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Darwin on Crusoe?
MacOS Rumors is running a blurb that Apple is exploring porting Darwin to other processors (including Transmeta's Crusoe processor) due to frustration with availability of high speed Motorola G4 processors. An interesting though, a Mac without a Motorola chip... Of course, it's just a rumor at this point... (update: I've got it
confirmed from "anonymous sources" that this is true)
Instead of "porting" Darwin to x86 and running it on a bog-standard Crusoe, why not talk the Crusoe into being a G4 instead of an x86? I was under the impression that the Crusoe's code-morphing software could be reworked to emulate other instruction sets besides x86 ...
That being said - i was with apple sticking with the PPC for a long time.. but now, with almost a _year_ of failure... i'm beginning to believe that there needs to be another way to power our Macs. We have almost 12 months of proof that Motorola can't cut it. Hell, they care 20 times more about embedded processors - and are simply not _that_ interested in high end PPCs.
Now, if you want some _honest_ reporting of what's going on, besides the bong resin i spewed out on my page, go read about the G4 mess over at AppleInsider. It tells about the problems that Apple is having with Mot and how they went begging to IBM to make AltiVec enabled PPCs.
I do think that Apple is in real trouble with the PPC series.. and its not the technology, its the companies involved.
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It woudl be even more interesting to see Mac on a Sparc chip or an 1000Mhz Alpha. Now that would be speed in style. Think of the graphic capabilities that would have.
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
Sure, they get misinformation sometimes, but they don't misrepresent it as fact, and the correct information far outweighs the errors.
It's conceivable that Apple could work with Transmeta to make a PowerPC clone. But that's what it would have to be - same architecture, same instruction set, different chip.
I remember thinking awhile back that AMD would make an interesting addition to the Apple-IBM-Motorola partnership - after all, AMD already licences technology from Motorola, and vice-versa I think.
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But that wouldn't be a Mac. It'd be a bastardized Mac-like implentation. No matter how much you try to justify it, it they just no longer would be the Mac's that we've known. A lot of the Mac OS' ease of use comes from it's closeness to the hardware. Things like Plug and Play (which apple never bothered to name as such) work much better on every iteration of mac compared to PC's. They also do USB much better than PC's. That's not just beacuse of a couple extensions to the Mac OS. It's beacause Apple knows EXACTLY what chips to expect in each Mac system, as well as tolerances of things like motherboards and cables. Microsoft can have pretty much no assurances that vendor A's USB implentation is anything like vendor B's (especially so the smaller the vendor is)... they may even use the same chipset, but place them at different distances from the PCI brideg chips, messing up the timing...
>the roll your own crowd.
that market isn't as attractive as you might think. it's composed largely of people who want to buy components on the cheap. the margins there are thin, and strongly susceptible to economies of scale. if you're not one of the really big fish in that market, or one of the hyerspecialized little fish, you're fish food. that's why we're unlikely ever to see a vertically integrated hardware/OS/software vendor in the x86 clone market.
Apple's marketing is strongly based on transparent hardware support and ease of use.. "it works, right out of the box", "this is the manual you get with a Mac", "there is no step three", etc. that requires tight synchronization between hardware and software, and the roll your own crowd could traditionally care less about that. they want to build what's cheap, not bow down before someone's list of officially approved hardware. the last thing Apple needs is to have its brand shot down by a proliferation of nightmare boxes built by people who don't give a damn about Apple specs.
besides, it costs like hell to support umpty-seven different permutations of hardware at all, let alone reliably. Microsoft has trouble doing it, and they're just a tad bigger than Apple is. you even hear occasional stories about Linux users not being able to get a certain hardware configuration to work, and we have a fairly decent amount of support, too.
so when you take the various factors into account.. loss of margins on the hardware side, negative branding from noncompliant hardware in the marketplace, and a geometric increase in the cost of support on the software side.. you'd have to buy a whole lot of Apple-produced software to offset what you'd cost them.
just between you, me, and the fencepost error, i don't think you were planning to spend more than a couple $K on software, were you?
