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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 ...
How long 'til we get to see some leaked photos of Apple-specific X86 hardwware?
When Mac went from the 68K to the PPC, they included emulation software, do that the PPC could still run the 'legacy' 68K code. Because the PPC was enough faster than the 68K, the emulated code still ran with 'reasonably acceptable' speed.
Intel isn't much (if at all) faster than similarly timed PPCs, so trying to do a PPC emulation on an Intel CPU would probably be a horror story.
(the '386 architecture is also not quite as elegant as the PPC architecture. Most of the registers would have to be stored in RAM, and that would hurt you BIGTIME).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
He's thinking about when Apple went from Motorola 680x0 chips to PowerPC ones. The OS had a 68k emulator that allowed it to continue to run old apps. The poster is expecting that if Apple releases an OS on x86 hardware, the OS will include an emulator so granny won't then wonder why her old recipe application doesn't work on her new computer.
As someone who's been if a few multi-architecture operating systems (BeOS, OpenStep, NEXTSTEP), I can say that it isn't as pleasant as everyone says. While OpenStep made it pretty easy to cross compile, there were always apps that just weren't available for your platform (particularly NEXTSTEP for HP Apollo machines.) It's not a good place to be, and it is always frustrating for users. How many PPC BeOS apps were there when the BeOS stopped being something a lot of people did? Certainly not as many as there were for Intel.
My basic point is that it will be a major pain in the ass for all of the users for gains that aren't yet a big enough deal to convince me.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Hello.. please stop staring at your cock, and please in future read posts before you attack the poster.
;;winces, hits submit;;
Furthermore, your assumption that PPC is automagically more powerful than Intel architectures is a clear indication that you are severiously under-informed.
Note that the poster you responded to never said the PPC was more powerful than intel. They referenced the fact that when apple changed from 68k to PPC hardware, they included an emulator so that legacy apps could be run on PowerPC computers. The emulation he referred to was for third party apps which have yet to be recompiled, not for the ported OS.
All the original poster said was that while it was no big deal to emulate the 68k on the vastly more powerful PPC, emulating a PPC on an x86 would be not so easy, as x86 and PPC are roughly equal. I am not able to see where your rediculous ad hominem attack comes from. They did not even advocate PPC as more powerful than x86.
That being said, it would indeed be extremely difficult to emulate PPC on the x86! This is simply because of the way the chips are designed. The PPC is RISC; it has simple instructions and lots of registers; the x86 is CISC; has few registers and complex instructions. RISC is not necessarily better or worse than CISC, and the x86 is not necessarily better or worse than the PPC. However, it is generally well-known and accepted fact that it is easier to write an emulator that runs on a RISC machine than a CISC one, and it is quite obvious to anyone who is familiar with the emulation scene that the PPC and x86 are good at different things, and one of the things that the PPC really shines at is emulation.
This will become blatantly obvious if you consider that there are multiple, at least three, separately developed programs-- one of which is open source-- which emulate an x86 PC on a PPC Macintosh. There are, however, no extant PPC Macintosh emulators for the x86 PC. None. And it isn't for want of trying; you can see here that there have been a number of macintosh emulators for the PC, just that none of them have done PPC emulation, only 68k. There have been many attempts to emulate the PPC on the x86, it is just that they have all come to nothing-- becuase the architecture of the two machines is simply such that it is relatively easy to emulate x86 on PPC and relatively extremely difficult to emulate PPC on x86.
I suspect i am responding to a troll. I really ought to submit this as AC. Oh well..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Back when PC boards were designed with red, blue, and black tape on mylar sheets, and UARTs were the cutting edge, there were two vendors of UARTs who had somewhat different designs. A small manufacturer of terminals had designed for one of 'em. But they were new and cutting edge, and the plant capacity was limited. So the vendor was being obstinate about giving them sufficient allocation to make their production targets.
Well the alternative chip was about the same side and functionality but had different pinout. And there was some extra room on the board. So a few days before the salesman was due to visit they hauled out the mylar master for the PC board, laid out the pad pattern of the alternate chip, and started taping up something that looked like reasonable circuitry.
Sure enough, the salesman saw the work in progress, concluded that the terminal was being designed so it could be built with either UART, and paniced. After that there was never a problem getting allocation.
I think the circuitry was never finished and tested. The pads made it onto the final PC board (no point in ripping the tape back off the master) but weren't even dirlled (at 1/2 cent per hole per board). And they came to be known as "The Blackmail Pads". B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Of course Apple have a x86 port of OS X. They want to keep their options open, and even if they don't move to x86 they will benefit by having an operating system that is already portable between architectures.
/Applications /DVD Player.app /Contents /Frameworks /DVDPlayback.framework /Versions /A /DVDPlayback | less "
l ePIVSupport
As for the evidence - it you do a "strings
(i've added spaces before each "/" to keep slashdot happy - you need to take them out again!)
Now, search for "Debug", and look at the three next lines:
DisablePIIISupport
DisableATHLONSupport
Disab
Now why would Apple's DVD Player have code concerning itself with PIII's, P4's and Athlons if they didn't have a version which ran on those chips???
Personally, I don't see Apple making the switch, but they've survived by surprising us time and time again...
All of your points are precisely why Apple won't do it:
1. Apple is a hardware company. They get their money from your $1100 iMac, not your $600 commodity iMac.
2. Steve would cringe to see Mac OS X running on your monitor. He'd make the most god-awful face, and we don't want to see that.
3. Microsoft would respond to a kick in the balls by cutting Apple's balls right off. Office X for the Mac? Sorry, it only runs on PPC macs. We had technical issues porting it.
Down the toilet, swirl swirl swirl.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
There are really two things to consider:
First, that Apple will solder proprietary widgets to the Macintosh motherboard which the OS will look for before booting. No widget, no boot. Simple as that.
Now you might say, "someone will reverse engineer it and then there will be rampant Mac clones," which brings us to the second point...
Second, even though it's totally possible to reverse engineer these types of widgets it's not realistic to do so. This is simply because Apple can change it willy-nilly any time they freakin' want to. Who is going to continue to invest in reverse engineering in order to remain compatible? Nobody. Don't believe it? Consider that you can buy G4 processors and you can buy all the standard Mac motherboard stuff...and absolutely nothing is stopping you from reverse engineering the proprietary widgets in use right now...and thus making your own Mac clone business...and yet nobody is doing it. I see no reason to believe that this will be a more attractive prospect just because Apple switches processors.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Why would Apple want to go with x86, instead of a 64-bit processor, such as the Itanium family? It has (according to Intel) the support of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Linux. If Apple did a port to this architecture, then they could switch from PPC when the time is right.
Doesn't this make more sense than investing time and effort in the 32-bit x86 platform?