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

lies

[Anonymous Coward]

this is unconfirmed and highly suspect, as someone who works at apple i can attest to this. they were talking about maybe doing it

Re:lies

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM will release a new CPU based on the Power4 ... for desktop use !! maybe the G5 ?
It will have about 160 parallel instructions : altivec ?
Will Apple use IBM powerpc CPUs in future ?

Re:lies

[Gangis]

Hmm... This oughta be interesting. I'm gonna install it on my other other other computer (after I get the ISO).

Re:lies

[Gangis]

Also... I suspect that it is actually Rhapsody Developer's Release 2. Some of you may remember that Rhapsody was an x86 port of MacOSX Server but was canned after Developer's Release 2.

Re:lies

[Gangis]

Okay, this is funny. :) That's actually Windows XP, ladies and gentlemen. I downloaded the fragment of the ISO and opened it with Winimage. I got the directory tree with WinXP files in it. Nice job. >:P

Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's not on KaZaA, it doesn't exist.

Re:Nope.

[TerryMathews]

While the above comment was made in jest, I would have to agree here. If this port of OS X isn't on KaZaA or some other P2P network, it doesn't exist. Apple builds for OS X for PPC get leaked onto P2P left and right. Short of Apple Security being more ruthless than the SS in WW2 (And since we haven't heard any horror stories like there are about Intel security...), I don't believe this story for a minute.

Re:Nope.

[di0s]

ditto for Hotline(where most of the Mac goodies are anyways)... =)

Re:Nope.

[antijava]

Actually there is an Intel port. There has been for years. Way back in the Rhapsody days there were two developer releases available for Intel. Just because they stopped making them available doesn't mean they stopped building it.

The biggest reason is that maintaining an Intel version ensures that everything they write stays reasonably portable. It they can stay compatible with PPC and Intel in the code, than supporting any other chip that comes along can't be much more difficult.

Internal builds used to always be built fat...they would just be stripped to PPC-only when it came time to press to a CD for external use. I don't know if it's still the case, but I don't see why they would stop the practice.

Also, maintaining compatibility keeps future migration options open to them.

Most of OS X is highly portable already. The kernel is Mach, which was fundamentally designed with portability in mind. Above that is the BSD layer which is regularly synched with the OpenBSD source tree, which is x86 code -- so it's portable. CoreFoundation is part of Darwin, so it already compiles on x86. Cocoa is very high level and used to run on x86 back in the OpenStep days...no big issues there. I see no reason why Cocoa couln't easily go to Darwin as well. Apple had to basically build the Carbon library from scratch after the developer community refused to migrate en-masse to Cocoa. I don't believe Apple would be short-sighted enough to not write it in a portable fashion. Really, Classic is the only part of OS X that would cause a problem with an x86 port. If push comes to shove, Apple could just draw a line in the sand and say that Classic isn't supported...developers have had enough time to move their stuff forward.

Of course, just because the port is possible doesn't mean that Apple will ever make it a product. Support for such a thing would be a nightmare given the huge number of hardware options in the x86 world. Apple is barely capable of keeping up with drivers for there exremely limited set of hardware options.

Re:Nope.

[packeteer]

Of course there is an x86 port but dont call it an Intel port. Calling it an Intel port makes it seem liek they want to release it for desktop chips, they dont. It makes perfect sense that they would at least build it for x86 so if anything wasn't compatable they would know about it. It's better than a couple of years down the road if they tried to switch only to find out some code which was built upon and built upon no longer works. This way they can have the option open.

I would believe it if Microsoft has builds of Windows that work on solaris or maybe even mac hardware. Before you flame me for saying that let me tell you that security is TIGHT at Microsoft. If they dont want something leaked it ISN'T. All these warez kiddies think they are so clever getting their "leaked" 2600 build of winxp. I can garuntee that it was intentionally put out. I dont think its some giant conspiracy on the part of microsoft but i dont beleive something like that could slip out from under them. Sometimes you guys forget that Microsoft is not in a bad situation and whatever they do its going to help them. Make fun all you want, i know i do my hare ;), but MS is going anywhere anytime SOON. So just continue to improve on Linux and BSD but you can bet that when it IS a real competitor for MS things are going to get nasty. They have the money to throw around at nearly ANY type of crazy plan to keep them afloat in the future.

So one last not for all you would be flamers with mod points to burn. Im not trolling im simply stating the facts that are very apparent if you look without blinders on. I am all for linux and i dont even have an windows boxes on my home network but you still have to look around and see the rest of whats going on sometimes.

Re:Nope.

[Lazaru5]

FWIW, the BSD portion of OSX/Darwin is from FreeBSD (3.2 for 10.0 - 10.1.5 and recently synched with 4.4 for 10.2). There's a few config files, etc that are from Net and Open though.

Re:Nope.

[piobair]

In concordance with the other reply. The PPC version was originally ported from OPENSTEP - a NeXTSTEP port to intel. Apple has continued to maintain at least limited functionality of its OS on intel since discontinuing the Rhapsody project. Through the rumour mill I heard the reason Rhapsody was never publicly released was for fears of M$ dropping Office on the Mac.

The currently maintained functionality is realized in the WebObjects runtime on Windows.

I couln't imagine Apple not maintaining a perfectly viable intel-based OS that was up-to-date as late as '99.

FYI: Rhapsody still runs my CVS repository at home.

Stick with PPC

[Microlith]

If they can't stick with Motorola, they should go with IBM.

It's one thing to go from 68k to a more powerful PPC architecture. It's another issue altogether to move from a PPC to an Intel or AMD cpu. The emulation speed would be a hell of a performance hit.

Re:Stick with PPC

[Zero__Kelvin]

"It's one thing to go from 68k to a more powerful PPC architecture. It's another issue altogether to move from a PPC to an Intel or AMD cpu. The emulation speed would be a hell of a performance hit."

Nobody said anything about emulation. A port is a native compilation, and therefore no performance hit is taken. Furthermore, your assumption that PPC is automagically more powerful than Intel architectures is a clear indication that you are severiously under-informed. I won't go so far as to call you a newbie, but your bias suggests that you have a ways to go before you become a seasoned professional. Keep on plugging though, and try to be more open-minded. Consider doing research before forming conclusions, for example.

Re:Stick with PPC

[Anonymous Coward]

But surely the apps would need to run under emulation unless you're suggesting that Apple has been maintaining parallel ports of those as well

Re:Stick with PPC

[toganet]

You're missing the leap implicit in our young friend's comment:

The apps they are talking about are Carbon or Classic apps that would need to be significantally modified to compile on x86.

So, Apple would have to write an emulator to allow these apps to run within OSX on x86. Problem is, they'd be doing this from scratch. I mean, know any good PPC emulators?

On the other hand, could they do something like add a slower G4 to the system, as a CPU dedicated to these legacy apps, and then tweak the Carbon APIs to use it? There is a precedent here from the days of the first PPC's and PPC upgrades.

Re:Stick with PPC

[Stephen Samuel]

Nobody said anything about emulation. A port is a native compilation, and therefore no performance hit is taken.

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).

Re:Stick with PPC

[pla]

x86 = CISC architecture

Actually, wrong. The x86's have a CISC *instruction set*. All the major x86 chip makers have used RISC cores on everything released since the original Pentium-class chips.


RISC (greater-than) CISC

Another fallacy. RISC chips can usually attain significantly higher clock speeds than CISC chips, but at the expense of doing less per clock. This does not make either one automatically "faster" in terms of total computational power, just different in their approaches to speed.

Re:Stick with PPC

[dattaway]

Looking at the PPC instruction set, it looks a little more robust than a "reduced" instruction set to me. They all look CISC, except for the old favorites, such as the 6502...

As far as which is better depends on your assembly language preferences. I prefer accumulator arithmatic of the RISC, but since we use compilers these days, this point is moot.

Re:Stick with PPC

[MaxVlast]

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.

Re:Stick with PPC

[DrPascal]

"...your assumption that PPC is automagically more powerful than Intel architectures is a clear indication that you are severiously under-informed..."

That is classic Ad Hominem to those that know logic and critical thinking class material. Attack this guys point, not him as a person ... it's a fallacy.

Of course, your entire statement is wrong because your name start with a Z. ;-)

Re:Stick with PPC

[Zero__Kelvin]

"PPC = RISC architecture


x86 = CISC architecture


RISC > CISC


therefore PPC >x86"

Your missing a key element in your formula, even if I grant the mistaken RISC>CISC part. Intel != x86. For example, the intel StrongARM processors used in the iPaq are RISC.

Re:Stick with PPC

[Zero__Kelvin]

"That is classic Ad Hominem to those that know logic and critical thinking class material. Attack this guys point, not him as a person ... it's a fallacy."

This is by no means such a case. I attack his point as wrong. I merely go on to point out what his being wrong, an the manner in which he is wrong, says about him. At no time do I suggest that he is under-informed, and therefore wrong. I state that he is wrong, and therefore under-informed. Will the real Dr. Pascal please stand up .....

Re:Stick with PPC

[el stevo]

How many PPC BeOS apps were there when the BeOS stopped being something a lot of people did?
when was BeOS ever something "a lot" of people did? ;-)
seriously though, i ran BeOS on an old ppc 603e powermac since DP4 but eventually i gave up on it after release 4.5... when the company started going all crappy

Re:Stick with PPC

[mentin]

Another fallacy. RISC chips can usually attain significantly higher clock speeds than CISC chips, but at the expense of doing less per clock. This does not make either one automatically "faster" in terms of total computational power, just different in their approaches to speed.

Absolutely right.

And when you consider current clock speeds (~2.5 GHz P4 chips vs. ~1.2 GHz PowerPC chips) multiplied by PowerPC doing less per clock, you get the picture.

Although situation is not that bad, P4 is somewhat faster than PowerPC now.

Re:Stick with PPC

[el stevo]

and before the days of intel's purchase of ARM and all their technologies, the apple newton messagepad 2x00 series ran on strongarm processors... and doesn't apple still have a stake in ARM's tech stuff... ?

nevermind... the strongarm is way too underpowered for a desktop

Re:Stick with PPC

[mindstrm]

Okay
So let's see
Your 100MHZ PPC chip is faster than my 2GHZ P4 because yours is risc?

This is the #1 most common thing mac freaks say.. that it's better because it's RISC.

RISC is better as a *technology*... that doesn't mean a RISC chip is inherently better than a CISC chip.

That's like saying Diesel is better than gasoline.. so a diesel vehicle is faster.

Re:Stick with PPC

[beebware]

Bit of history. Admittedly the StrongARM is made by Intel now (after they brought Digital who previously made it), but the ARM core technology inside it is still (c) ARM Plc who are a totally independent company selling to a wide variety of chipset manufacturers. ARM, themselves, are NOT owned by Intel.
Apple, IIRC, have around a 25% share in ARM (Advanced RISC Machines, but used to be Acorn RISC Machines when they started out, but Acorn has been 'defunct' for 2yrs+ now as soon as it was realised that the Acorn Group PLCs share of ARM was worth more than the total share value of Acorn :( ).
StrongARM chips were originally used in desktop machines, I've got a 202Mhz SA in my Acorn RISC PC desktop machine - admittedly it's around 7 years old now, but in it's day it was a damn good machine: Acorn themselves (not ARM) weren't very good in marketing...

Re:Stick with PPC

[mindstrm]

You forget that, due to the nature of Apple's solid APIs and the fact that OSX is BSD based...

All the developers will have to do little more than re-target and recompile. Very little work involved, relatively speaking.

Why would a Carbon app need to be significantly modified to compile on an x86? Does an app for Solaris SPARC need heavy modification to run on Solaris X86? No, it doens't, it needs, well, no modification whatsoever, it just compiles.

Same thing here.

Yes, they would need a new emulator for classic apps.. but many of these already exist for x86, they could probably purchase code if they don't want to do it themselves. it would be no harder than writing one for PPC. PPC and 68K do not have any kind of inherent compatability.

Re:Stick with PPC

[anfloga]

Okay, I'm confused. I've also heard this (that RISC chips did less per instruction, but with more instructions/second) and CISC chips did more per instruction, but with fewer. The PPC is a RISC chip through and through, and the x86 and clones are CISC at least at the instruction level. And the new x86 chips have MANY more cycles/second than the PPC's right now. But I've heard it chanted over and over among fans of the PPC that a PPC, at the same Mhz rating is faster than the x86 (although nobody is claiming anymore that current PPC chips are faster than current x86 chips, because of the huge discrepency between clock speeds). How can this follow from the above, if the PPC does less per instruction?

Erik

Re:Stick with PPC

[mbezch]

Well, the PPC chips have 64 bit registers, as opposed to the x86 32 bit registers. More data can be processed per cycle this way

Re:Stick with PPC

[zapod4]

Do macs have parallel ports?

Re:Stick with PPC

[bofkentucky]

Kind of like that hybrid AthlonXP and Opteron 2P workstation posted on HardOCP(Micht have been amdmb) the other day. It could work, but it would require a 3GIO or Hypertransport link, it could not exist on the PCI bus without saturating.

Re:Stick with PPC

[Scott Wood]

1. All PowerPC chips ever used by Apple have
   been 32-bit (and no, having Altivec does not make it a 128-bit chip, nor does it make the general purpose registers any larger than 32 bits).
   
2. 64-bit registers only help a few types of
   applications in terms of raw number crunching;
   their main benefit is a larger address space.
   

Re:Stick with PPC

[i am fishhead]

(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).

Actualy if the PPCs emulated registers are used frequently, they would prety much always be in the L1 cache. Much less hurt that way, to the tune of 1-3 cycles acess time which, due to the long pipelines, means you can get to the data almost as fast as registers.

Re:Stick with PPC

[rschroeder]

My understanding that Carbon apps contain enough legacy code that recompiling wouldn't be an option.

Cocoa apps, on the other hand, are ready to go.

it's the whole yellow box v. blue box thing.

Re:Stick with PPC

[jovlinger]

HP's Dynamo is a _great_ technology: basically, it is trace-based binary translator. It acheives impressive speedups by 1) only doing the expensive optimisations when deemed likely to be useful, and 2) discovering dynamic code paths than can be turned into straight-line code, and then re-optimised as a unit.

Dynamo achieved 20% speedups when run with source==target architectures (ie, it beat native code in a apples-to-apples test).

I'm kinda despairing tho; the paper is several years old, and any 27 obvious applications have failed to use it.

Re:Stick with PPC

[modecx]

Iv'e been a RISC idiot for a long time now, and on damn near every architecture Iv'e messed with, a RISC chip whooped a similary clocked x86 chip by as much as a 50% margin. They did it while running cooler, and taking less energy to boot. It might be because the machine in question had a better memory subsystem (SGI for instance), or because it could parallel calculate well (Dec ALPHA), or because it had a huge cache and great prediction (SPARC), or whatever the case. The fact is that there's alot of things that can make a chip excell over it's competitiors, or suck dust like a Hoover.

