On Saturday 04 June 2005 9:40 pm, Martyn Drake wrote:
No doubt you've all probably read this by now:
http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+IBM%2C+switch+to+Intel+chips/2100-1006_3 -5731398.html?tag=nefd.lede
I think that CNet may have the wrong end of the stick, it wouldn't be the first time. For a start they are assuming that intel=x86, Apple may have enough rights to the PPC to get someone else other than IBM or Motorola to build it.
A clue is that they are moving the mini first and then higher end models later. I can't believe that they are going to be selling two different architectures side by side.
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.
Unless Apple have some clever (and bloody fast) code morphing technology up their sleeves that allows PPC code to run at full speed on x86.
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.
If this is really true, it'll be interesting to see how this is going to affect existing Mac users (who will have probably invested lots of money in software already) and existing PC users assuming that Apple opens up and allows anybody to run Mac OX for x86 processors.
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.
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.
Scary though, whatever the announcement.