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PowerPC Open Platform Motherboards Finally Here
Cajal writes: "IBM's POP (PowerPC Open Platform) is a standard for making PowerPC-based motherboards. It's been out for years, but no one did anything with it. That's now changed. According to a story on PenguinPPC, Mai Logic is finally making POP motherboards. Finally, we can buy PowerPC motherboards without dealing with Apple."
One board costs $3,900 - I think I'll still be dealing with Apple for my PPC needs - get a dual CPU and a GeForce 4 included for that price!
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
personally if i wanted a powerPC i would want to deal with the people that have been doing it for years, and have the most to gain through its success... basically all the cmdrtaco's of the world that want a mac, but are pc slaves for some obscure reason.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
What would the advantadge of this be over an Intel/AMD system? Or is the clone AIX market going to open up?
If they're comparable in price to an intel I could see Linux folks using them for servers vs. Intel. But if the PPC is a lot more expensive (20%) I don't see the value in this.
If MacOS still ran on something other than Apple's machines like it did in the mid 90s that'd be a reason to get one, but at the moment I'm not seeing it.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Motorola makes a bunch of boards including the Sandpoint and the MVP (Which is a dual board). Galileo/Marvell makes boards, Tundra sells boards...
They're all ATX form factor and supported by linux too.
An Apple that isn't an Apple is quite tempting. My main complaint about those things for most of my years has been the inability to build a frankenstein like you can with the old PC architecture.
I've been planning on getting myself a new computer in the next few months, and pretty much assumed I'd be getting a Thunderbird. But now... now this makes me think. On the plus side the PPCs will be able to run Mac OS X (or will they?), but they won't be able to run any flavor of Windows (which I need for games and such). Of course, the deciding factor may just be how much more Mandrake supports their PPC code after this.
PPCs... feels like I'm talking about BattleTech...
You alreayd could get PowerPcs without dealing with apple. Terra soft [terrasoft.com] makes the iBriq. Adimitidly, its not designed for desktop use, as its about the size of a cdrom drive, and needs an adaptor to use a pci slot, but if you really don't want to deal wwith apple....
Mod point free since 2001
Why not just buy a damn Athlon +++++ whateever system. At least I can be sure my binary only applications would work (ie. Java, Games, drivers, etc). Yes, in an open-source-only world, thats cool...
If I HAVE to have a risc-based work-station I would rather do it on Solaris. You can pickup a sun-blade very cheep, throw in some ram and you have a great unix workstation. It will run all the crap you would want to run on linux, including linux itself.
If I want to use a PPC platform, I personally will buy an Apple.
But if you buy more than one... the first board is $3,900 and each additional board is $2,340. I hope the price is alot lower when the final version is produced. The specs are more like those of a $200 motherboard.
I Heart Sorting Networks
I'd assume that Apple continues to tie their Operating Systems to proprietary ROMs - making a generic PPC motherboard fairly useless if you're planning to run MacOS. Not like this is a new thing - since the early 80's, Apple has used their ROM chips to sue any clone manufacturers. I remember my 1992-vintage Mac emulator for the Amiga required Mac ROMs that the emulator manufacturer would not supply.
I'd love to be wrong on this one - getting more competition in the PPC-hardware space would be great, but I doubt Steve Jobs will play along - he'll take his ball home first.
'ARRGH! Pirate Designers of the Internet, we be!'
Competition is a good and healthy thing, but part of me is a little worried by this.
I mean, if apple hardware becomes the open market that PC hardware is now, Apple will have to quickly adapt.
Microsoft understood from the beginning that the real profit is to be made in software, but Apple is still a proprietary hardware company that happens to also sell the software which their machines require.
If the market truly opens up, Apple may face the really tough choice of dumping their hardware line entirely. When the time comes, will they make the right choice and make the shift to software-only gracefully?
If they don't then I fear that one of the last strongholds against Microsoft market share may wither and die.