Also (as off topic as I'm going here), Diesel as a fuel is better than gasolone. It has about an 8% better energy/weight ratio than gasoline. Diesel is easier to manufacture, and requires less refinement than gasoline (thus more efficient to manufacture). The only problem with it is that it's not as flammabe as gasoline, meaning that a Diesel engine is usually larger than a Gasolone engine, because it has to operate at higher pressures, and requires more mechanicaics. Parts are larger to handle the greater torque from Diesel combustion, need a high pressure fuel pump to get the pintles to work correctly, etc. The only reason gasoline took off as a fuel was because it's just so easy to work with, and it dosen't have the tendancy to gell in cold weather (although in really cold weather gasoline just won't work because it needs to vaporize to become flammable, whereas a Diesel with fuel line warmers will work just fine)

Not to mention the fact that jet fuel is very close to kerosene, which is kind of a more refined version of Diesel (both of which can be used as turbine fuel for non-aviation related use). Diesel(or kerosene) with liquid oxygen also makes an amazingly cheap but powerful rocket fuel. I think the best way I can explain what I'm getting at is that what you get out of something depends on how you use it, whether is is a CPU or whatever.

[/end rant]

Re:Stick with PPC

[nutshell42]

The trick is that modern cpus split the data in a number of instruction pipelines where a number of instructions gets processed in line.

a P4 has 4 pipelines with 20-stage pipeline, a PowerPC 7 pipelines with 4 steps afaik.

Long pipelines are better if you want high clock speeds therefore it looks like intel will be able to push the p4 design beyond the 4GHz

but the PowerPC design is more efficient; say the processor is not able to fill a pipeline at one clock cycle, the PowerPC will lose one working step for 4 cycles, the p4 for 20, the same problem occurs if the jump prediction fails.

But as AMD had to learn with the Athlon (which is afaik similar to the PowerPC in this design point) a P4 may be inferior at the same clock speed but that's meaningless if Intel is able to reach 800MHz (Athlon) to 1GHz (PowerPC) more.

Re:Stick with PPC

[dorzak]

This may be an over simplification, but isn't Carbon/Classic essential an emulator on OSX of the pre-BSD based Mac OS's?

Cocoa then being the native OS X/BSD based apps.

Re:Stick with PPC

[fod]

Well, the PPC chips have 64 bit registers, as opposed to the x86 32 bit registers. More data can be processed per cycle this way

... Yes, 64-bit PowerPC processors will have 64-bit integer registers. But since all current PowerPC processors are 32-bit, they have 32-bit registers...

Re:Stick with PPC

[bnenning]

No, all PowerPCs that have shipped in Macs have 32 bit integer registers. They have wider floating point and (sometimes) vector registers, but so do x86 processors.

It is true that PowerPCs are faster per-cycle than x86 chips, partially due to having *more* registers.

Re:Stick with PPC

[larry bagina]

Reduced Instruction Set Complexity

Although you might argue it's still complicated :)

The main ideas of RISC are

1. lots of general purpose registers
2. Fixed-width instruction coding
3. one instruction to read memory to register, one to read register to memory

By those criteria, PPC is RISC (although it's not 100% RISC), and x86 is not.

Re:Stick with PPC

[larkost]

Neither is technically an emulator, in the same way that WINE is not an emulator.

In Classic, MacOS 9 is running, but taking a number of services from the host MacOS X system through a number of special extensions. All classic apps would need an emulator (if the vendor has not rewritten for Carbon.. there is no chance they would recompile for x86).

In Carbon it is a native application, but much of the code (both in applications, and in the equivalent of shared libraries) is very PPC specific, and would probably need an emulator o be commercially viable.

Re:Stick with PPC

[larkost]

1-3 cycles of access time would kill performance. This is one of those huge differences between PPC and x86, an emulator would constantly he hitting this wall... remember things in the registers are a 0 cycle cost.

Re:Stick with PPC

[ncc74656]

Why would a Carbon app need to be significantly modified to compile on an x86? Does an app for Solaris SPARC need heavy modification to run on Solaris X86? No, it doens't, it needs, well, no modification whatsoever, it just compiles.

It depends on the app...if you have any hand-optimized assembly language in your source code (which you will if you're using MMX, 3DNow!, or SSE...or (presumably) AltiVec, since we're talking about code originating on a PowerPC-based machine), you'll need to rewrite that section of the program.

Re:Stick with PPC

[PythonOrRuby]

Actually, as far as I know, hand-crafted PPC assembly is not necessary at all to optimize for the Altivec instruction set. Last I heard you simply used C functions like vec_add() and such.

This is not to say that rewriting the Altivec libraries to map to any of the x86 SIMD units would be easy, but it's easier than if everything were in assembly.

Re:Stick with PPC

[woogieoogieboogie]

The Athlon's EV6 FSB has always been capable of running up to 400mhz (200 mhz x2). Combined with the latest thoroughbred revision, a 200(400) mhz fsb would yield a real 3.2 ghz Athlon or a PR 4.192 ghz. Given that the p4 is assumed scalable to 4 ghz, AMD really has nothing to worry about in regards to the true potential of the Athlon. do you really think it is a surprise that AMD somehow magically always seems to pull out a faster processor whcih compares favorably to the best Intel has to offer? A switch now to a 333 or 400 mhz FSB would kill the Athlon as it would require new motherboards, but given that 333 and 400 mhz Athlon motherboards are becomming prevelant, the potential for AMD to release 166(333) mhz and 200(400) mhz fsb Athlons transparantly to the motherboard is quickly becoming a reality. The cpu makers always sandbag the public because ther eis huge money to be made in incremental processor speeds. If AMD did release a 3.2 ghz Athlon with a PR of 4.19, it would blow both companies' loads until the next generation cpu came out. Don't think for one moment that AMD cannot volume produce 3.2 ghz Athlons or that Intel cannot volume produce 4 ghz p4's today if they wanted to. AMD's future is not worth the 5 minutes of glory in thrashing the Intel today and intels has the Hammer hanging over it's head so thrashing the Athlon today would probably only cause the hammer to come come down quicker. Intel will obviously remain the leader and AMD will continue to release "good enough" until, like the original Athlon, they have a poduct which can take and hold a substantial lead.

Apple is no different, until recently, their "good enough" strategy has worked well, but the g4 has reached it's peak potential and Apple has to move their platform forward with a more modern design, in particular a design supporting a faster bus and DDR capabilities. The g4 is no longer "good enough" to compete, no more than a k62 or cyrix mk2 is.

No company will ever be able to remove the "mhz = speed" from the consumers mind. MHZ Speed is sexy, "more work per cycle" is boring. Whoever can lead the mhz(ghz) race will win in the consumer mind, all others will have to produce "good enough" to compete.

Re:Stick with PPC

[Pig Hogger]

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.

This is because in any given Macintosh application, some 95% of the code is OS code, and only 5% is application code.

The OS code is, of course, compiled for the PPC chip, whereas the "legacy" application code is emulated. So, you end up with only about 5% of the code being emulated, which explains the 'reasonably acceptable' speed.

Re:Stick with PPC

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Two words: byte swapping.

Besides that, any code written in assembler would have to be redone.

Re:Stick with PPC

[FozzTexx]

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.)

Yes, but in most cases this was because the developer (<cough>Frame<cough>) was too stupid to click the little check box in PB next to the other architectures when doing a build.

Re:Stick with PPC

[RedWizzard]

P4 has 4 pipelines with 20-stage pipeline, a PowerPC 7 pipelines with 4 steps afaik

Pretty much right. The G4e has a 7-stage pipeline, and is able to fetch 4 instructions per clock. But don't get too hung-up about pipeline lengths and execution unit numbers. Pipeline lengths do allow faster clock speeds, and result in higher stall costs, but that's only a small part of the puzzle (comparable to saying the only thing that matters about car engines is the number and size of the cylinders). Scheduling, branch prediction, cache size, etc, are all also important. Ultimately the only thing that counts is user-level performance.

Re:Stick with PPC

[MaineCoon]

Big difference... Especially endianness - that is, byte order of multi-byte words (2 byte shorts, 4 byte longs and floats, 8 byte long longs and doubles).

The 68k was big endian, and the PowerPC on the Mac runs in big endian mode. x86 is little endian. Big endian is when the byte order for a number goes most significant to least significant byte. Little endian is the opposite.

Examples:

1 (0x00000001)
Big endian: 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x01
Little endian:0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00

4096 (0x00001000)
Big endian: 0x00 0x00 0x10 0x00
Little endian:0x00 0x10 0x00 0x00

305419896 (0x12345678)
Big endian: 0x12 0x34 0x56 0x78
Little endian: 0x78 0x56 0x34 0x12

Likewise... if one has a 4 byte integer in memory, and assumes it is within 0-255 (or -128-127), little endian processor, treating that pointer to the integer as a pointer to a single byte, will work properly. Big endian machines requires offseting the pointer. This is, of course, bad coding, but it happens nonetheless.

Suddenly all binary data files need translation to work... any code that makes assumptions about byte order doesn't work (such as optimized code for handling byte streams of data in chunks).

A major part of my job is doing conversions of software from Windows to Mac (games specifically), and handling for endian conversions in file read/write and network transmission, and fixing code that is specific to little endian byte order, is a not an insignificant part of the work.

This means that now a lot of code has to be changed/fixed/whatnot, but also a new testing cycle. And if you think getting a lot of developers to just recompile is a pain (and it would be)...

- Chris Jacobson

Re:Stick with PPC

[yokem_55]

This is exactly what I had in mind. Apple could get some vendor (motorola or Ibm) to outfit a ppc chip with a hypertransport bus, and hve it connected to a hammer ht link. Now to make this work, the bios would have to be engineered to handle both chips (getting a bios to handle i/o's for two completely different architectures would be a nightmare though), and the kernel would have to hacked up so as to make sure that ppc code got executed on the ppc, and x86 code got executed on the hammer. This would allow apple to maintain full ppc legacy compatability without resorting to emulation.

Re:Stick with PPC

[Scott Wood]

Bullshit, yourself.

The first paragraph of section 1.1 of the MPC601 specifications begins, "The 601 is the first implementation of the PowerPC family of RISC microprocessors. The 601 implements the 32-bit portion of the PowerPC architecture, which provides 32-bit effective addresses, integer data types of 8, 16, and 32 bits, and floating-point data types of 32 and 64 bits."

The only significant things that are 64-bit about the 601 are the floating point registers and the data bus. Not only do these not justify calling it a 64-bit chip, but the sizes of these in x86 chips are 80-bit and 64-bit, respectively (assuming at least a Pentium when it comes to data bus width), and the person to whom I responded (rightly) called x86 32-bit.

In any case, the 601 has absolutely no bearing on the performance of modern Macs.

Re:Stick with PPC

[dair]

My understanding that Carbon apps contain enough legacy code that recompiling wouldn't be an option.

That's incorrect - the whole point of the Carbon exercise was to remove legacy code. It was derived from the QuickTime for Windows project, and there's nothing PPC-specific about the Carbon APIs.

The biggest problem, for either Cocoa or Carbon apps, would be to handle endian swapping - it will become less of a problem as more people use XML for their pref files, but a lot of existing code will assume structures on disk have the same layout as structures in memory (which won't hold if files were generated on a different platform).

This probably would affect Carbon code more than Cocoa code, primarily because there's a lot more Carbon code around. However this wouldn't be such a big problem for developers who already use cross-platform file formats (Photoshop, Word, etc)

it's the whole yellow box v. blue box thing.

Yellow Box was the old name for Cocoa, and Blue Box was the old name for Classic - those names date from before Carbon was even an option.

-dair (although blue box still lives as the "TruBlue" process that runs Classic)

Re:Stick with PPC

[FozzTexx]

NeXTSTEP 3.1 and above was on four architectures. When they went to OPENSTEP they dropped the HPPA support.

I always compiled all the stuff I released for every architecture, because it was so easy. There were a couple of times there were bugs in gcc which caused different behavior on different architectures, but 99.9% of the time if you tested it on one, it was tested on all.

The real need for testing comes when you're recompiling the same sources for different variants of OPENSTEP. Fixx'm, an irc client runs on OPENSTEP, OpenStep Enterprise (Win32), and several versions of Liberace (OS X). They are all built from the same sources checked out from the same CVS repository, but there are a few #ifdefs here and there to deal with different quirks in each OS.

Re:Stick with PPC

[modecx]

Obviously, someone didn't get my point, but who cares? Just an AC.

Re:Stick with PPC

[The AtomicPunk]

You assume much. Heard of inline assembly?

Re:Stick with PPC

[Guspaz]

Not true. We're talking about back when PPC were first released and people made the jump from 68K, right? Back then people were using system 7.x, which was never optimized for the PPC. It wasn't until 8.x (I think 8.1 really got into it heavily, 8.1 was also the last MacOS to run on 68K if I'm not mistaken) that the OS started to become PPC optimized.

Further more, I was under the impression that the PPC had hardware 68K emulation built into the core, not software emulation. Is this not the case?

Regards, Guspaz.

Ported all of Mac OS X to x86?

[qslack]

They have ported all of Mac OS X to x86? Not just the kernel?

Let's pool $100,000 (Blender-style) and bribe the guy who runs their internal CVS repositories. Anyone wanna throw in a few bucks for macosx-x86-0dayl33t.iso? :)

Re:Ported all of Mac OS X to x86?

[Ikari Gendo]

One thing that I haven't seen commented on is that the Finder is a Carbon application -- Jobs specifically claimed this as an example of "eating one's own dog food." This means that unless they've rewritten the Finder in Cocoa, or ported Carbon to this alleged x86 build of OS X, the story is as groundless as all other similar stories.

The article strongly implies that Carbon has not been ported to "Marklar," as in the following:

Apple would have to also coax most of its third-party developers to rewrite their applications from the ground up in the company's Cocoa application environment.

But if there's a Cocoa version of the Finder, why haven't we seen it? (Be aware that I'm not a Jaguar user, and don't know if the Finder is Cocoa in the most recent release.) However, given these points:

• The Finder is written in Carbon.
• Carbon is not part of Marklar.

any claim of a fully-featured x86 OS X is bogus.

Re:Ported all of Mac OS X to x86?

[akac]

QuickTime on Windows is basically very much the same as Carbon. Porting the old ToolBox (Classic part of OS X) to x86 would be fruitless and probably impossible. Porting Carbon to x86 has largely been done in QuickTime as it is. Carbon is just an API - one greatly cleaned up.

Re:Ported all of Mac OS X to x86?

