Will Darwin be Ported to the IBM Power 4?

eadint asks: "I have heard rumors thorough the net that Apple plans to port Darwin to the Power 4, 64 bit chip. Currently I work for a university. We are using Apple computers and are considering the platform for our number crunching capabilities. According to this Motorola has no plans on producing a 64-bit chip. Does anyone know if Darwin can or will be ported to a true 64 bit platform."

Comments

Power4

[MonaLisa]

Have you considered Itanium-2 under Linux for
your "number crunching" platform? The McKinley
(Itanium-2) is faster than the Power4, and also
cheaper (although you'll need to buy the Intel
compilers for a few hundred if you want great
performance).

Re:Power4

[Guspaz]

What about waiting for the Hammer to come out? I thought the Hammer's compiler was free.

Regards, Guspaz.

AMD hammer for apple?

[brejc8]

These are just roumors but I heared this from several sources that apple are talking to AMD about a 64bit only OS.
Apple might need to get faster chips to compete but making something so close to a PC will allow clones.
Alternatively apple could just port their OS to the hammer PCs and keep making their own PPC machines.
The OS is sexy enough to make a large wodge of money.
Especially if it comes with M$ office which is the only reason a lot of people dont wish to use anything other than windows.

If you want it, start writing it.

[dbrutus]

The quickest way to determine if this is a live product would be to start the port using opendarwin.org and see what happens. If you start to get odd or wierd static from Apple, you probably tripped across a secret Apple project and you'll know. If not, then you might just turn it into a live product anyway.

It would certainly be smart both for IBM and Apple to support this as a first step to Mac OS X on RS/6000. Apple could use the increase in its upper end and it would help IBM push some more boxes.

Yes, it is

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't say too much because of NDA reasons, but you will see more than just Darwin from Apple on Power4. Wait six months.

Can't say much more than this but..

[Anonymous Coward]

I shouldn't really be posting even this, but it's not particularly important, so here goes..

Apple are currently in negotiations with AMD (as confirmed a few posts above this) so that AMD will eventually produce a special 'locked' x86-64 based chip that Apple can develop its own motherboard for.

This board, along with a ported Darwin (initially it's only on the server end, but eventually for the clients the full OS X bumph will be ported, although once you have Darwin running, that's all pretty easy) will become the top-end Apple server, positioning the current X-Serve as a sort of 'iMac of servers'.

I would like to help in the efforts...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to join the efforts in
porting the Darwin OS over to
IBM's Power4 platform.

A few suggestions:
1) I would really suggest the Darwin be ported
to Power4 LPAR as well as the non-LPAR modes.

2) Work with IBM. Put together some convincing
proposals of why IBM would lend support
or assistance to this effort. IBM is already
porting LinuxPPC to POWER4.

3) study the IBM RS/6000 platform.
eg. formerly called CHRP.

4) work on the device drivers.

Hopefully, someday we can run several OSes
( MacOSX, LinuxPPC, and AIX) all at the same time
on POWER4/POWER5. As well as achieving a
much higher performance for MacOSX.
The pSeries 690 is capable of running up to
16 partitions simultaneously. Meaning, we can
run more than 1 OSX, LinuxPPC and/or AIX !!!

CHF