On the other hand, it will be in the best interest of the companies which produce third party hardware to keep Apple in business(after all, if Apple goes under, who will buy hardware for Mac OS?), so maybe some sort of truce will be drawn. I guess as always, it's wait and see.
Really though, despite the foreshadowing, this is good news for the market.
lysergically yours
Only the core layer of OS X is open sourced: it's what we know as Darwin..
What makes Mac OS X really attractive on the surface is it's GUI, which is not open source. Check out a nifty diagram here to see how it all stacks up.
The answer is yes: Darwin will probably run easily on one of these boards, (there is an intel port of darwin). It is unlikely you'll get Aqua and the other supporting layers to run though, bearing in mind that it is unlikely Mac OS X "as is" will run on one of these boards without significant code surgery.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
I hope you mean "you get 2 cpus", since that $3900 is only for the board. There is no talk of getting a CPU with it. (lets not forget case, drive, memory, etc, etc, etc)
But we must also note, that this is "Evaluation" and not mass production. Odds are they are probably built much by hand for the time being, therebye raising the price (alot).
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
I like the "Ultra DAM 100" ports... oops :)
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
If POP has "been around for a few years now", whatever happened to the Common Hardware Reference Platform? Would POP be the phoenix from the ashes of CHRP by any chance?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Given that they are selling evaluation boards for $3,900 in quantity 1, I think sticking with Apple might be a good idea in the short term. Since the chipset is only $30 in quantity, hopefully somebody else will begin making affordable motherboards based upon the design. But Apple doesn't charge that much for a pimped out G4 tower, even with their steep RAM markup.
What's curious is that their web page seems to indicate that the same chipset works with x86, PPC, and MIPS processors. I'm sure there are 100 reasons why it's impossible, but that kind of chipset flexibility does seem to raise some interesting dual-boot or multiprocessor setups to say the least.
Moto (and many others) have been selling PPC motherboards for many years, maybe close to a decade by now. They are used for a fair number of embedded projects. The two downsides are cost, and every frickn' one of them seems to have another way to interface with PCI, or to deal with the boot sequence, or something. So all the not-so-fun parts of porting an OS have to be done again and again while the rest of it "just works" (or tends to).
P.S. for a (slow) PowerPC, just buy an old TiVo. Linux comes with it, and NTSC out. Of corse it is only 50Mhz, but it works (don't get a new TiVo by mistake, they try to rip you off with one of those 200ishMhz MIPS CPUs...)
"Evaluation Board" often means "produced by hand, in small lots" which is probably why the price is so high.
Best Slashdot Co
PPC is fated to be an embedded CPU only, unless the support hardware comes down in price.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This really doesn't seem like its that great. You get a 750CX (IBM's G3), 133mhz FSB, a few PCI slots, 1 AGP 2x slot, and a few other things like ethernet etc, and its almost 4 grand. Geez! I think you'd be better off with a fancy new dual G4 + GeForce 4 (Which, of course, you won't actually be able to get until the rest of us have had GeForce 4's for months) for $3k, which is complete, and even comes with a case.
This likely won't have much impact on Apple as a whole. Frankly, after trying to make older hardware useful spending countless hours failing to have successful installs of LinuxPPC and Yellowdog Linux, I was thrilled to see that I can in fact have BSD albiet Darwin flavored without agony (and, of course, my old hardware remains unused).
Apple's ultimate desktop success with Darwin/OSX will be because users who need that kind of OS power can now have it without the niggling driver details that plague Intel OS distributions. It amazes me that Linux has been as successful as it has with the agony that users have to endure to successfully install the OS. The bar is much higher now. Users can expect their OS install to just happen and still have the power tools of compilers and real server software without the electronic equivalent of repeatedly stabbing themselves in the leg with a fork.
Of course, the die hard slashdot crowd will always prefer Linux, but it seems to me that things are shifting to a new and friendlier approach.
well, lets think about this for a second. What does PC stand for?
:P The Anal Retentive part of me goes into convulsions every time I see PC vs. Mac. But then I give it chocolate and it quiets down.