[Fillup]

The Finder is a Cocoa application.

Re:Ported all of Mac OS X to x86?

[Ikari Gendo]

The Finder is a Cocoa application.

No, it's a Carbon application in Mach-O executable format. See this document for the following passage:

The Finder in Mac OS X is an application--specifically, a Carbon application--that manages the user's desktop and mediates user access to applications, documents, and other items in the file system.

Re:Ported all of Mac OS X to x86?

[BitGeek]

Finder is both a Carbon application and a Cocoa application. At least the one on my Jaguar install is. Which means technically its a cocoa app (From what I can tell) but it still links in a lot of carbon code.

But then, most programs are. Its very difficult to write a cocoa application that doesn't hit carbon (Even though you don't link against it) and vice versa... for instance printing is done by carbon, even for cocoa apps.

Carbon is part of OSX and is going to stick around (much as I prefer cocoa and objective C)..

I see no reason to believe that carbon can't be (or couldn't have already been) ported to x86. Odds are most of it is C not assembly anyway.

Re:Ported all of Mac OS X to x86?

[Anonymous Coward]

only for their open source stuff. Inside, they use bitkeeper (because that's what NeXT used).

John, Senior Apple engineer.

Re:Ported all of Mac OS X to x86?

[bnenning]

QuickTime on Windows is basically very much the same as Carbon. Porting the old ToolBox (Classic part of OS X) to x86 would be fruitless and probably impossible. Porting Carbon to x86 has largely been done in QuickTime as it is. Carbon is just an API - one greatly cleaned up.

Moderate this up, it's exactly correct. The eWeek article is likely wrong on this point; there's no reason why Carbon couldn't be fully ported to other platforms, and I expect it has been.

Leaked Photos of Hardware

[Eravau]

How long 'til we get to see some leaked photos of Apple-specific X86 hardwware?

Re:Leaked Photos of Hardware

[morgajel]

oh, I'd imagine the photoshoppers are hard at work right now:)

Re:Leaked Photos of Hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine an iMac. Now imagine an iMac being anally raped by an 8" aluminum heatsink. That is what the x86 iMacs will look like.

-- The_Messenger

Re:Leaked Photos of Hardware

[archen]

I imagine it would look something like this but with flames shooting out.

Re:Leaked Photos of Hardware

[jchristopher]

How long 'til we get to see some leaked photos of Apple-specific X86 hardwware?

How long 'til we get to see an .iso of OS X for x86 on Gnutella?

Re:Leaked Photos of Hardware

[Elwood P Dowd]

How long 'til we get to see some leaked photos of Apple-specific X86 hardwware?

Jesus Christ, give me a minute. Photoshop is a little slow on this 600mHz iBook.

Re:Leaked Photos of Hardware

[desau]

call me an idiot, but it made perfect sense to me.
and it was funny. And 3 moderators seemed to think so as well.

Mac OS X86 and hardware.

[mwber]

It seems like they could still couple hardware and software if they went to x86, just not as tightly. They could keep lists of "recommended" hardware, with some sort of rating or ranking system. Perhaps they wouldn't even attempt to write drivers for more than a couple peripherals and allow open source drivers to emerge if they're needed.

Just a thought.

Re:Mac OS X86 and hardware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe they could just use Intel-based chips, but dump the legacy BIOS crap and go with an OpenFirmware-based system. Hell, maybe Apple should just make the jump to x86-64 for their new platform, since it looks like they'll be able to source those chips from two suppliers: "Hammer" from AMD and "Yamhill" from Intel.

I'd buy it.

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Re:I'd buy it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a dremel and cut the button in half.

See, two buttons.

Re:I'd buy it.

[garcia]

I would only use it if I was actually using Mac hardware. I really don't see any reason that I need to switch other than that.

Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[eyefish]

Here I'm posting an article I wrote about the Mac OS X on the PC Platform long ago and that I tried getting publish on /.. Well, maybe now is a good time to post it after all

As we all know, with Linux we have the best free (as in beer) operating system in the market. It's fast, it's stable, it's well-supported, it scales, and it has a GUI environment that although very acceptable to the Linux community, it really is not up to par to the elegance and simplicity of the Mac OS/X GUI (and god spare me some flames, even the Windows XP interface feels better than the "stock" KDE or GNOME shipped with Linux).

On the other hand, we have Mac OS/X, the most amazing GUI out today for any platform. It certainly makes our friend Bill G. jelaous. It also has an amazing rendering engine by sporting PDF under the hood. However, even though it has a great backbone in the form of an open BSD system, the truth is that it is doubtfull the apple folks will get the steam, hype, and generally market support that Linux is constantly getting lately in all media, corporations, and geeks alike. Add to that the fact that Mac OS/X runs only on the PowerPC platform (at least officially), and you get a lot of potential market away from Apple.

So how about this, why not have Apple port it's whole Mac OS/X upper layers to the x86 platform, publish some specs for Linux vendors to "plug under", and run it on top of such Linux-based (as opposed BSD-based) systems???

With this we'd get the great support Linux enjoys in the enterprise (even when I'm first to recognize that BSD is just as good technical-wise, but this is a market-driven world folks), it'd also get the support from the millions of geeks who own a x86 machine, it'd get the support of all the OEMs who would almost inmmediatelly start providing hardware/software products for the platform, and just as important it would get the support of the common user thanks to its simple, elegant, and fast GUI system.

As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure soon after we could start converting all Wintel users to the new platform ("Mac OS/Linux"?), since a new hardware investment would not be needed. Just a software download and a much lower price than a Windows license (say, 50 bucks?).

I know, some will argue that "what makes Macs different is the tight integration of the OS with the hardware" and blah blah blah, but heck, should this that I propose take off, I'm sure that Apple will have enough leverage to publish standards making this integration much simpler and still remain open, while benefiting everyone.

Note that since the Mac OS layer would sit on top of a MacOS-compliant Linux distro, it means that teckies will NOT be forced to use the Mac OS GUI, since they could use their Linux distro as usual, minus the Mac stuff. They could even keep using their old KDE or GNOME GUIs.

So, how does Apple make money? selling the top layer (software services and GUI), and if they want even selling slick custom-built hardware boxes like they do today with the OS pre-installed.

Now, please stop all the flames about "sotfware should be free and I shouldn't have to pay to use the Mac OS/X layer on top of Linux" and all that. Software should be free, but people also have families to take care of, and Apple's effort should be rewarded by paying them. Case closed.

As for Linux, imagine all of a sudden a flood of trully useable applications being ported from the Mac (and even Wintel) world to the new "Mac OS/Linux". This would eliminate the barrier many have when trying to move from Wintel to Mac: "my apps don't work or I can't access my data".

Also imagine the simplicity of installing, deinstalling, and managing applications that Mac OS would bring (do not tell me how debian, RPMs, etc are great, they suck big time if you ever had to use them regularly; yes I have).

This, I think, it's what would really bring a true competitor to the Windows monopoly. I'm sure that *I* would switch inmediatelly.

And BTW, as an example let's take my own case: I do not use Linux regularly because it's just too darn hard to do anything (unless you _already_ knew how to do it). Sure once you get it working it's fine and dandy, but heck, sometimes to get it to work you have to get the sources, read the FAQs, HowTos, set some flags, find dependencies, get extra libraries, etc.

Likewise, I don't use Mac OS/X because I can't go out and afford to buy a whole new machine architecture. I already have my decent 1.2Ghz Celeron, it works fine, why should I switch and spend US$1,700 just to use a nice GUI?

However allow me to keep my machine, give me the stability and power of Linux, and the elegance and simplicity of the Mac, and you can count me in right away.

Now don't get me wrong, Linux is *awesome* for someone that knows how to use it, or has the time to learn it. I think's it's an amazing platform for Apache, mySQL, PHP, firewalling, routing, Java, Perl, etc, but it could be much more if it was easier to administer and use.

You gotta understand that the people in large corporations are afraid of getting into something they don't understand or think it's too complex, this is why Windows NT has gotten such a large market share; People very close to me admit it, they use WinNT even if they have to reboot it once every 2 weeks because it is *easy* to use. And folks, yes I agree that maybe "they're not qualified enough to have such a job", but the reality is that they are here to stay and always will be here to stay, and Microsoft is counting on them.

Add to all this the distressing fact that the Windows OS _is_ getting better all the time (ask a Win95/98/Me user how many times they rebooted WinXP lately, or check out the Windows .Net Server Beta). Eventually (the truth hurts folks), Windows will be as fast and stable as Linux, and yes, they will copy the Mac look and get away with it just as they did with Windows. And they will have a market of several hundred million users who (like a herd) will simply follow Microsoft because simply they're not tech-savvy enough to realize that there are other choices. And developers will continue increasingly target the Windows platform because numbers speak: Do I sell for 4 million Linux machines, 5 million Mac machines, or 500 million Wintel machines?

This is the time folks to trully all come together and trully create a second option to Wintel. Let's combine the best of what we have (a Linux foundation, X86 hardware, and Mac OS upper services and GUI layers), and trully create something we can be proud of a few years from now.

So what's the next step? Someone should send this article to Apple's Steve Jobs, and have Steve meet with the heads of the major Linux distros to define some specs that all would follow to support the Mac Layer. Rally some OEMs to make their products "Mac Linux"-ready (so that they could support the tight-integration features that makes Macs such a joy to use today), and rally the big software developer houses and let them know about this and get them excited, and let's all rally behind this effort and give them all the support the open source community is famous for. This could be the beginning of a trully beautiful relationship...

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[doomy]

Linux is not free as in beer. Linux is free as in freedom. To be free as in beer, the beer has to come with source. In this regard, MacOS X is free as in beer, since you get it when you buy a mac.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[mr100percent]

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.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[be-fan]

The limitations of QE are clearly noted. The PowerPoint they released awhile ago cleared showed that QE was only used for compositing and window effects. QE works by taking windows, software rendering them to textures, and using OpenGL to draw textured quads to the screen. This way they can do compositing by making the quads partially transparent, and they can do stuff like the genie effect by using vertex shaders to manipulate the verticies of the quad. But the REAL work, drawing to the window, is done by the software renderer.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[Arandir]

...and run it on top of such Linux-based (as opposed BSD-based) systems???

Bloody Hell! Why would you want to cripple it like that?

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[be-fan]

Dude. I use Linux for 90% of my work. I've gone months without even having it installed. Still, I can recognize a good idea when I see it.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[be-fan]

Umm, drawing to the desktop window is what Quartz is all about! It draws all the scrollbars, buttons, text, etc. The stuff QE accelerates (transparent windows and window effects) is nice, but its fluff, just eye-candy.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[jbolden]

I think OSX is a wonderful OS offering a business desktop almost as good as windows and a development platform almost as good as Linux. It certainly beats the Linux/Wine or the XP/Cygwin combo.

If your point is the Linux kernal vs. the Windows kernal I don't care which one the mass of humaninty runs. If your point is the whole Gnu/Linux suite vs. the XP suite (which includes extended office) then free as in speech is very important. Right now with a fairly portable Linux kernal and the suite of gnu tools (including gcc) as a community we can take any hardware configuration that emerges and produce a modern operating system plus a full suite of application for it within a year or two. That's a hell of a lot to give up for a better GUI.

Stay the course.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[MoneyT]

Question. Why would Apple release a PowePoint presentation of their developments? It would seem more likely to me that they would release it on the Appleworks Presentation or some other form

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[non]

It doesn't. BeOS does (or rather did). 6 years ago Apple offered to buy Be for US$125 million. In the end they made the exact same decision Be made; Unix. I still have the Taligent Guide to Object Oriented Programming. I probably should have sold it to a used book shop, although I doubt I would have got that much for it...

So why Be, because it was already largely Posix compliant, and yes, it ran on both PPC and x86. Jobs, when referring to that famous windowing OS demo at Xerox PARC back in 1970, said that it was obvious that this was the future, it was only a question of who would win.

That said, Apple is a hardware company, first and foremost, and in order to show profit has to sell hardware. M$ is an OS company.

The real question is why isn't there a M$ port to PPC, the answer is plain; the hardware isn't priced for the market. Even with all that Apple has done to make the cost comptetive. OK, for an iMac, they might get sales based on design, but in 6 months every small manufacturer in Singapore and Malaysia will copy whatever they put out. So whats left? The brand. And the brand is Apple's first and foremost concern. Thats why Mac OS for x86 means nothing, until they also brand x86 platform hardware.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[MobyTurbo]

However, even though it has a great backbone in the form of an open BSD system, the truth is that it is doubtfull the apple folks will get the steam, hype, and generally market support that Linux is constantly getting lately.

[more explaining why Apple should switch to Linux from BSD deleted]

Linux is OK, but BSD itself is so compatable with Linux that not only do practically all sources recompile without changes, it even can run Linux binaries on the Intel (and maybe others) with almost no overhead in emulation. (Also on some other platforms it has similar binary emulation for the predominant Unix, like NetBSD on SGI platforms emulating Irix)

Why, other than the fact that "more people have heard of Linux", the crux of your argument, should they switch when the BSD API itself already (assuming they haven't made big changes that a simple switch to the Linux kernel wouldn't fix either) has the ability to run tons (well over 5,000 packages ported for FreeBSD) of Linux and Unix software with a simple recompile or, when neccesary for closed-source applications, emulation of Linux?

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[colatek]

I think one of the main reasons OSX runs so well is because the hardware it runs on is controled by Apple. Wouldn't Windows run well if there were only 5 diffrent variations of computer hardware to support? I am just guessing that if Apple were to sell an x86 version of OSX right now it wouldn't run as smoothly. I may be wrong. I myself just switched to OSX and love it.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[Proc6]

And Apple makes money on this how?

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[ZigMonty]

Yes, if you consider moving a window "fluff".

Quartz Extreme is great but you're right, we need to have *all* of Quartz accelerated.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[jcr]

But the REAL work, drawing to the window, is done by the software renderer.

I don't know where you got the idea that compositing the windows isn't Real Work. If you look at CPU usage on systems with and without QEX, you'll find that without QEX, far more CPU time is spent compositing windows than generating their content in the first place.

-jcr

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[eyefish]

MobyTurbo, I agree with your comment on BSD being very compatible with Linux. My point is a marketing point of view. I'd have no problems simply renaming the Apple-supported BSD variant as Linux (of course, after making sure all Linux APIs are supported).

You are right in what you say. My point is "let's play the marketing game". Remember, things are not what they are but what people believe they are.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[TheLostOne]

90% of your work is done on Linux and yet you haven't had it installed for months....

With that kind of work output you must be in Managment :P

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes sense (long)

[Yves Schmid]

Well, nothing prevents you to install an OpenGL context in your window and do the rendering of the window using 3D acceleration instead of the Quartz API. I do this everyday... Apple does not force you to use Quarz to render the inside of your windows.

