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 ...

Comments

Re:Believable

[YeahIThoughtSo]

I totally agree. I program GameCube games, and the PPC chip that IBM has supplied in it is just a wonderful little powerhouse. It's a modified 750 core running at 486 Mhz and has got incredible FP performance and ~ 1.6 GB/s out to memory through a special write-gather pipe. The FP can handle paired-singles (anyone see the altivec connection here?), and the machine as a whole is just stupid fast. (Yes, the memory architecture has someting to do with this too...)

Anyways, it totally makes sense for apple to go with a desktop version of the POWER4 core. The PPC specification is such that any program written that targets the UISA (think it stands for something like user instruction set architecture -- ie, non-privelidged instructions) will move right over to any other PPC core w/o a recompile. And the PPC64 spec is such that all instructions are still 32bit; it's just the data / registers that're 64bit. So binary compatibility is a no-brainer.

Couple in the fact that power4 has multiple cores on a die... and, damn. I'll buy my first Apple machine if they actually do this.

Already done that

[moosesocks]

Actually, apple released an incomplete build of an early development build of OSX compiled for X86 to ADC members sometime around 4 years ago. It was dubbed as the Apple Rhaposody OS Developer Release 3. It was quite intersesting to pick up the similarities between it and OSX. A ton of information, along with screenshots are posted at this site.

It was really a transitional OS which gap between NextSTEP and OSX. It contains both elements of both OSes. Anybody recognize the chess program at the bottom of the page?