Personal Computer.
Hmm, so wouldn't a motherboard for a personal computer also be a PC?
By jove, I think I'm right
POP is more akin to x86 than PC (or Mac for that matter)
I need a life.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
It isn't (yet?) highly integrated. Lots of on board components, makes for a more expensive system.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
As I understand it, the core codebase (Darwin) is fairly agnostic - it's just another flavor of Unix, teeth, hair, a**hole & all. Darwin sourcecode is available, if not GPL'd (Doesn't Apple have their own 'open source' license?). Darwin has already been ported to other platforms.
The catch is the UI - Apple's precious UI - the part of OSX that isn't available for the world+dog. In the bad old days, Apple would fill up the ROM chips will hardware implementations of their QuickDraw API (And lordy, did those old Macs need those API calls in hardware!).
During the CHRP clone days of the mid-90s, Apple was able to put all that stuff back in software, eliminating the need for those chips. Needless to say, CHRP is quite the distant memory.
So the question remains - is Apple still using proprietary chips on the Mobo to ensure that noone can manufacture legit clones? If so, what parts of OSX rely on that hardware? How much could you get running? It'll be interesting to find out..
'ARRGH! Pirate Designers of the Internet, we be!'
You're right when you say that what makes Apple Apple is that they sell the "whole widget" in one shiny box. As a matter of fact, you're right in pretty much everything you say.
I understand that this new motherboard does not hail the immediate arrival of a Mac hardware open market, but I think that it may be a sign of things to come. If there is a sudden push towards Apple clones, I don't know if all the litigation in the world can stop the market from opening up. Remember IBM(i understand that the case presents significant differences, but the analogy holds some water).
What I'm getting at is that Apple may have to face an open market not too far in the future. And you bring up another interesting point: Can the computer market really bear two competing open market standards?
lysergically yours
The more people that use POP, the more processors that IBM & Motorola can sell - this helps the old economies of scale kick in and make PPC processors cheaper.
Cheaper PPCs would help AIM compete with the commodity x86 marketplace.
I own a couple of pieces of alpha hardware and it's fun in a geeky way to have. It's nice to test code on other platforms, it's nice to be able to learn assembly to other platforms and have something to work on, and a 21264 makes a hell of a web server. I'd love to have a newer PowerPC machine to work on but the prices just aren't there. If I could buy a motherboard and processor for $400-$500 maybe even $600 then I could easily see a little clique of people doing it. I can see real market value to it as well, I've seen 6 or 7 embedded jobs over the last month that were for PowerPC products.
I hope that they are interested in lowering the prices and ramping up some mass production of the hardware. I could also see a huge market for lower priced integrated PowerPC motherboards with G3s or even 60x processors on them; put 3 NICs, IDE and a PowerPC on a motherboard for $200 and you have a nice DIY home gateway/firewall/router box.
Proprietary Apple hardware?
PCI? open.
USB? open.
Firewire? open.
VGA? open.
PowerPC? open.
ATI/nVidia Graphics? open.
Apple has already quickly adapted, by adopting industry-standard technologies, sans of course your blessed x86 platform. But who in their right mind likes working with the pile of shit that is the Intel platform?
Apple is less closed than Microsoft. No one says Company X can't go out there and build a PPC system. Hell, people have gotten OS X to run on a few old Power Computing (non-Apple) computers.
Regardless of the degree of difficulty in kludging darwin to run on the POP boards, you're still missing out on the one thing that has set Apple apart in the computer industry: the tight interweaving of hardware and software. The most attractive feature of a mac, the guarantee that your mac stuff will run, is not really available to those who use the POP board.
I can't understand why it excites any of you to be able to by a PowerPC chip from someone other than Apple. My dual processor G4 was reasonably cheap, Apple was friendly, and the package arrived quickly and was ready to go 90 seconds out of the box. Just don't buy an Apple monitor and don't get a ram upgrade (it takes regular PC133). It came out to be something like $2300, quite a bit cheaper than the $3500 for the board, plus (as noted previously), the GeForce *grin*.