So what's your problem...? You want standard UI to be accelerated...? I don't think it's that interessing to use the GPU to render a button or a list box. Compositing makes more sens for buffered windows. Now when you really need 3D acceleration install a GL context, that's all...

Yves.

Business as usual

[brindle]

Of course they have an X86 port.

If they release on intel hardware it will be for a finite set of manufactures to a limited set of specs, so that they can continue to deliver true plug-and-play. Expect to pay more for intel based hardware that runs Mac OS X.

And don't be too disapointed if your current system is not supported.

-b

Re:Business as usual

[mjprobst]

I think everyone is _still_ not thinking far enough outside the commodity X86-box market when they say "it will run on a finite set of specs".

Think rather, "Apple will design its own motherboards from scratch, with the only thing in common with other X86 boards being the presence of an x86-compatible chip".

They could dispense with lots of the legacy bullcrap that way--use something similar to Open Firmware, eliminate unnecessary layers of BIOS bullcrap, leave out any legacy support for ISA in the chipset, support a reasonable interrupt architecture, whatever else they want.

Plus, software like VMWare could still probably be made to run Windows on such an architecture, since these are the kinds of things that can be virtualized, and the things that aren't necessary. I doubt Windows would run out-of-the-box on such an architecture without some virtualizing mechanism to emulate missing things. But you'd still get better speed than with an X86 emulator on PPC.

I think it would be cool, actually, and even useful if VMWare were ported to it.

Re:Business as usual

[SpotBug]

And then, once Windows is running nicely on your x86-based Mac, developers won't need to write Mac software anymore. And then, well, then Apple's in the same business as the rest of the PC makers, and probably dies.

Oops.

And that's the problem with Mac on x86, even in the case where you still have to buy Apple's hardware. You're going to expect that it run your Windows software (it's got an x86 CPU in it!). As soon as that happens, developers start telling their Mac customers, just use the Windows version on your Mac. Little by little, Mac OS goes away and Apple with it.

Re:Business as usual

[g4dget]

Except for the x86, Macintosh is already almost a PC: PCI, USB, IEEE1394, AGP, ATA, etc. Even their BIOS is not homegrown anymore. And the mainstream PC hardware architecture has gotten pretty powerful--it's unlikely that Apple can do any better. PC vendors also have started eliminating complex legacy stuff pretty aggressively--in another year or two, ISA, parallel ATA, and PS/2 will likely be history, and BIOSes (for better or worse) will be based around ACP.

Re:Business as usual

[TheSunborn]

Do they even design their own PPC motherboard?
I mean they used to use Motorola chipset, but that might ofcause have changed.

Martin Tilsted

Re:Business as usual

[karm13]

I doubt Windows would run out-of-the-box on such an architecture without some virtualizing mechanism to emulate missing things.

even if it would, it wouldn't in the next version.

Re:Business as usual

[mjprobst]

Hey, I never said it would be to _Apple's_ benefit to provide VMWare, or even to port to X86. I just said that if it happened I think they're more likely to design something without 20-year-old PC-compatible roots, more along the lines of their existing PPC motherboards.

I also think it would be silly for them to move to X86 for the reason mentioned above; someone would port VMWare to it, and native software would become more difficult to justify.

Re:Business as usual

[mjprobst]

Point taken, but I still think they might have reason to design chipset stuff in-house.

Here's a good question--could they hack Altivec support into a chipset, or license it to AMD, and create an Intel-based platform that can run Altivec instructions? It's mostly a matter of how difficult it is to compile/port those instructions over to another architecture, now that they're depending on them.

This way they would end up creating an almost-X86 around AMD's core. Once again, might not be practical when thinking in terms of commodity hardware, but as a way out of sour deals with Motorola it might do service.

Re:Business as usual

[Gumber]

Apple is going to have to balance the savings of using a standard PC platform with the expense of supporting multiple vendors, or loosing hardware revenue because someone releases a patch that lets MacOS x86 run on their hardware.

You have to consider that Apple's current machines are very PC like in many respects (AGP, PCI, USB, IDE, industry standard memory, etc.) In other words, they are already leveraging major peices of the PC architecture.

I would guess that an Apple PC would look very much like the latest PC hardware spec pushed by Microsoft with, perhaps, a hardware key to tie in with the OS, and perhaps a BIOS that doesn't support so much legacy crap.

Re:Business as usual

[zapfie]

Er, there's WAY more to a computer than its CPU. Windows will run on the current Macs too just swell, and you don't see your scenario playing out.

Re:Business as usual

[g4dget]

Is there any reason to believe that AltiVec is better than Intel's or AMD's vectorized instruction set? Maybe it's better on the G4 than its equivalent on the P4, but maybe it also has more silicon devoted to it there.

Re:Business as usual

[Matthew Weigel]

Blockqouth g4dget:

Even their BIOS is not homegrown anymore.

That's true, it's not "homegrown," but it's also not crap like the PC BIOS. NeXT went down the road of trying to support regular PCs before, and Sun has made an effort too; I think everyone has learned their lesson about trying to go from a tightly controlled in-house architecture to an open market-controlled architecture.

Apple would die if they tried to pull the same "your hardware is five years old; too bad" games on a regular PC that they do with Macs. Any move would involve not much more, I think, than putting an x86 processor in their Macs.

Re:Business as usual

[Matthias Wiesmann]

Is there any reason to believe that AltiVec is better than Intel's or AMD's vectorized instruction set?

The main difference between Altivec and MMX (can't say for AMD technology), is that altivec has its own registers, so that altivec instruction can run in parallel with normal instructions. There is more info on Apple's developer site.

Performance

[hobbesmaster]

I wonder what type of performance OSX gets on x86 processors; photoshop doesn't count.

Re:Performance

[skinfitz]

Hear Hear.

Incidentally I heard that Rolls Royce in the early days used to rush out and put a cover over any of their cars that broke down to maintain their image.

Kind of reminds me of something.

To quote Chris Farley

[bogie]

Holy Snikees!!!!

I say bring it on. Of course this would mean a custom bios and only "Apple approved" hardware would work, but this should at least bring the cost down.

Imagine a $600 Imac that you could use your own monitor with!!! My check if officially prewritten.

Oh it would probably be a swift kick in the balls to MS as well :-)

Re:To quote Chris Farley

[atolicus]

swift kick you say? hardly... think a lil before you bash.

Re:To quote Chris Farley

[GigsVT]

I thought the point of an Imac was it was all integrated. G4s can use any normal monitor.

Re:To quote Chris Farley

[len_harms]

Apple will never go back to letting others make the hardware. The did for a few years. For awhile the other manufactures were making BETTER boxen then apple. Apple figured out that they were hurting themselves by letting others sell their boxs. Know why motorola is not playing very nicely with apple? If you think about it is simple. Apple burned them. Not just a little. But big time. Apple stoped selling the OS to other companies. Those companies were instantly overnight put out of bussness. Motorola will not forget or forgive that lightly. They lost a large chunk of sales to that segment of the market. This instantly relegated their chips from front line in every mac that everyone makes, to cpus put into routers plus the little market share that apple had.

You will more than likely see only 1 or 2 platforms that support it. Then it will be a totaly custom bios from apple that will make it work just right.

However I still would not put it past them to switch stratages again. They have done it over and over. After the 2nd time most bussness usually figure out that its cheaper to write software for windows as you will not be rewriting it again next year. This is because apple dropped ALL support for the thing they were saying is the next greatest thing ever. While this is the holy grail of computer science the perpetual rewrite. Its not the holy grail of most companies that are just tring to break even.

Also most hardware manufactures treat drivers as the last thing done ever. like 'oh yeah we need drivers'. If it comes down to a choice between windows drivers and apple drivers. The choice will always be the bigger of the two markets. Apple will have to 'help' manufactures with bribes uh monitary donations, and probably actual people to make it work.

Also MS makes most of its money from Office sales. I would be willing to bet that office on the mac is a top seller. Windows exists in its current form to run Office. That it runs other things just helps them sell more copies of windows is gravy.

Re:To quote Chris Farley

[MaxVlast]

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.

Re:To quote Chris Farley

[bsane]

BETTER boxen then apple.

If by better you mean cheaper then you're right.

This is because apple dropped ALL support for the thing they were saying is the next greatest thing ever

Not quite sure what your talking about. I can't think of anything that had actual external development behind it that they dropped. Maybe the Newton?

The rest I agree with...

Re:To quote Chris Farley

[PythonOrRuby]

Number 3 wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. After all, Microsoft's Mac Business Unit coded Office v.X using the Carbon API, yet it only runs on Mac OS X, thus negating the one reason to use Carbon rather than Cocoa(except of course for laziness, and an unwillingness to learn something that looks new).

Bah!

[aero6dof]

Its just a bargaining chip to deal with Motorola - who would be stupid to believe that it's actually going to happen. For one, Apple would have to weather the storm as MS decides to bury OS X.

Wouldn't be surprising

[haloscan]

The chance that Apple is maintaining an x86 port is possible but would most likely cost them business-wise if released. The simplicity and stability of the OS are what makes it most attractive to those who purchase Macs and releasing it would complicate matters with new drivers having to be built for the numerous amounts of hardware available for the x86 platform.

On a sidenote, the project name is an interesting choice ("The project (code-named Marklar, a reference to the race of aliens on the "South Park" cartoons)").

Re:Wouldn't be surprising

[zapod4]

On a sidenote, the project name is an interesting choice ("The project (code-named Marklar, a reference to the race of aliens on the "South Park" cartoons)").

Also akin to Melkor, the Lord of Darkness in Middle Earth.

Re:Wouldn't be surprising

[Scott Wood]

If the main attraction of Apple's software is that it works well with Apple's hardware, then what stops them from offering a hardware/software combination with the same level of quality as they do now, while also licensing the OS for use on other hardware? If you want the "Apple experience", you buy a Mac. If you're interested in the OS, but are either unwilling or unable to pay a premium for a Mac, then you can buy the OS for use on a cheaper machine. You still get many of the benefits of the OS, but may lose a good deal of the out-of-box experience. In the absence of such a choice, that person would likely have just bought a Windows PC. How does that help Apple?

Re:Wouldn't be surprising

[Delphix]

You seemed to have missed the part where MacOS was licensed (MacOS 7) to other clone makers. The SuperMac, the StarMax, etc computers? This is where Apple almost got burried. They can't make enough money off selling just the OS to other hardware manufacturers.

Why do you think the first thing Mr. Jobs did when he showed up on the scene again was to terminate the clone contracts?

Re:Wouldn't be surprising

[Scott Wood]

If the price that Apple charged the cloners for the OS was so low that Apple was unable to make money doing so, they should have raised it. If, after raising the price to such a level, the cloners were still interested, then Apple makes money, the cloners make money, and everyone's happy. If not, then people either buy Apple Macs (i.e. no different from the current situation), or they buy an OS-less CHRP box and buy MacOS off the shelf (at whatever price Apple can put it there profitably); once again, Apple makes a profit, the customer gets what he wants, and everyone's happy.

However, that's irrelevant to my point, which was that licensing MacOS to third parties wouldn't cause driver headaches when run on Apple's own hardware, and thus it doesn't deprive Apple of the ability to continue selling a mostly hassle-free out-of-box experience to those who are willing and able to pay a premium for it.

I hope this marklar work out.

[laserjet]

I hope this new marklar really works on marklar marklar. Marklar seems to be the marklar of the marklar, not just another markler off the old marklar. Marklar really does need to marklar another marklar maker in order to be marklar with the marklar. Marklar is just not marlar anymore, and this seems to be a good marklar to the marklar. A small marklar to marklar, really.

Re:I hope this marklar work out.

[laserjet]

For all the people that didn't get this, it is from an episode of South Park where an alien race visits south park from the planet marklar. And they speak marklar.

Re:I hope this marklar work out.

[jerryasher]

I haven't seen southpark recently, where does it come from?

Re:I hope this marklar work out.

[Czernobog]

Apple has managed to marklar us all.
The OS was called marklar, not OSX.
It's marklar independent and they only need cross-marklars to port the marklar..
I just hope someone's thought of introducing marklar compatibility, considering how much marklar on various marklars exists out there.
It is more than obvious that we'd need marklar-marklar interpreters as their marklar is sure to be incompatible with anybody else's marklar.

Imaging Microsoft porting the bulk of their marklar on marklar. It'd cause Marklars to start speaking english...

Re:I hope this marklar work out.

[joto]

From a space-episode, in which they meet an alien race speaking like the above comment. It's just like smurfs, overusing another word. Hardly the best episode.

Believe what you will...

[mookie-blaylock]

... but it might help to not get ahead of yourself.

While the x86 ports of MacOS have been rumored to exist for ages, the buzz doesn't seem to suggest that Apple is totally ready to give up on PPC just yet.

The Apple rumor scene has been abuzz about the rumored desktop version of the Power4 -- even the article mentions this. This CPU supposedly has Altivec functions included, which Apple has been going crazy about since the G4 came out. IBM said they'd discuss it at the Microprocessor Forum -- and I'd keep my eyes on this.

While it's all speculation, it makes more sense than requiring yet another shift in architecture and requiring everyone to rewrite their apps to run on an x86 version of Mac OS X.

Wait a sec

[bennyboy]

This would be more then just porting the X86 hardware. What about other hardware that is used in current apples that will have to be ditched. Motherboards.. video cards.. etc. It doesnt seem as simple as ripping out the ppc and dropping in a p4. Does any one really understand the intended migration, cause this seems far fetched to me.

-b

Re:Wait a sec

[be-fan]

Motherboards.. video cards.. etc.
>>>>>>>>>>
If you hadn't noticed, the current Mac's are basically just PCs with G4s in them. I mean the system bus is PCI, the graphics bus is AGP, they have Firewire and USB, they use ATA hard drives, DDR-SDRAM, and NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards. The only things they'd have to change around are the code hooking into some motherboard/firmware level stuff (Apple-Evil-Proprietory-Boot vs ACPI for example) and they'd be good to go.

Re:Wait a sec

[money_shot]

Take a good look at the hardware in an apple today... ide controllers, ati/nvidia video, standard CD/DVD players/burners, standard firewire/usb buses.

I don't see where there would be all that much work past a new mobo.

- money_shot

Re:Wait a sec

[Cid Highwind]

"Apple-Evil-Proprietary-Boot"?

It's called "Open Firmware" and it's a documented standard. MacOS hasn't booted from a proprietary ROM since the days of NuBus (*shudder*).

Re:Wait a sec

[bnenning]

(Apple-Evil-Proprietory-Boot vs ACPI for example)

Macs boot via Open Firmware, which is neither evil nor proprietary.