While this Would Be A Good Thing, it's not quite this simple. The motherboard would have to include the Apple ROM, which is one of the primary keys to getting MacOS to run on other hardware archs. There is also the matter of the device support. MacOS MoBoards have so much on them: 16bit sound, Firewire, etc. old Macs has SCSI-1, video, etc. on the board also. Finally, the BIOS for MacOS is their own product called OpenFirmware, which they would have to either write around or release compatability info on.
Now don't get me wrong, the MacOS hardware software dependency is going towards something where this may be possible. For instance:
The ROM is slowly being moved into a system file which gets loaded into RAM. MacOSX doesn't (read: "shouldn't") access the ROM at all, I believe (Yay!)
Video and SCSI are now off the board. Video is going to be standard AGP (as in Sawtooth G4's) rather than on-board or in a special 66MHz yet 32 bit PCI slot.
MacOSX early versions/Rhapsody Dr's were released under certain x86 platforms already. MOSR had a report of someone seeing a Rhapsody DR at Cupertino(sp?) running on a Sun SPARc 4.
So there are hurdles to overcome, but Apple has been overcoming them slowly anyway. The most likely thing that I would see happening is Apple making motherboards based on their hardware for different CPU (AMD-Motorola alliance crossed with Apple-Moto-IBM's 'AIM' alliance may yield something interesting...K7's maybe?) would probably be the most likely outcome.
In this case, you will still have a premade system from Apple then build on it.
- Sig
On Macintoshes, you can access it by holding down Command-Option-O-F while booting. On Suns, it's Stop-A. I believe someone actually wrote a Forth version of Breakout that could run on Apple's OF implementation. Pretty neat trick for a boot monitor, imho.
Some PCI devices even have Forth driver code in their ROMs.
Translation: "I got scared during the dark days when Apple was 'beleagered,' so I ran and hid my head in the sand."
I just read this morning how they chose not to give or even sell (at street price) iMacs to freeiMac. The company FreeiMac would give away free iMac computers with the usual 3 years of Earthlink subscription plus accepting advertising.
Translation: "I read somewhere that Apple didn't want to supply tech support to thousands of users too dumb to know that there's no such thing as a free computer, and anyway, Apple already has an Earthlink deal going."
Talk about clueless! They have turned down another opportunity to increase the awareness and use of their computers. They already have an ever decreasing share of the market and decisions like this will only help seal their doom.
Translation: "What is this iMac thing everyone is talking about? Why have I never heard of it? I'm sure glad I sold all my Apple stock when they reached that high of 18."
Jobs is an insane, megalomanial leader of a corporation led by more fools. Not that Apple doesn't do good things -- the Macintosh is an incredible computer and I loved mine. But I bowed to economics and bought a less expensive PC (I prefer Linux or BeOS, thank you).
Translation: I've heard that Steve Jobs runs a tight ship, and forces his employees to work towards a common goal, and to be productive. It must suck to work where you have to earn your paycheck. Since I don't have a paycheck to worry about, I couldn't afford anything but this leftover PII doorstop, and whatever free OS I could find to run on it."
This possible move to the Crusoe processor may be the sign of intelligence: Emulating the G4 in a cheaper and less power-hungry processor == Less expensive G4 == Cheaper Macs == More consumers buying your expensive hardware.
Translation: "I don't know much about the G4, but I assume it uses electricity just as inefficiently as a Pentium. I wonder if I can get a free Crusoe. Too bad I flunked economics."
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I don't know if the porting story is true, but Mac OS Rumors has a spotty record. Many of its leads often seem to be lifted from elsewhere, the rumor reliability is poor, and usually so late as to be useless, besides which its articles are so filled with bogus predictions using words such as "likely", "possibly", "predicted", and longs chains of if-then scenarios as to completely obliterate any authoritative source that might have passed a true lead on in the first place.
You will be issued one grain of salt apiece.
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