Will cost a much more reasonable price, around $400 or so for a mATX PPC motherboard with onboard Firewire, AGP4x, etc. Will work with Linux. Due within the next couple of months.
This is one reason people were able torun OS X on unsupported machines.
The high-level components like Cocoa and Carbon don't run on Darwin/Intel because the available binary code is PPC code.
I think it would be great to have one motherboard that supported processors from multiple vendors. Mai's web site says that the Teron PX board will support PPC, MIPS, and X86 processors.
Brings a whole new meaning to "Dual Boot".
You could develop in X86 Linux, shutdown swap processors, reboot in PPC Linux recompile and test.
says the kid with a PowerComputing box.
Sapere Aude - Homer
Every single one of those legacy machines were genuine Macintoshes, and therefore have the Apple ROM need to run the old MacOS. OS X could easily check for the presence of that ROM and refuse to install. That has nothing to do with the Darwin core.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The only part of the system were they could do this would be the darwin kernel (the open source part). Do you really think that Apple would add such a feature, which requires testing and could probably cause bugs, simply to prevent the four guys that might build a stock PPC which is more expensive that genuine Apple computers from running OS X on it? Do you really think this would be cost effective?
A long time ago I watched the rags weekly for news of CHRP PPC boards. This was in the age of NT4, which shipped with binaries for Alpha, i386, PowerPC, (MIPS?) on each CD. PowerPC was going to be an excellent platform for computationally intensive problems on NT. Combined with Apple machines, PowerPC was going to be one of the big players in the desktop and workstation market.
Once M$ gave up on support for PowerPC for NT, PowerPC was instantly marginalized as a workstation platform. Sure it's fantastic in Macs, IBM workstations, and massively parallel supercomputers, but without NT support this PenguinPPC announcement really means nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Except for stuff like display drivers. OS X uses a native, accelerated binary driver for talking to the display hardware. If you have a display chip that Apple themselves never used, and that those drivers don't (and have no reason to) support, you'll find they don't work.
Besides, the higher-level stuff could theoretically examine the OF ROMs, and see if they are or are not genuine. I don't know if it does this or not - considering the hacks to make OS X run on older PPC Macs, probably not - but it could be done in response to something like this.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
The obvious reason is the coolness factor. ;-)
Other reasons are coolness (in terms of low temp and fewer fans, not hip dude wearing sunglasses) and power usage. Low-power-usage (yet still fast) computers would be great for 24x7 servers.
Emulating MacOS (like Sheepshaver under BeOS did) would be somewhat nifty (although current real Macs these days are very nice, so this would be a somewhat less valid reason than it would have been a few years ago).
Another server-related idea: obscurity. Let's hypothesize you have bad, insecure source code that, for some bizarre reason (I can't think of an actual good reason) you're not going to fix. Let's say it has a buffer-overflow attack hole. All the kiddies' scripts will try to put x86 opcodes on your stack. Put when you execute them, you'll just dump core instead of getting rooted. Yes that still sucks, but it's an improvement, right? Actually, I don't remember, but I think PPC stack may grow in opposite direction than x86, so buffer overflow attacks might not work anyway?
Use your imagination; there are probably other advantages. But really when you get down to it, the coolness factor is the best one. :-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Now I can get out my NT 3.51 disks again!
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
Check out that ugly power regulator in the upper left corner. Even if this is a demo board, a cleaner job should have been done with the prototype's part selection, mounting and soldering. This must be a joke, as that thing does not even have a heat sink on it. I think I will pass, and get one of those nifty new 1GHz dually's Apple now has.