Re:Wait a sec

[be-fan]

A boot standard based on Forth? How can that NOT be evil and proprietary? Yea yeah, I know, I stuck my foot in my mouth. I didn't know they changed it awhile back.

Re:Wait a sec

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's main problem is the disproportionate number of homosexuals who use their products. Being associated with this deviant demographic keeps Apple from growing beyond the homosexual community. If Apple wants more marketshare, they are going to have to drop the gay stuff and concentrate on normal.

Re:Wait a sec

[moof1138]

Apple-Evil-Proprietory-Boot = IEEE 1275. An open standard used by Sun, IBM, and Apple.

Actually, this idea isn't new...

[TaliesinWI]

I remember Apple having ads in a few PC mags way back (like almost a decade ago) talking about how they were going to port MacOS to the Intel architecture. This would have been when Windows 3.1 was the best Redmond had to offer, but I'm not sure the MacOS of that era would have been much better. :)
I'll see if I can find the damn magazines and I'll post issue numbers.

Re:Actually, this idea isn't new...

[Etcetera]

This would have been when Windows 3.1 was the best Redmond had to offer, but I'm not sure the MacOS of that era would have been much better.

Geez, are you kidding? System 7 was FAR AND AWAY better than 3.1 ever was. I remember reading a compariason of System 7 to Win 3.1 in a MacUser issue from back in '90. System 7 formed the basis of the Mac's OS for almost 10 years, and though it was showing a little bit of age as it progressed, it was still a remarkable OS.

Re:Actually, this idea isn't new...

[Stephen Samuel]

Back in the early '90s, a PC (Windows) magazine (PC Mag, I think), acknowled that

MacOS has a 5 year software lead on Windows, and this lead is likely to continue for the forseeable future

(or something pretty close to that).

Engineers rule at Apple, so the OS was well designed, but badly marketed. System 7 was stable, consistent, extensible, and -- unlike any version of Windows -- very well thought-out and designed.

Marketers ruled at Microsoft, so the OS was badly designed, but well marketed.

Yes, the marketing people won this war -- but as a childhood saying went:

20,000,000 flies can't be wrong eat shit!

Re:Actually, this idea isn't new...

[MaxVlast]

System 7 kicked butt.

The project you're talking about is Star Trek. It happened at the same time as Taligent and Pink. Any idea where all of those things are now? Find me a Dylan programmer and we can ask him together. Or we could send him an RTF e-mail with Cyberdog. Running in Copland.

Re:Actually, this idea isn't new...

[Etcetera]

Oh come on Windows had premeptive multi tasking and nice true type fonts by late 94.

Not sure if that's a joke or not, but...

System 7 introduced TrueType in 1990. True, true preemptive multitasking didn't arrive on the Mac until OS X (unless you count Copland), but some would argue that in a single-user environment, pre-emptive multitasking isn't all that it's cracked up to be in terms of real-world uses. Sometimes you WANT apps to "self-coordinate" their process time.

I wouldn't want my school's 30,000-user Solaris box running in cooperative multitasking, but a personal machine won't be getting that kind of use anyway.

Re:Actually, this idea isn't new...

[rnd()]

System 7 had a way better UI than Win3.1, however it also crashed a lot more. Thus, for me it would be a near-tie but I'd probably choose MacOS 7 and learn to live with the crashes.

BTW, Win95 is without a doubt superior to system 7.

OS X is already available for Intel.

[FrankieBoy]

Darwin is the core for OS X and there is a port for it called GNU-Darwin-x86. Aqua is the GUI and I think that there are some people working on this.

Re:OS X is already available for Intel.

[Jeremy Erwin]

The kernel is called xnu. The Darwin operating system (like most *BSD distributions) is comparable to what RMS and Debian call GNU-Linux. MacOSX uses a fork of Darwin-- there isn't a one to one correspondence between a Darwin release and a MacOSX release-- and adds further libraries and services, Carbon, Cocoa, and Quartz being the three most famous.

Re:mac l00s3rs

[c1pher]

"superior x86" architecture.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Please!

[supabeast!]

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!

Re:Please!

[Halo1]

Do you really think Macs cost more than most PC's just because of the processor? The G4 isn't that expensive, most of the extra cost comes from the fact that Apple sells less boxes and ass such needs higher margins to be able to fund its R&D (Dell doesn't have 28% margins on its products, believe me). An Apple 80x86 box would probably still cost as much as the current PPC Macs and you'd stil be bitching...

Believable

[Jeffrey Baker]

I'll believe Apple has an x86 port of OS X. But, the OS is not the main problem. Apple can't switch to the x86 because their app vendors would be in hell trying to port their AltiVec optimizations to MMX/SSE/3DNow!/SSE2. Nevermind that Apple would suddenly be just another PC vendor.

It is much more plausible that Apple is switching the 64-bit IBM Power4 CPU. IBM is presenting this new desktop version of the CPU at Microprocessor Forum on October 15th. The CPU has a mystery vector unit with 160+ instructions, just like AltiVec. There was a post to the gcc-patches mailing list proposing a patch to enable altivec support on the powerpc64 target, and this patch originated from Alan Modra at IBM's Linux Technology Center.

All evidence indicates that IBM will produce a desktop CPU with an AltiVec unit. Apple has hit the wall with Motorola, and are now selling overclocked G4 miracle CPUs just to stay in the game. I think Apple will switch to Power4.

Re:Believable

[Baki]

I don't think Apple would suddenly be just another PC vendor. Porting OS-X to Intel CPU's does not mean Apple would adopt the complete PC architecture for their future hardware. I am almost certain they would make non-PC compatible Intel hardware.

Apple has no reason to stop their excellent strategy of close marriage between non-commodity, thus predictable, hardware and their operating system. I do think they develop the Intel version in order to be able to switch CPU, should the Power PC CPU not work out well, not in order to become just another PC vendor.

And of course they want to keep it highly secret, since it would be very damaging to current hardware sales once people start to think another CPU switch (like 680x0 -> power in the past) making the current hardware obsolete.

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.

Re:Believable

[Gumber]

Umm, hasn't apple already adopted the PC architecture? PCI, USB, AGP, etc?

Re:Believable

[io333]

What in the world are you talking about? Haven't you ever heard of yellow dog linux: the distro that runs on mac hardware?

OSX is BSD with a pretty face. The most any developer would have to do is recompile.

Re:Believable

[furballphat]

I find it doubtful that they even have this port, never mind if they are going to use it. If it does exist, then it has done for several years, yet it has only been leaked now (by Think Secret!)

Directly involved in the development of Marklar is 12 or so people, however the article says: "mainstream Mac OS X team is regularly asked to modify code to address bugs that crop up when compiling the OS for x86." This means that all the OS X developers know about it, as do the internal testers. I don't know the specific numbers, but that's a lot of people, and surely one of them would have let the cat out the bag before now.

Re:Believable

[g4dget]

Apple can't switch to the x86 because their app vendors would be in hell trying to port their AltiVec optimizations to MMX/SSE/3DNow!/SSE2.

Without AltiVec or MMX, the G4, AMD, and P4 seem to be roughly equivalent at the same clock speed. And not many applications are optimized for AltiVec--not many can be.

Overall, Apple might well benefit in terms of performance by going with x86, even if a tiny handful of hand-optimized applications possibly gets a little slower.

Whatever they do, Apple should probably go with a 64bit architecture, since 4Gbytes is getting a bit tight. Maybe Itanium is the answer?

Re:Believable

[ZxCv]

...and surely one of them would have let the cat out the bag before now.

Uh, the cat was out of the bag long ago. This has been rumored since before 10.0 was even released. The only real 'news' here seems to be that Apple is still keeping up the Intel version of OS X, not that it ever existed.

Re:Believable

[Blue Lozenge]

I'll believe Apple has an x86 port of OS X. But, the OS is not the main problem. Apple can't switch to the x86 because their app vendors would be in hell trying to port their AltiVec optimizations to MMX/SSE/3DNow!/SSE2. Nevermind that Apple would suddenly be just another PC vendor.

I'm sorry, but have you ever written code and optimized it with both AltiVec and SSE2?

I have and I can tell you that the bulk of porting between the two is "Copy", "Paste", and "Search and Replace".

For example:, you might replace 'vec_add' with '_mm_add_epi16', 'vec_pack' with '_mm_packus_epi16', or 'vector signed short' with '__m128i'.

This goes for about 90% of my SIMD code. The last 10% is where the two instruction sets do not exactly match up: A simple assignment in AltiVec is an _mm_load_si128() in SSE2. The different byte-orders sometimes introduces a few changes. Some instructions behave differently, eg. vec_madd() and _mm_madd_epi16().

In the end, porting an optimization between AltiVec and SSE2 is trivial compared to writing the optimized algorithm in the first place.

SSE: It's no different from SSE2 if you're just doing single-precision floating-point.
MMX: It's the same story, except you also have to cut your 16-byte vectors down to 8-bytes.
3DNow!: Again, same idea, but with a much smaller palette of instructions to choose from.

Re:Believable

[Bloodmoon1]

It wouldn't suprise me if this (Marklar) was true, but I'd be more prone to believe it if it came from a more reputable source. You see, eWeek is owned by Ziff Davis who has a vested intrest in the success of, and popular rumors for Microsoft, Windows, and therfore, x86. By vested intrest, I mean out of the 9 magazines they produce, almost half are for geared towards the PC population, and 0 are based around macs. Plus they've always seemed a little biased towards the Wintel Empire, IMHO. This reminds me of the start of the month when a Bear-Stearns analyst said that Apple would go to x86 in 2-4 years, but then disclosed that Bear-Stearns owns Intel stock, and as such would have reason to make such a "detailed analysis" and maybe get Intel stock to rise as a result. So yeah, I'll actually believe it when I see it.

Re:Believable

[loply]

Precisely. Read the article. It says this has been known in spots and patches for years. This is just yet more evidence.

Re:Believable

[zapfie]

Well, an x86 port does not imply x86 architecture. Apple's not stupid enough to kill off their hardware sales- after all, it's what keeps them so strong. Using an x86 chip in a custom Apple architecture gets rid of the whole issue with Motorola and IBM, but maintains Apple's grip on the Mac hardware market. Now THAT is more plausible.

Re:Believable

[Jeffrey Baker]

I think you are pointing out only superficial differences. AltiVec has 32 registers. Pentium4 has 8 SSE2 registers. If you wrote a program that exercises 20 AltiVec registers, you have some changes to make to jam it into the Pentium4. Also the PPC74xx has a dedicated unit for AltiVec, which means the programmer can issue instructions on the scalar FP unit and the AltiVec unit in parallel. The Pentium4's FP unit is the SSE2 unit, so any super-optimized AltiVec code needs to change. Nevermind that SSE2 still doesn't have a satisfactory analog to the vec_permute on AltiVec.

My only point is that anyone who took the time to really exploit AltiVec for that nifty iDCT routine is going to have to do it again for SSE2.

Re:Believable

[ztwilight]

Apple doesn't have any app vendors. They've all flown ship. That's why there are so many unemployed Mac programmers in silicon valley, and also why Apple is providing such a large free software bundle with Mac OS X.

Re:Believable

[SPYvSPY]

Case in point: Super Mario Sunshine fucking rules!!! Gamecube, all the way!!!

Re:Believable

[okmijnuhb]

I don't see why apple can't become an OS vendor for PC hardware as well.
I'm sure they could make money selling OSX for x86, in direct competition with Microsoft, as well as selling their fancy expensive hardware that everyone loves.
Geez,if they matched the prices that Microsoft gets for their (schlock) product there would be a major revenue stream.
Of course it would be an extra platform developers would have to write for.

Re:Believable

[Blue Lozenge]

How many developers do you think waste their time programming AltiVec in assembly?

You can accomplish 95% of your optimization by using compiler extensions which expose AltiVec & MMX/SSE/SSE2 as intrinsic C functions. I code with variables, not registers and I let the compiler worry about instruction scheduling and register contention. This is incredibly easy to implement and maintain, which is not something that could be said of assembly. If you want to squeeze out that last 5%, then go ahead and do it in assembly. Meanwhile, I'll be busy optimizing the next algorithm.

As for that fully tuned AltiVec iDCT routine, I'd point you towards Intel's website, where you can download and use such common routines as DCT and iDCT. Intel has a vested interest in having your apps run fast on their processors.

As for vec_permute(), I agree that it's a cool instruction, but one of its most common uses is to work around the AltiVec limitation that prevents you from loading or storing data to unaligned memory locations. Not an issue on Pentiums.

Lower prices, at least...

[Mulletproof]

I can see one consumer advantage right away-- Lower hardware costs. The ability to take it anywhere for repairs, not just apple certified (or uncertified, for that matter), which are fewer and farther between and generally higher priced to boot. Don't have to worry about those specialized apple motherboards anymore either. Not that they still wouldn't have their own software issues, but it certainly can't hurt...

Re:Lower prices, at least...

[Gilmoure]

Suppose Apple did decide to switch to using an x86 processor. Do you think this means that Apple is going to rewrite everything to run on every ASUS/Intel, etc motherboard out there? Hell no! They'll use their own motherboard with their own chipsets, bios, etc. They continue to sell for about the same prices as they do now. One of the reasons that Apple was able to make it through their 'crappy 90's' before Jobs came back is that they have some of the highest margins in the industry on their hardware. They don't have to sell as many boxes as Dell, HP, ect. to stay in business. You can also bet that you'll only be able to get your box repaired at an Apple Warrenty shop no matter what processor they put in it. Apple won't sell their parts to Joe-Blow Repair shop.

Re:Lower prices, at least...

[Stonent1]

You're forgetting.. All that stuff is handled by darwin. If someone wants it to run, they can write it themselves! As long as darwin is open, I don't see what will stop OSX from running on any Intel PC.

Please...

[Anonymous Coward]

... How many times can slashdot post an article like this before it gets old?

Let's see:

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/0 5/ 1644246&mode=thread&tid=181

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/0 1/ 165248&mode=thread&tid=179

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/17/1332 26 &mode=thread&tid=107

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/01/27/ 01 54236&mode=thread&tid=107

And that's just in this last year. Give it up, people! It's not going to happen.

Recompiling

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. You expect people to recompile for x86?

Do you have any idea how long it took Apple to get everyone to recompile all their software for the 68k software for the PPC? It took years. If apple had started off telling everyone to compile FAT binaries from the time that Mac OS X was released, maybe we'd be okay. But the mac os x developer community is somewhat mature now, and there is a fairly large mac os x software library. Large enough going back and getting everyone to recompile everything would be hellish.

