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Apple Secretly Maintaining x86 Port Of Mac OS X
Earlybird writes "According to this eWeek article, Apple has ported the whole of Mac OS X to the x86 architecture and is maintaining it in parallel with the PowerPC builds. Dubbed Marklar, the project is perceived as a fall-back plan, and, quoth the article, 'has apparently gained strategic relevance in recent months, as Apple's relationship with Motorola has grown strained and Apple looks to alternative chip makers.'" Believe what you will ...
I'd definitely buy it if it were released. I'm all about having choices in the market, and OS X running natively on x86 hardware would be a step in the right direction. Both from the standpoint that I'd have more choices of what OS to run on my PC-compatible box, and in terms of what hardware I can choose to run Mac OS X on.
Come on, Steve -- give me a 2-button trackpad on a Titanium powerbook, that's all I ask for. I'm paying three grand for the thing, the least it could have is the number of mouse buttons *I* want on it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It also has an amazing rendering engine by sporting PDF under the hood.
>>>>>>>
Actually, Quartz is a stupid software rendered piece of junk that will get blown away when Microsoft releases a "real" next-gen GUI API in the form of the 3D accelerated Longhorn desktop. Quartz is a holdover from the early 1990s, something that Steve foisted on Apple, causing them to miss the boat on where graphics was really heading, into the hardware accelerated realm. Case in point: Quartz "Extreme" which utilizes all the power of a GeForce4 just to accelerate compositing and window effects, instead of actually accelerating DRAWING. And why can't QE accelerate drawing? Because tying the Quartz API to PDF (instead of making the rendering backends generic and abstract, is it should be) has tied them too tightly to fully utilize OpenGL acceleration.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
If there is a god out there, please let this be true, and please let Apple switch to AMD processors that don't cost so damned much for such crappy performance!
Really? Quartz Extreme rocks in Jaguar. It keeps my CPU usage waay down, and looks crisper and beautiful.
Microsoft announced they're 3 years away. Vaporware as far as I'm concerned.
is around 4
I sure hope you're wrong.
Mmmm.... Anna Kournikova....
as in April's Fools Day?
This must be crap
This
For one thing, I doubt you grasp the "x86" architecture as it is known today. You think you know what you're talking about due to slashdot and Apple ads. The x86 architecture doesn't really exist. No modern processor executes x86 instructions. The overhead of doing translation is minimal. And Intel and AMD have shown that doing their own cores and the translation from x86 to them produces amazingly fast chips. Intel and AMD can continue to do x86-ish architectures (and will; I think hammer will be big and turn out to perform better than Intel's IA64 chips) and the performance will be as good as an architecture without the x86ish syntax.
For another thing, for someone who claims to know about PCs, how can you not get the parts to work together correctly? Get revision 2, non-cutting edge motherboard, CPU, hard drive(s), graphics card and a $10 NIC and you have my computer, which has had no problems during either configuration or while running. And those "wal-mart shitboxes" that you speak of are pretty much the same. They're not top-of-the-line, but the parts -- standard motherboard chipset, standard cpu, generic video, PCI bus -- are well supported by free unices and pretty darn stable.
My experience has been: I can put together parts that, for the most part, are the cheapest ones available (or close to it) and get a computer that works seamlessly and flawlessly. (Maybe not in Windows, though)
Oh well... what do you expect from a f lamer
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
For another thing, for someone who claims to know about PCs, how can you not get the parts to work together correctly?
Where did I say *I* had trouble? I don't buy cutting-edge stuff or made-by-slave-labor-in-Asia-cheap stuff. I built my PC out of parts I knew to be quality by researching them. What I do is not typical. "Gimme the cheapest thing you got" is typical.
My experience has been: I can put together parts that, for the most part, are the cheapest ones available (or close to it) and get a computer that works seamlessly and flawlessly.
Well no shit, Sherlock. I should hope that someone who isn't running Windows on their PC would be able to competently assemble and maintain their own PC.
(Maybe not in Windows, though)
But Joe Sixpack is not gonna build his own PC or use something other than Windows as the OS on it-- so I guess my argument does hold water.
Oh well... what do you expect from a flamer
How disappointing. I expected better from someone with such a low User #.
~Philly