Gerald Roebke
Finally, an alternative! I for one, am sick of the hacked up kludge that is modern Intel/IBM PC hardware. I swear, every time I upgrade my system to the latest and greatest x86 processor and chipset, I run into more and more bugs, flaws, unexplainable quirks and incompatibilities, etc. in the hardware. Think about it. PC hardware has so many relics from the past--all of which must be kept supposedly to support legacy apps and hardware. When will designers wake up and realize.. "hey! we don't need to run DOS anymore!" It's time to cut all ties with "legacy IBM PC" functionality. That means it's time to ditch: floppy controllers, all remnants the ISA bus, PS/2 ports, parallel and serial ports, BIOS functionality intended for real mode operating systems, etc.
Or.. if the price is right, maybe I'll just buy one of these PPC boards. (-:
These folks are going to have a hell of a time selling boards with all the good quality stuff floating around for less than $100. A socket 7 mobo can be had for $70 with a 550MHz k6/2, brand new. I bought one used for $20 with 130M of ram to match a spare 400MHz k6/3 I had. While one of these newer boards might perform better, there are other $2,000 systems that can beat the crap out of it.
Three years and one recesion too late, I'm afraid. Good luck to them. I'd like to see them everywhere.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
IIRC it used to check to make sure you didn't have bogus RAM (ie non-Apple approved) installed
You recalled wrong. The firmware update raised the motherboards standards for specifications for RAM. They did this because there were problems with nonspec RAM leading to stability problems.
To sum it up: all the firmware update did was disable shit RAM that didn't meet specifications. As long as you bought good RAM from a reputable dealer you were fine.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
You'll be working with stuff that's had to evolve in a much more Darwinian environment
Am I the only one who finds this troll ironic? After all Darwin's native development environment is Apple supplied PPC systems.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Hello,
There's another PPC Motherboard with PCI, UDMA100, and Firewire coming in a couple of weeks from a German company named bPlan. It's called Pegasos, and info is here.
$650 with a G3/400 is a lot more palatable than $3000. I just hope it has OpenFirmware on it!
Shouldn't be too hard to buy a refurbished iMac for $600 or less somewhere.
Of course, it would be a custom Apple board (which you probably don't want), but you do get the G3 chip.
I wonder how much hacking you could do to an iMac mobo?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
$3900 is a mite high, but high prices are not particularly surprising when something is being sold in its initial "units of 1 board to early implementors."
It obviously won't get wildly popular until they can get pricing a bit more competitive with the hardware emitted by Apple, but it's a little early to say that this will never happen.
MAI may be able to maintain a viable commercial business without prices ever falling to $100/unit, by the way...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
--Tom, former administrator of openppc.org.
Tom Geller
Quite a few people here aren't really clued in on the facts. First, the $3900 price tag is for an evaluation model. Intel and AMD do the same thing to vendors... nothing new. And, yes, there have been many $4000 PPC motherboards around.
Second, if you read the PR on MAI's site, you can see that they plan to release the boards for SIGNIFIGANTLY less then $3900. The bigger flipside to this is that they also plan to produce (or license to produce) PCI cards and embedded g4 devices from $300-$600 with SMP capabiliy. (cool.. i can dual boot now.) similar cards sell now for $2000+
Third, nobody seems to mention this chipset's ability to use PC hardware. I suppose this would be pretty easy to accomplish, but it's still a cool feature. The only limitation here would be driver support (not a HUGE issue. i dobut many people will be playing quake on this anytime soon. the first boards would sell to developers).
Fifth, as a small sidenote, microcode solutions (http://www.microcode-solutions.com) plans to relesae a suite of ppc emulation products this spring. They plan on offering a hardware board, as well as a software based product. Of course, many are skeptical and believe it is vaporware. They currently offer a ppc amiga based macos emulator. (there are tons of amiga ppc motherboards out there. there are still a disturbing number of amiga users (shame gateway cut off their funding, right when they were about to make a comeback.)
Finally, the chipset itself sells for $20. This is comprable to what chipset vendors such as VIA charge for their hardware. I would expect to see other companies support this sometime.
