuming you could work around all that and could write some sort of custom program, you would still have all all kinds of performance bottlenecks and latency between the different boards, ram and so on.

If you really wanted to extend the life of the G5, you could easily set it up as a simple home server / media server - load it up with a bunch of hard drives and use it to bounce files around to all your other machines.

 

[leman]

You can set up a distributed computing system (Apple used to have their own but they have discontinued it in favor for open-source systems), but it really depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to split parallel tasks (e.g encoding hundreds of video files) between the two machines, it might be possible, if you are expecting better performance in Safari - forget about it, doesn’t work this way.

And anyway, the G3 Mac is hopelessly outdated and I doubt that you can do much useful with it.