I'm sorry, you need an emulation layer to help people crossgrade gracefully. This isn't linux. Usually, people don't have the source code to apps they install. People expect to install by dragging a package icon from one window to another, not by typing "./configure; make install", waiting 15 minutes, and then poking through your hard drive trying to figure out where the Makefile install script put its junk.

Gee, there's a great line. "Buy mac os x for the PC! But you won't be able to run any classic mac os apps! Or any commercial apps where the CDs were pressed before april of 2003, or any shareware apps, because the shareware developers will be too lazy to configure confusing FAT binaries for an archivecture they don't use! You can run Microsoft Word, IE, and Fink, though!"

I really hope apple has some plan for dealing with this, some kind of CLR-style "partial compilation" VM thing so that one executable can contain machine code for two architectures without having to take the disgustingly inefficient fat-package route. If every single application has to come with two binaries, one for each of the two architectures, and there's PPC-only shareware apps made by lazy ppc users and x86-only shareware apps made by lazy x86 users floating around.. that's just going to be the biggest mess imaginable.

I can't even imagine what it will be like trying to explain to the average iMac owner why their new software comes with two CDs, one marked "x86" and one marked "PPC". And let's not even get into devices, or software that's been written to use Altivec.

Re:Recompiling

[homer_ca]

"inefficient fat-package route"

How much of application bloat is actually executable object code? I'm sure data and graphics take up a large part of the disk usage. Still, even assuming each application will double in size, it's not even close to the same problem as it was in the days of 300MB hard drives.

x86 port doesn't mean it will run on a Dell

[realmolo]

Just becaus they have it running on x86, doesn't mean they plan to sell Mac OS X separetely from their computers.

There is NO reason that Apple would stop making their own hardware. Hardware that would be radically different from PCs designed to run Windows. Hell, I doubt you'd even be able to install Windows or an x86 Linux distro on an x86-based Mac. It would surely have competely different BIOS and ports and everything.

Re:x86 port doesn't mean it will run on a Dell

[norton_I]

Maybe not Windows, but I bet 10:1 odds that within 2 weeks of the hardware being readily available, the linux kernel will boot on it and you will be able to install debian with custom boot floppies. Probably sooner, given that it already runs on a bunch of "custom" x86 machines as well as the very PPC systems Apple would be porting from.

However, if I were Apple, and wanted to do this, I would contract with a PC motherboard maker or two to make an OEM version of one of their motherboard series that had an Apple written BIOS, but was otherwise identical to the PC version. Pop that in a custom Apple designed box and put in Apple approved hardware, and you are ready to go.

If they wanted to run PPC code for Carbon/OS9 classic apps, do that on a PCI based coprocessor card, rather that a motherboard integrated system.

As a bonus, the MacOSX/Intel version of photoshop could be modified to use the PPC in parallel with the x86 CPU for an extra performance gain that Jobs could brag about.

Re:x86 port doesn't mean it will run on a Dell

[nitehorse]

Boot floppies?

Apple hasn't shipped a Mac with a floppy drive in years, man.

A boot ISO, maybe. Boot floppies? heh. I'm still laughing. :)

Thanks for that.

All I have to say......

[Jaysyn]

is I hope there is a leak..

Jaysyn

Yup.

[rice_burners_suck]

I believe that Apple has a working x86 version of Mac OS X, and furthermore, that they should put it on the market. This operating system is a very real, very strong competitor to Windows XP. (I further believe that Windows XP would never have happened if it wasn't for Apple's bitchen new graphics--when someone at Microsoft saw that for the first time, I bet they shit their pants.) If there's a concern over companies porting their software to the PC platform, Apple needs to make all their existing APIs work on the x86, and should offer to outsource, for application developers, the conversion of assembly level code to x86. (They might offer, for a nominal fee, to find and resolve bugs that result from a change in architecture.)

People are sick of Windows. They're sick of the difficulty in using it. They're sick of the bugs, the problems, and the cost. I think Mac OS X has the opportunity to crush Windows XP.

Marklar! LOL!

[8Complex]

FYI, Marklar is the planet that the boys took a space ship to on South Park in one episode. The people of Marklar had only one word for all nouns -- Marklar.

They got chased up by missionaries that wanted to convert the entire planet to Christianity and the Marklars ended up kicking the missionaries off the planet and allowing all of the Ethopians to move to Marlar to live since they couldn't survive in Ethopia. :-)

So in relation -- Marklar... a strange foreign land. Kind of suiting for OSX on X86, eh?

The only reason I clicked on this. .

[The Real Chrisjc]

. .was to look at the lovely apple OS X styling of the slashdot logo :)

I believe it

[drinkypoo]

But I don't think they're going to release it on anything other than their custom hardware, which will be overpriced like their PPC hardware.

Who cares if moto can't provide the chips, they're getting Cu-connect PPCs from IBM now, right?

you don't even know what you're talking about

[geek]

sorry, but you don't

Re:you don't even know what you're talking about

[be-fan]

Prove it. I'm getting my info right from Apple's released info. Read this document. Note, especially, page 10, where it shows the data flow diagram. Note how Quartz "Extreme" simply takes the place of Quartz Compositor, and the Quartz2D drawing to window buffers is still done in software (read the legend). Now, beg for forgiveness.

Re:you don't even know what you're talking about

[MoneyT]

An "Apple Document" without the 3 pages of legalize that accompanies every Apple document? I DON'T THINK SO. Show me proof from Apple's web site, not from somewhere else

Re:you don't even know what you're talking about

[be-fan]

If you took a look at the URL, you'd see that that's a document from Apple's Siggraph 2002 presentation. Do you think Apple would put all the pure technical detail (heavy sarcasm) in that PDF on their website where the Mac users go? They don't even tell you what kind of sound card the machines you're buying comes with! If you still don't believe me, the the article is on OSNews.

Once again..

[mindstrm]

didn't we already know this?

Apple maintains this in case they decide to switch the Mac processor to x86.

It's not so that OSX will work on your PC.
It's so that apple can build a Mac using an intel chip instead of ppc.

X86 is not equivalent to "Industry Standard"

[Fished]

If apple were to move to X86 (still probably unlikely, even according to the article), I somehow doubt that they would move to the industry standard platform.

Think about it - if Microsoft can put hooks in Windows XP that prevent it from installing on a different OEM than the one you got it from, what's to prevent apple from doing the same? Further, they could easily make their X86 hardware different enough to prevent any random clone from working. In fact, SGI did something similar a few years ago, not that it did them any good. The point is that, even if they go X86, a mac could still be proprietary. There's much more to the Industry Standard platform than running on Intel.

Makes sense

[lkaos]

Presumably, Apple isn't really "porting" to x86. OS X is based on FreeBSD which was developed for x86. I seriously doubt that they made many assembly level changes that required serious parellel development.

If one thinks about it, maintaining a version of OS X on multiple platforms makes sense. It helps catch bugs since undefined behavior can be more volitale on certain platforms (and hence, easier to catch). One of the best ways to squash bugs out of a program is to have it run on a variety of platforms.

I wouldn't be suprised is OS X ran on a whole bunch of platforms... Of course, that doesn't mean that 1) Apple has any plans to release ports or 2) that there is decent hardware support on any other architectures.

Re:Makes sense

[elmegil]

Which is a damn shame, because I'd be really glad to pay Apple $100 - $150 to run MacOS X + on my Intel hardware, but I cannot convince my wife that it's worth $2000 for an iMac.

Re:Makes sense

[MoneyT]

there aren't any $2000 imacs out there. Just thought I'd clear that up for ya

Re:Makes sense

[Gilmoure]

Basic iMacs start at $799.00. G4 based eMacs (17" CRT iMac) start at $1099.00. iBooks start at $1199.00. G4 minitowers start at $1699.00. 'Course, if you're a student, you can get even better prices. You can also find beige G3's, used on eBay for $300 on up. These also run OS X 10.2.

Re:Makes sense

[elmegil]

I was thinking of the original price of the highest end one with all the bells & whistles I want. I can do roughly equivalent x86 based hardware for significantly less in any case, and that was the point.

Re:Makes sense

[sessamoid]

there aren't any $2000 imacs out there. Just thought I'd clear that up for ya

A quick trip to the Apple store shows an iMac with Superdrive and 17" LCD for $1,999. Even before adding memory or anything else to it, that comes to well over $2000 after shipping and sales taxes.

Re:Makes sense

[karlm]

Presumably, Apple isn't really "porting" to x86. OS X is based on FreeBSD which was developed for x86. I seriously doubt that they made many assembly level changes that required serious parellel development.

Much of the userland is NetBSD and FreeBSD-derived. This means stuff like the libraries, ls, top, ps, etc. If you're writing good, well-optimized C/C++ (maybe ObjC), then there should be very little assembly (ideally no assembly) code outside the kernel. (Maybe some AltiVec math/graphics libraries in userspace.)

In any case, I doubt there's much assembly at all in the FreeBSD-derived portions of OS X. Most of the userland is simply a cross-compile. The kernel actually probably required a fair ammount of effort to port (from the NeXT m68k kernel and/or from Darwin PPC).

The monoserver is not a userland port of the FreeBSD kernel. IIRC, the NeXT people had a userland implementation of a BSD 4.3 kernel, from which the Darwin monoserver descended. I just thought I'd point out that calling OS X a port of FreeBSD is like calling LinuxPPC a port of the GNU system. Sure it contains a port of the GNU system, but you neglect the Linux kernel port that came from a totally different group.

I think of OS X as a modernized PPC port of the NeXT system. Cocoa and Darwin are both born of NeXT.

That agreement has run out.

[Blaede]

Apple can do whatever it wants.

Lose Carbon & AltiVec? 3rd parties not gonna

[mactari]

I've actually been thinking about this a bit, and couldn't decide if I fell on the, "There's no way Apple's duplicating their efforts on x86; it's just not economic. They're already late releasing OS X and its updates as is," side or if I figured that "Motorola and IBM just aren't getting it together with the PowerPC; it might be time to jump ship".

I usually end up thinking that if Apple used x86, the OS would lose all its tricks that are G4 specific (particularly things that used the AltiVec instruction set). These are the things that it's used to make Photoshop run faster -- not to mention iMovie, iDVD, etc -- if the OS swapped over to another processor architecture. If a Mac is slow now, wait until it loses the one ace up its sleeve when it comes to digital video. Seems that'd shoot Apple's new niche (one-stop digital hub) all to heck.

Not to mention what the switch would mean for third parties that would have to recompile (again!) for the new platform. I doubt the Classic environment is making its way to x86! Not a big deal in itself, and a break from Classic would be super, but hang on... That probably means Carbon, the compatibility layer that helps apps written for Classic run natively on OS X, is also out. Now we're talking problems. Legacy 3rd party code is out the window in many cases.

I do wonder if Apple's gone so far as to utilize whatever's the equivalent of MMX in the Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon's instruction set to overcome the problems it'd suffer by switching (pardon the pun). I still can't imagine Carbon's x86 compatible. Cocoa ("new improved NextStep") would probably be all that would make the jump.

I suppose it can't be that tough to port if you limit to Cocoa, though. As people have pointed out before, Darwin's got an x86 version now and NextStep (the OS Apple bought that was supposed to turn into OS X a little more quickly) ran on x86 hardware. I always thought it'd be silly to duplicate all the effort of the tweaks Apple put into Next for PowerPC as they were already way behind on OS X without clear x86 plans, but perhaps those tweaks aren't as fancy or ugly as I'd assumed.

I still don't think this means Apple's leaving hardware, any way you slice it. There will be something, even in x86 Macs if they show up, that makes it so that you can't run OS X without quite a bit of custom hardware that Apple controls.

This is B.S.

[geek]

Apple looks ahead, not behind. X86 is dead, everyone knows it which is why everyone (Intel, AMD, IBM) are moving to 64 bit processors. Why in the world would Apple port to a processor that's being phased out by everyone else on the planet?

Yes they have an Intel version of Darwin, thats been out fo ages. I gaurantee there is no OSX on Intel.

I would believe a port to AMD's 64bit processor, or IBM's Power4 (which isn't a port at all since there is binary compatability). They would never, ever, never, port to an old outdated x86 that they have been talking smack about for 10 years +.

Re:This is B.S.

[MoneyT]

You don't even have to look that deep into it. Look at the code name. After nearly 5 years of code names like Copland, Rhapsody, Jaguar, Tempest, Wall Street, Nitro, Tsunami, Trident, Cyan, Titan, Allegro, Tempo and the like that Apple would generate a project code named Marklar?

Bargaining Chip?

[eric2701]

Seems that Apple having the ability to run X on another platform gives them an advantage when it comes to them negotiating prices and such with IBM. It doesn't look like Motorola will be able to produce the chips that Apple will need in the future, so Apple's sole supplier of PPC chips would be IBM. This would not be good for Apple. This way, while a move to Intel doesn't seem likely, Apple is in a better position to ask for things such as faster chips.

Re:Lose Carbon & AltiVec? 3rd parties not gonn

[drinkypoo]

I usually end up thinking that if Apple used x86, the OS would lose all its tricks that are G4 specific (particularly things that used the AltiVec instruction set). These are the things that it's used to make Photoshop run faster -- not to mention iMovie, iDVD, etc -- if the OS swapped over to another processor architecture. If a Mac is slow now, wait until it loses the one ace up its sleeve when it comes to digital video. Seems that'd shoot Apple's new niche (one-stop digital hub) all to heck.

Altivec schmaltivec. Yes, it works and it's cool, but the x86 chips have the higher clocks. These companies already have versions of the software optimized for x86 CPUs, because there's more software on x86 than there is on PPC. Not everything is on both platforms, but most software which requires that much CPU is present on both platforms already. They can borrow the highly optimized code from the wintel version.

The definition of Marklar

[usermilk]

From http://www.slangsite.com/slang/M.html:

marklar:
A noun standing in place of any noun you have temporarily forgotten. Synonym of thingy, thingumbob, whatsit. Also may be used deliberately when the meaning is abundantly clear anyway. Derived from its use by space aliens in an episode of South Park
Example: On Marklar, everyone and every thing is referred to as marklar. We come in marklar. Take us to your marklar.

OSX on cheap x86 hardware would be great!

[PRR]

I get the TigerDirect catalog every few weeks, and I'm amazed at how inexpensive all the x86 hardware has become.

Last week I went into a local CompUSA, and they had some Apple reps there among the Macs taking questions. I commented on how I love the OS, but the hardware is just too expensive for me. (I'm sure this is the comment they get trained to answer the most) Her reply was "Why, it's not that expensive at all now, a G4 only costs $1600." To which I politely smiled and thought to myself how I could build a couple AMD boxes for that much.

Otherwsie, I really like being able to launch a terminal (within the OSX GUI) with a shell (ksh?) in it, just like Linux! :)

Re:OSX on cheap x86 hardware would be great!