Another issue is legality. It's perfectly legal to run LinuxPPC and beos. NOT macos. Sure, OS9 doens't need a hardware rom to run, but it is written specifically in the EULA that macos may ONLY RUN ON APPLE HARDWARE (yeah... it's in caps in the EULA... lawyers really abuse their shift keys!). Another project, MOL (mac-on-linux) which hopes to produce a mac compatibility layer (what wine is to windows, mol is to macos). Supposedly, it works well.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
There are three differend boards mentioned in this story. The eval boards are indeed expensive, but that doesn't matter because they're not intended for the general public. The "Barbie" board is intended for the general public, and it doesn't have any price listed so we don't know if it's going to be expensive or (crossing fingers) cheap.
It's a bad idea to get rid of the old DOS prompt. There are still things that a command line does better than a GUI. There is no GUI good enough yet to utterly replace the usefulness of the command line.
Sorry dude. DOS is 100% dead. It died many many years ago. But you're right about command line interfaces being more useful (although DOS had a crappy one). Use a real operating system (Unix) and you'll have all the command line interfaces you could dream of. And if you're still using the Win9x series, give it up man. 16-bit real-mode is history.
The rest of the legacy stuff is the reason why the PC platform is so much more useful than anything out there.
Uh.. No. The PC is more useful because it's an open architecture. If for some reason you still need legacy ports or floppies, use an appropriate USB adaptor. Linux supports most all of them.
The thing I would be thinking about would be low power, fanless, micro-atx or pc104 type form factor. So we could put Linux no them about build them in to little network routing and web serving bricks.
the part about "apple-labeled machine"
that's why they don't sell apple-clones anymore. OS 8 or 8.6 were the first to include that clause
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Only the Darwin layer interacts with the hardware, all the other layers interact with the Darwin kernel (that's one point of having a kernel). So Aqua cannot "know" if the motherboard is genuine Apple or not.
I've been wondering just how true this is -- I understand that this is the architectural idea, but the truth could have been anywhere between:
* "because the dependencies are minimized, it would be very easy for Apple, if they so chose, (has to be them, since the higher layers are not open-source) to modify the code to enable the higher layers to run", and
* "the abstraction really is complete, so that with the right hardware-enabling kernel extensions (which anyone can do, since the kernel is open-source), you can literally run unmodified Apple binaries and third-party applications".
I guess you, and the page you linked to, are saying that it's the latter, which is really good news, and which I've only doubted out of general cynicism. Now for an even more ambitious question:
The high-level components like Cocoa and Carbon don't run on Darwin/Intel [only (?)] because the available binary code is PPC code.
If this is really true, and the CPU is the only reason (i.e., the other differences between the platforms are not too big to be abstracted beneath the Darwin layer), then would it be theoretically possible to hack a PowerPC emulation engine into Darwin/Intel, such that all the higher level code could be run through the emulator? I'm talking about integrating it at the kernel level, so that PPC binaries could be run in a "wrapper process" that would pass their code through the emulator, translate their API calls to the appropriate format before passing them to the kernel, etc.
This kind of architecture independence is an idea that's been kicked around in a variety of contexts, with different pros and cons, but this seems like it could be a promising one, with Darwin/Intel bringing it to the "almost-there" level, and the lure of Mac OS X running on x86 boxes. Any chance?
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
I wasn't a hard-core kernel/device/bootloader geek, just a Unix admin in their data center. Even with Open Firmware, there still seemed to be alot of strangeness to Apple hardware that would make an IBM PPC MB a bit of work to get going. I didn't say it was impossible, just that you wouldn't be able to pop in the MacOS X CD and install like you were on a Mac.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Why deal with Apple? Because dealing with Apple means difficult to use, closed systems.
Not difficult to use at all... give a few examples.
Apple traditionally promotes "simple" over "easy to use". A hammer might be much simpler than a tool box, but it is a lot hearder to use a hammer to turn a bolt.
Macs are known for being easy to use. It must be you!
Until now, "PowerPC" was a dishonest marketing trick: the Mac wasn't a PC, but the PC in the PowerPC chip might have misled some fools into thinking it was.
Well, no. Apple invented the personal computer, also known as the "PC."
