On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 09:14:13AM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Also parts of OSX rely heavily on the Altivec/Velocity Engine/VMX, so without a major rework some things would slow down quite a bit. Unless Intel can graft a VMX instruction layer on X86.
I was under the impression that lots of OSX was based on NeXT technology, which originally ran on m68k and x86, I'm quite certain that Apple have been building an x86 version of OSX for some time and that the changes they would need to make to the OS to get it running on x86 would be minimal. Although, like you mentioned I wouldn't be surprised if the move isn't to Intel x86 but to a different Intel architecture, or possibly even an AMD platform?.
The platform just cannot survive another architecture shift. A lot of software has only just caught up with OSX on PPC, Apple cannot go back to those developers and ask them to rebuild their apps for X86.
But aren't many of these apps already built for x86 as they run on Windows? Certainly I was under the impression that most Apple users fave software was either made by Apple *or* Adobe. So again the porting wouldn't be disastrous (and given that if they were going to shift to x86 Adobe would already know this and probably have been given Mac OSX on x86 to build apps with).
You will never see OSX running native on standard PC hardware. Even Darwin is very fussy about what chipset it is running on. Even if Apple went the X86 route then you can be sure that OSX will only run with an Apple Bios and possibly a specific Apple chipset. Although this would make the PearPC guys life a lot easier.
Hmmmn, I was just thinking... Isn't it time for a Mac OS XI? I don't think it would be beyond Apple to start producing software for x86 with a limited range of hardware support (say only recent Nvidia and ATI gfx cards, limit it to fast cpus, Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 and above only and you can then ignore lots of the problems with old hardware as you don't support it). God knows if they will actually produce a version of Mac OS X that runs on standard x86 hardware, I can see that if they did it would be interesting, as I'm sure that many Windows users would be happy to pay 100 quid for a copy rather than the 200-300 quid that M$ want for Windows upgrades.
If OSX ran on standard PC's then Apple would fail as a hardware business and OSX would be in direct competition with Windows...For a start this probably means that they could wave goodbye to any new versions of MS Office.
You forget the funky thing that Apple can do if M$ say "no more office for Mac OS" they can just bundle technology similar to wine with a funky wrapper/installer and then run all the popular Windows software natively. It makes a huge difference to launching what would essentially be a new OS with the tagline "runs 90% of existing Windows software, while giving you the ease of use of Apple Mac OS X".
Either way, everything is just speculation until Monday. I reckon perhaps they are just going to announce iCrack where you give Apple money and they give you addictive hard drugs and then tell everyone how wonderful Apple is and how they are your friend really ;)
Thanks Adam