[GigsVT]

Don't ever, EVER order from tigerdirect, read my journal.

Re:OSX on cheap x86 hardware would be great!

[damiam]

Apple hardware usually costs maybe $100 more than comparable PC hardware. If you configure a PC from a major retailer with similar specifications to an iMac, you'll see that. Just because a homebuilt PC with cheap parts costs half as much as an Mac doesn't mean an Mac is expensive.

Re:OSX on cheap x86 hardware would be great!

[be-fan]

For most retailers, you can't even configure a machine that matches a low-end iMac. The closest I could find is this an $1120 Dell vs this a $1433 Apple iMac. Even then, its not a fair comparison because the Dell is using an UltraSharp flat panel (vs the regular flat panel in the iMac, which has more ghosting and less contrast) hooked to a GeForce4 MX (vs the GeForce2 MX in the iMac) and with a vastly superior 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 (vs the 700 MHz G4 in the iMac). That's $200, and at the low end, thats a huge chunk of change. At the high end, I can configure a Dell Precision Workstation with dual 2.4 Ghz P4 Xeon procs, Quadro4 graphics, 2GB of RAM, 120 GB of disk, DVD-RW, 20" flat panel, etc, to compete with Apple top of the line machine with comparable features, but vastly slower procs, a non-workstation graphics card (regular GeForce4) and a 23" flat panel display.

Re:OSX on cheap x86 hardware would be great!

[damiam]

Yes, the cheap Dell is better in some ways then the cheap Apple. But then again, you forgot to add the video editing bundle and the CD burner, which bumps the price up somewhat. Besides, I'd pay $200 extra to use OS X.

As for the high end - dual 1.25Ghz G4s aren't "vastly slower" than dual 2.4Ghz P4s. For your average office app or game, you won't notice a difference. For multimedia purposes, the G4s are probably at least as fast, due to Altivec. Yes, I know, Altivec isn't an omnipotent silver bullet, but it still kicks ass.

And if I have the choice between a Dell 20" flat panel and an Apple 23" flat panel, I think I know what I'd take.

Re:OSX on cheap x86 hardware would be great!

[be-fan]

Yes, the cheap Dell is better in some ways then the cheap Apple. But then again, you forgot to add the video editing bundle and the CD burner, which bumps the price up somewhat. Besides, I'd pay $200 extra to use OS X.
>>>>>>>>
Sorry, the link was bad. Dell order-form doesn't allow deep linking. I priced in a CDR at the $1120 price point. And you might like to use OS X, but Windows XP is pretty damn good for the average home user, and they would probably take the $200.

As for the high end - dual 1.25Ghz G4s aren't "vastly slower" than dual 2.4Ghz P4s. For your average office app or game, you won't notice a difference.
>>>>>>>
Oh please, that's bull. The Office app will be slower because OS X's GUI is slower. The game will be slower because G4s are nowhere near as fast as P4s. PC World did some benchmarks awhile ago that showed that Quake III was 50% faster on a P4 1.5 Ghz than on a G4 733 MHz, using EXACTLY THE SAME GRAPHICS CARD. That meant the the CPU on the P4 was a good deal more than 50% faster. Assuming for a moment that this scales with the different CPU types here (which it doesn't, because the Xeon has a much larger full speed cache as opposed to the G4's external, fractional speed cache) that still puts the dual P4s at more than 50% faster. And this doesn't take into account that the G4 doesn't effectively utilize DDR-SDRAM, and as games become more memory-bandwidth limited (Doom III) the effectivly PC-133 performance on the G4s will be blown away by the 3.2 GB/sec of bandwidth on the Xeons. And if you go into apps besides games and office (like gcc and whatnot) then you're covered by the SPEC benchmarks, and we all know how poorly the G4 does in those.

For multimedia purposes, the G4s are probably at least as fast, due to Altivec. Yes, I know, Altivec isn't an omnipotent silver bullet, but it still kicks ass.
>>>>>
Ha. There is a lot of talk on this (one giant 1200 post thread on ArsTechnica) and the general conclusion is that given the limitations of Apple's platform (namely memory bandwidth) AltiVec really isn't that much faster than SSE2 except in a few special cases where its permute instructions are useful. Otherwise, the P4s smoke the G4.

And if I have the choice between a Dell 20" flat panel and an Apple 23" flat panel, I think I know what I'd take.
>>>>>>..
I wouldn't be too sure. I know Sharp makes some LCD screens that look noticibly better than Apple's, and are cheaper to boot. Since Dell rebrands them, I wouldn't be surprised to see one of these panels show up somewhere in its product line.

Re:OSX on cheap x86 hardware would be great!

[damiam]

Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. Maybe the Reality Distortion Field has gotten to me and distorted my view completely. But I still think you're wrong.

Anyway, for what it's worth, the last issue of Consumer Reports rated Apple flat panels as the best monitors available to consumers.

don't get all excited

[jchristopher]

Don't get all excited just yet. Even if this came to fruition, it would almost certainly be on a very narrow subset of x86 (apple-controlled) hardware - not just something you could buy in a box and install on your existing generic box.

As such, it would suffer from all the current problems of the Apple platform: no 'cheap' (This does hold promise, though. I've been very disappointed with the GUI speed of OSX, and I'd be very interested in how much of a speedup there would be on more modern hardware.

Re:don't get all excited

[zztzed]

Don't get all excited just yet. Even if this came to fruition, it would almost certainly be on a very narrow subset of x86 (apple-controlled) hardware - not just something you could buy in a box and install on your existing generic box.

I'd bet that within weeks of a hypothetical OS X x86 release, if it ran only on Apple-built x86 hardware, someone would create an XPostFacto-type utility to allow it to run on non-Apple x86 hardware.

Re:don't get all excited

[jchristopher]

And Apple would promptly use the DMCA to smack them down. There is no way Apple is going to allow the existence of an OS X that runs on any old hardware. (Though I wish they would).

Re:don't get all excited

[zztzed]

I wouldn't be so sure. XPostFacto is still going strong with no threat of legal action from Apple whatsoever, and I gather there are numerous happy users of OS X, running it on their old 7300/7500/7600/8500/8600/9500/9600 series PowerMacs via XPostFacto. Then again, the XPostFacto people (person?) can probably get away with it since they're not directly modifying Apple's code, just distributing an extension (or kernel module, if you prefer) using known APIs. Presumably XPostFacto's theoretical x86 analogue would do the same.

Then again, the situation's not exactly the same -- at least in the case of people running OS X on upgraded legacy Macs, they've already paid Apple's hardware tax.

Re:don't get all excited

[reallocate]

Assuming the Apple would not be so blindingly stupid as to release an x86 OSX that ran happily on PC boxes made by anyone but Apple, it eems to me there are lots of ways to inextricably bind Apple hardware and software together, regardless of the chip that's inside: don't use the standard PC architecture, code key software components to run only on specific Apple hardware components, refuse all online transactions w/Apple and manual software installs if the machine's serial number isn't there, etc.

(By the way, isn't complaining about an alleged Apple "hardware tax" a bit like a Geo owner complaining about a Lexus tax?)

Re:don't get all excited

[DavidRavenMoon]

...they're not directly modifying Apple's code, just distributing an extension (or kernel module, if you prefer) using known APIs.

AND the kernel in question is open source.

Re:don't get all excited

[mbbac]

GUI slow? Throw a faster video card into your PowerMac!

Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes no sense (short)

[TellarHK]

You put out a lot of good reasons the Open Source community would want this, or could use it. But you're putting in no reason for Apple to want to do it.

Apple would die the quarter that OSX became an x86 commodity. On x86 hardware, they'd be dealing with all the vendors that make things for Microsoft as competition, and dealing with unhappy traditional Mac developers that just made the switch to OS X on PPC. They'd alienate the entire Apple infrastructure just to gain a few points on hardware speed that they wouldn't even be able to sell anymore. People won't pay Apple's -slightly- higher hardware prices when they can get the exact same thing (technically) for less.

Apple makes money by selling hardware, that's where the support base they have is, and that's where the company excels. The entire user experience as a whole is what drives Apple sales.

If we do see OS X on x86, we'll see it on the same Apple hardware we see today, just with a different chip in the mix. It'll all be Apple branded, no clones, no over the counter OS sales for plain-jane x86 machines.

This is the ONLY way that an x86 port of OS X makes sense to Apple.

Personally, I'm betting that it'll be the new .09 (Or is it .06?) micron fab IBM just built that'll produce the next generation of Apple chip.

Apple: DO IT!

[sterno]

Would I pay $290 for XP? No, not unless I absolutely had to. Would I pay $129 for OS X? Damn straight I would. Hell, I'd probably pay $200 for it even. I've been longing to play with OS X but I'm not willing to invest the money in a PPC based system.

I'd rather I could download it for free, but I'd be okay with paying real money for it :)

What I don't understand is...

[ryochiji]

What I don't understand is why Apple still gets chips from Motorolla when IBM appears to be a more agressive proponent of PowerPC (after all, they use it in some of the high-end machines). What does Apple get from Moto that they can't get from IBM?

Oh really?

[geek]

You could build a couple AMD boxes with quality assured hardware, tested and retested to make sure its bug free, that included Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire and a host of awesome applications such as iTunes, iMovie etc.... for 1600?

While if you're so great i suggest you start a company and put apple out of business.

You're arrogance is astounding.

Re:Oh really?

[iMMersE]

you're spelling is also astounding ... :)

Re:Oh really?

[shepd]

>While if you're so great i suggest you start a company and put apple out of business.

Okay, I'll take you up on that...

Waitaminute -- Microsoft beat me to the punch last year. Bummer.

Re:Oh really?

[DavidRavenMoon]

you're spelling is also astounding ... :)

YOUR spelling isn't so good either ;)

Re:Oh really?

[DavidRavenMoon]

Waitaminute -- Microsoft beat me to the punch last year. Bummer.

Microsoft put Apple out of business? When did that happen?

Re:Oh really?

[be-fan]

You could build a couple AMD boxes with quality assured hardware, tested and retested to make sure its bug free, that included Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire and a host of awesome applications such as iTunes, iMovie etc.... for 1600?
>>>>>>>>>>>>..
Yes. As for the gigabit ethernet comment, who gets gigabit ethernet into their desktop? How is this a feature? Its Apple's bullshit again. Besides, a gigabit ethernet card is $50, so I don't think it counts much towards the $1600. I built a machine over the summer (Athlon XP 2000) for about $850. I'd be willing to put it up against a low-end G4 any day.

Re:Oh really?

[shepd]

>Microsoft put Apple out of business?

When Microsoft bought Apple's compliance by forcing them to do anything M$ wants as long as Apple wants M$ Word and Internet Explorer.

I wouldn't say they've been put out of business. I would say that some of their ethics have been bought out, though.

Re:Oh really?

[DavidRavenMoon]

When Microsoft bought Apple's compliance by forcing them to do anything M$ wants as long as Apple wants M$ Word and Internet Explorer.

But that deal was part of an out of court settlement, along with the 150Mill, for MS ripping off Apple patents.

The deal came to an end this month...

Lately Apple has been pushing Mozilla over IE

Re:Oh really?

[iMMersE]

Irony ... You're American right? :)

Re:Oh really?

[DavidRavenMoon]

Irony ... You're American right? :)

Yep. But still, "you're" is a contraction for "you are" not a the possessive form of "you." Not in any language... sorry.

The post you referred to had no misspelled words.

Interesting move

[elan]

With apple buying Emagic for their Logic Audio audio editing software (and cancelling the windows version) and buying NothingReal for their Shake compositing software (and cancelling the windows version), this could be a very interesting strategic move.

If they ever decided to move into selling the OS for x86, people with x86 hardware might be tempted to move over from Windows to using MacOS for the applications (e.g. all the pissed off Logic users).

I'll beleive it when I see it

[kir]

In other news...

Microsoft has secret internal plans to open source their always changing strangle hold - the .doc format. This, according to "sources", is seen as move to stem growing concern in its customer base that Microsoft really is, as they've been twice found guilty of, abusing its monopoly status in the market.

...and all throughout the world, pigs have sprouted wings and taken to flight.

Support

[romey]

support costs will kill them.

right now they only support their hardware(and some addons), but with x86 there are soo many combos of hardware, it'll be VERY hard to support it all.
now, if they say they are supporting this and that, but not the other, why would windows users(or linux ones for that matter) switch?

oh well only time well tell what they are going to do.

Re:Support

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

You seem to be under the impresion that if Apple went Intel, that they would start selling fully PC compatible Macs. I doubt that will happen. The only thing that they want to change is the chip, they will still make their own motherborad. In other words, they will still have control over their hardware.

Re:Support

[DavidRavenMoon]

support costs will kill them.

Yep. Look what happened to Be after they switched to x86.

No.

[mcc]

Hello.. please stop staring at your cock, and please in future read posts before you attack the poster.

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.. ;;winces, hits submit;;

Re:No.

[Elladan]

Writing a PPC emulator is not a big deal. Emulating any processor ISA on any other is not a big deal. You can write one in C that's fully cross platform and works anywhere, even.

Emulating the whole system so it can run full OS software is much harder, since you have to emulate a lot more than just the CPU. There's nothing special about macs here - in fact, it would be easier since they're rather standardized - it's just more to do.

The problem with emulation isn't that it's hard. It's not. It's that it's slow. Writing a fast emulator for a PPC chip on an x86 would be quite difficult. Of course, this goes for any other chip, not just the PPC, as well. The x86 chips are actually harder to emulate, because they're so bizarre and badly designed, in truth.

The reason PPC Mac emulators are hard to find is because nobody wants one. There a strong demand for emulators to run software that won't run otherwise. There's very little Mac software in that category, so hardly anyone wants an emulator for them. At least, they don't want one bad enough to write it.

Re:No.

[mcc]

Actually, the 68K emulator on PPC macs WAS there to run the OS. The OS wasn't fully PPC native til around System 8.5. The PPC macs were launched long before this.

Yes. You are right, and i probably should have mentioned this.

It is probably worth noting that the emulator in an x86 mac os x would not have to run the os, however, as os x has a very flexible, platform-agnostic architecture that it inherited from NeXTSTep (which was a cross-platform OS)..

Secondly, I suspect the lack of PPC emulation on x86 is more to do with it being a significant project that doesn't actually have a great deal of use right now. After all, mac owners have often wished to emulate x86 for the sheer weight of the app support -- but how many x86 people have been bothered about PPC?

This is an excellent point. However, i wasn't really trying to say PPC emulation on x86 isn't possible; just that it is really, really hard. :) I would suggest you take a look at this list of various mac emulators for various platforms; clearly, someone has an interest in emulating macs. There's 18 different packages listed there (although apparently a couple of them are for platforms other than windows). All 18 are 68k-only.