IBM coined the phrase "PC" for their first entry into the field to compete with Apple.
Now as far as PowerPC, that's IBM's trademark, not Apple's, since it was their Power CPU to begin with. They went to Apple with the chip.
Bottom line... it doesn't have to be Wintel to be a PC.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
So *that's* why they include a couple of Apple stickers with every new computer..... Stick them on the side of your clone and you can run OS X all you like...
Disclaimer: Yes, this is a joke... but an interesting concept none-the-less.
While we might be able to say, "competition with apple, lower prices!", this also means, "apple loses income, apple loses resources!" With apple's OSX (and their accompanying systems) being the largest contenders with MS for the desktop market, is this a good thing?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
"Finally, an alternative! I for one, am sick of the hacked up kludge that is modern Intel/IBM PC hardware."
:).
I thought the same thing when I got an Alpha motherboard. Far superior architecture and it didn't have the added weight of all the legacy junk. Heck, DEC even gave schematics for the whole board! That was beyond cool (to this day I am still saddened that DEC went away).
Then came the support issues. Even under Linux some of the most basic stuff was not 'yet' supported on the Alpha. That and I had PCI problems because DEC's implementation was 'slightly' different. Sure, DEC UNIX and VMS worked fine, but I would be stuck with all DEC hardware. I ended up going back to x86 after hacking with it for 6 months.
Moral of the story: x86 may be a bogged-down leagacy beast, but the massive support for it make it easier to set-up and maintain the even a streamlined intelligent Aplha -- as much as I would not like to admit it
Do either MacOS 9 or MacOS X support the articia chipsets? IOW Do they have Articia chipset drivers pre-loaded in Mac OS? Because even if someone releases a MacOS VIA like 4in1 chipset driver set for Articia chipsets one still has to install the OS 1st, which is very difficult unless there are rudimentry compatible chipset drivers built into the install.
I don't think it would be that difficult as (I think) the Articia chipsets are (part licensed) clones of IBM chipsets. Hence its compatibility with Mips, PPC & X86 CPUs, although what type I don't know, ie is it compatible with the GTL+ bus (the p6 bus of the Pentium Pro, PII, Celeron & P!!!), the EV7 bus (the bus the Durons & Athlons use), 'Netburst' (the p7, AKA P4, BUS), or the p5/686/K6 bus whatever that's called?.
However IMAO I think that Apple will go out of its way to make sure any system drivers that are pre-loaded into MacOS are totally incompatible with the Articia chipsets.
Has anybody tried replacing the kernel on a commercial MacOS X system with a user-compiled Darwin kernel? Did it work? Were there any issues?
Also, I recall that the delay in adding DVD support to 10.1 was partly due to the problem of satisfying the DVDCCA that the system was "secure", and that no rogue hacker could intercept their precious video frames; this would most likely have involved modifications to the kernel (and/or the Mach microkernel), and a fork from the open-source Darwin kernel (otherwise the "security" features could be bypassed by using a modified kernel). Has anybody tried playing DVDs over a home-made Darwin kernel?
Right, the performance hit for emulation would make it excruciating, except -- the idea here is that only the higher-level code (the {"Mac OS X" - Darwin} set of Apple binaries, plus user-level applications) would be emulated; low-level system stuff (the kernel's I/O, VM, and other hardware-access, the BSD layer, and whatever other services are included in Darwin) would run natively.
The question becomes: for real-world everyday use, how much time is spent in those system calls vs. executing user code? If user processes are spending most of their time waiting on I/O or other system calls anyway, then slower execution of user code wouldn't hurt so much as long as the system calls remain native. Could the overall performance be expected to come anywhere close to a level where it would be worth anyone's trouble to implement?
I guess a major decider would be Quartz: how much of the drawing engine is actually in those PPC binaries? If all the actual pixel-pushing is in there, then emulating it would be extreme pain, but if it's mostly control logic passing hardware calls down to the graphics card, then maybe it could be reasonable.
David Gould
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