So, yeah, the nonexistence of a PPC-on-x86 emulator doesn't say a *lot*, but it does say something interesting. At the least, i think it says that if apple tried to include a PPC emulator layer with an x86 OS X, it would be a really expensive undertaking, and maybe not worth the trouble.

And the really important thing is that every time in the last 8 years i've seen a PPC-emu project give up, the complaint wasn't that they couldn't make it work, but that they couldn't make it work with acceptable enough performance to justify completing the project. This has happened two or three times, but unfortunately i don't have documentation (links) of this, so you'll just have to trust my (admittedly rather unreliable) memory. You may want to plow through that emulators.com site i addressed earlier; they've been saying for years that they're going to have a PPC-on-x86 emulator done, like, any day now, man, for years, and produced nothing (although they seem to be actually nearing a release date now.. or so they say..)-- but i seem to remember that periodically they will release a kind of progress update, which mostly consists of complaining about how hard it is to emulate a PPC :)

Re:No.

[mkldev]

Worse. AFAIK, the INIT loading code used in the startup process is still 68k code even in 9.2.x. As I understand it, it would have been impossible to change it without breaking existing extensions in incompatible ways.

Re:No.

[jx100]

These people.

Re:No.

[geekee]

"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." What? Quote your source. That makes no sense. Since both the x86 and PPC architectures are more powerful than the 68000 architecture. It should be equally easy to emulate x86 on either platform. x86 uses a risc core now, BTW. Just because they support older CISC technology, doesn't mean they don't use RISC techniques in their more modern design. "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." There are no mac emulators for x86 because there is not sufficient demand for such a thing. Most mac software is also available for pc. However, most pc software is not available for mac, making it a much more profitable endeavor. If you understand Turing machine theory, then you'll realize there's no reason why either processor can't emulate eachother's instruction set.

Re:No.

[toddhisattva]

RISC is not necessarily better or worse than CISC

I like your use of "necessarily." I'll need to work that into my daily usage ;-) But I respectfully suggest you're neglecting history.

CISC comes from an age of assembly-language. It got so extreme some had polynomial evaluation as an instruction.

RISC comes from an age of compilers. It is a refinement of CISC, based on observing which instructions actually get used and how.

Please note that I don't mean that compilers didn't exist before RISC, it's just that in the late 70s when x86 was designed, a hell of a lot of stuff was done with assembly. Also, Jimmy Carter was President and the Bee Gees were selling millions of albums a year.

I'm sure you know all this, thus your clever "necessarily." But I'll continue for the benefit of any youngsters ;-)

CISC can have dozens of addressing modes. "Load indexed scaled adjusted and postincrement the index" and every imaginable permutation. Your CPU would suffer as it slogged through all the decoding.

It turns out that to get speed, people just did all the indexing and scaling and whatnot explicitly. The CISC processor was being fed a stream of simple instructions which it didn't have to chew on.

So folks started making chips that ditched all the complex stuff, and we got RISC, which have less than a handful of addressing modes. Effective address calculation was done explicitly, just like all the smart kids were driving their CISC chips anyway.

Turns out that sometimes it's good to have a little complexity. For instance, if it doesn't hurt anything to have a complex multiply+add instruction instead of a multiply followed by an add, and you sell into markets that can use such a tweak, why not?

Motorola's AltiVec is a further example of "enhanced RISC."

Thus was born "Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC," or POWER. Apple needed a RISC chip, enacted a shotgun menage-a-trois with IBM and Moto, and we got PowerPC.

A POWER architecture is two stages of refinement past CISC. Add to this the fact that x86 is pretty much the worst CISC architecture ever -- 68000 was so superior -- PowerPC is a much better, more refined chip than any x86.

If only Moto didn't suck at building PowerPC! What is wrong with their fabs? There's something seriously bad going on there, such a shame since Moto has proven design genius with 68000 and AltiVec.

In more fairness to the Dark Side, x86 vendors no longer directly execute the crufty x86 ISA. They translate the instruction stream to something that gets executed by a much better architecture than x86, "micro-ops" for a "core." In these cores, they've been able to incorporate a lot of RISC-like improvements, scalar-ness and whatnot.

Re:No.

[tshak]

There have been many attempts to emulate the PPC on the x86, it is just that they have all come to nothing.


It's called business. Millions of dollars have been invested to emulate x86 on a PPC because there is a market for it. I personally have not seen a large investment for PPC emulation on the x86 most likely because there is no market to invest the millions.

Re:No.

[Flywheel]

Their fabs might not be state of the art but there's nothing wrong with their fabs. The problem is, that also is the case for the current IBM PowerPC implementation, that PowerPC for embedded purposes is a pure goldmine, while for desktop purposes there's only one major costumer - Apple.

The resulat is that IBM almost has killed their implementation of the Desktop PPC.

MC is not much better, the development forces has for quite a few years been kept at a minimum, the development team has actually been disbanded for a short period -before MC got the idea of going 64-bit (The PReP is 64-bit with a 32-bit subset).

Disagreements, dislike, fights and hostility has been a part of the IBM/MC/Apple Alliance and now it seems like IBM is trying to eliminate MC with this new 64-bit PPC scheme. But then the G5 is about a year late, you could say that MC has had their shot at it.

Re:No.

[Ninja Programmer]

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.

Well that's fine, but this too is wrong. There is in fact no longer any benchmarks that show the Apple within a country mile of the Pentium 4.

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.

Ok, now you are just completely off base. The complexity of the task of emulation has to do with the instruction set you are emulating, not the target platform. The target platform is just a recepticle for compiled fragments. You don't software emulate another processor by trying to map the instruction sets directly to each other! If you claim that the RISC PPC is a cleaner nicer architecture because its RISC, then in fact to emulate it will be even easier to do than the 68K (a CISC) emulation.

You post like you sound like you know something, when you obviously don't have the first clue.

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.

Spoken like true uninformed macaholic idiot. The reason there is no PPC emulator on the PC is because nobody who has a PC wants anything that runs on the Mac. Nobody.

Re:No.

[plastik55]

If you claim that the RISC PPC is a cleaner nicer
architecture because its RISC, then in fact to emulate it will be even easier to do than the 68K (a CISC) emulation.

What you're failing to consider is that the PPC has way more registers than the x86 chip. Specifically, 32 general-purpose integer registers, 32 FP registers, 32 AltiVec registers, 16 segment registers, and five miscellaneous others.

Compare with the P4-- 8 integer registers, 8 FP registers, 8 MMX registers, 8 SSE2 registers, and miscellaneous others.

This means that a PPC emulating x86 instructions has registers to spare for decoding operations, while the P4 trying to emulate the PC will necessarily waste a lot of time sawpping register values between chip and cache. Dynamic recompilation can address some of this, but it is not magic.

Re:No.

[mcc]

Well, yeah. You'll have to excuse me-- I was in a really, really bad mood when i wrote that comment.

I'm sorry.

Re:No.

[photon317]

I think you miss why it's harder to emulate PPC on x86 than it is to emulate x86 on PPC. PPC is RISC - lots of small instructions and lots of registers. x86 is CISC, fewer instructions that do more, less registers.

Therefore, it's (relatively) easy to decompose a complex x86 instruction into a sequence of simpler PPC instructions that get pipelined well. However, in the PPC on x86 emulator, the only way you could be even remotely efficient would be to do some intelligent analysis of the incoming opcodes as "groups" that resemble the function of a single x86 opcode and try to translate it that way, which would be hard to do in the fly in a tight runtime emulator core. If you stick to the standard quick-and-dirty translation, you end up failing to really utilize the x86's complex instructions well, as you're issuing one or more complex CISC instructions per simple RISC instruction, kinda (at least that's one way to think of it). On top of all that, the fact that the PPC has way more registers doesn't help either. The code compiled for PPC will be optimized to make use of all of them, with tight loops assuming register-speed access to more variables than the x86 core can put in registers, so you put them in memory and take yet another hit.

The above isn't really all that correct, but hopefully it conveys the general gist of things.

exactly

[geek]

i'm so tire of this rumor. No one has found proof, no one can come up with a reason other than "I'm to cheap to actually buy anything so give it to me free on the crappiest hardware I can find at CompUSA".

slashdot needs to get off this, it's turning into another rumors site.

Think of the fun times

[banky]

You'd have to have a custom BIOS, or you'd lose the "startup disk" functionality. After all, you can boot any number of OS images off any number of disks with Apple hardware. Losing startup disk would be a pain - how to run multiple versions of the OS?

The graphics card issue isn't a big deal. You'll probably have to choose from one of several "approved" GeForce and ATI cards; big deal. Isn't that more or less what Windows power users do these days?

Likewise the rest of the story - Firewire, USB, etc - is no big deal. The average /.'er screams about the "closed" hardware but lately it's more and more PC-like.

Apple would likely lose all-in-one boxes. Most x86 laptops I encounter these days run hot. Crusoe, anyone?

Otherwise, really... the high-ups want Classic gone ASAP, and the important parts of Carbon run on Darwin, right? Cocoa used to run on x86.

I just can't see it happening, though. More of a bargaining chip than anything else.

Re:Think of the fun times

[ImaLamer]

Crusoe, anyone?

Yes please.

No, actually why not have OSX on Crusoe chips, that would rock. That could be their first step into limited pc markets.

Backup plan

[DavidLeblond]

If this were true (yeah right) then wouldn't maintaining a whole seperate codebase "just in case" be a bit much? That would be like a game developer developing a game for XBox and PS2 but not releasing the XBox version because it is a "fallback plan."

This rumor just doesn't sound very realistic to be.

Re:Backup plan

[the eric conspiracy]

"wouldn't maintaining a whole seperate codebase "just in case" be a bit much?"

I doubt if it's a 'whole separate codebase". It's probably just an effort to makes sure the existing codebase compiles on x86 + some drivers/patches for x86 hardware specific stuff.

Re:Backup plan

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Darwin is already x86 compatible, not that hard since it essentially a Mixed BSD and Mach core. OS X is based a lot on NeXT which in later years ran on x86 hardware. The Classic environment would be the biggest problem, thogh there were some aborted ports to x86, and remember that it's already been "ported" (and rewritten probably) going from 68K to PowerPC. Some important tools (eg QuickTime) already are on x86, so they have experience across chips. I doubt if many parts of the tree are "x86 only", they cut their teeth already on porting issues, I doubt if much is dirty, and they don't have a totally separate tree, maybe a branch or two. Look at Linux, they don't have an Alpha source tree. Isn't even the mainframe stuff part of the main tree now?

As to why, you need to keep your options open. Look what happened to Be, they swapped chips. Didn't help them much, went from competing with Mac hardware to competing on Microsoft's home turf, and they were hurt by that (though there were many times they shot themselves in the foot). If Iwas a shareholder, I'd expect this, haivng soemthing ready for a switch if it ever became necessary.

I think your analogy to a game developer is flawed. I personally thnk Apple's situation is more complex than can be summed up in a simple analogy.

• Apple sells hardware. Though as most said, Apple probably wouldn't make this available on general PC hardware, just on Apple branded x86es, they still have to start making the boxes. x86 margins are razor thin. By being essentially the only PowerPC hardware maker (they killed the clone market, pissing off Motorola) they have more to say about their hardware margins than say, HP.
  
• They'd need an infrastructure of apps and developers. PowerPC was so much faster than the long in the tooth 68k series that emulation was acceptible. Not fast, but acceptable. Things got better as more of the core got ported to PowerPC. The Pentium series isn't an order of magnitude faster (some would debate if it's faster at all, but thats not my flamewar). Old apps running a PowerPC emulator on the x86 would be slow.
  
• They can't piss off their chip supplier, not yet anyway. Luckily they have IBM in the wings. Motorola and Apple have been fighting for years. it's definitely a marriage of convenience now, but there's still that dependency.
  
• They'd be seen as tougher competition for microsoft, which still controls the most important apps to most MacOS users, Office. I'd never expect an MacOS X x86 native office suite. Maybe using the WINE will be good enough then for using Win32 Office on a mac, but without Office, this is a pipe dream. I don't follow the legalities of Microsoft and WINE, but I'd be interesting what MSs lawyers have to say at that point. They may allow a non-corporation, the Linux community to run WINE, but if it's a default install by a corporation? Even if Apple won, it would sap them of capital and time.
  If it did have WINE, it may bring up the irony of having x86 MS apps running much faster on x86 OS X than MacOS apps (emulated PowerPC).
  
• It would require 2 versions of apps. Even without source changes, it doubles your test matrix (maybe more, more variation in PC hardware) and doubles your shelf space requirements in the stores. See WinNT on Alpha, or PowerPC, or Solaris on PowerPC for examples of why this isn't a very workable idea.
  

Re:Backup plan

[be-fan]

whole seperate codebase "just in case" be a bit much?
>>>>>>>>
Well, let's see. Darwin, the core, already runs on x86, and thats where all the hardware dependent stuff is. The high-level stuff should be completely portable (just like KDE is mostly a recompile away from working on PPC, for example), with only some optimized AltiVec routines needing rewriting.

Re:Lose Carbon & AltiVec? 3rd parties not gonn

[bmajik]

Altivec isn't worth keeping if you'r emoving to x86.

Case in point ? Photoshop on a run of the mill athlon xp smokes the fastest hardware apple makes. Photoshop is supposed to be "the altivec macintosh app".

PPC hardware, altivec or not, is slower.

Incidentally, iMovie and all that other stuff runs on G3 macs with no altivec at all.

Your good observation is that classic and carbon apps wouldn't run well/at all on an x86 port.

Regarding coca / nextstep on x86, that problem was solved 15 years ago. nextSTEP 3.3 ran on x86 quite well. It was succeeded by OpenSTEP 4.x, which also ran on x86 hardware quite nicely.

Infact, apple didn't throw away 100% x86 compat until they did their quartz +aqua UI peice, and then grafted the legacy mac os 9 shit into the OS.

Howzaabout some REAL conjecture?

[mbourgon]

I'm going to agree with the other people who have mentioned the new IBM Power4. And, provided the G5 ever comes out, it would potentially put Apple back in the game, performance-wise.

That is, of course, if the rumored speeds are to be believed (G5 1.6ghz is supposed to have roughly twice the SpecFP and SpecINT of a P4-2ghz - The Register). Due in January, last I heard. We'll see.

I can see the possibility of them going to another chip manufacturer, and AMD would be the most likely - IIRC, the AMD architecture is emulating the x86 on half the die, with the other half being RISC based. If they could come up with a PPC emulator, it might be doable. That being said, NeXT _was_ running on x86.

As for Marklar being the phrase? Well, this is the company that had BHA (Butt-headed astronomer - one was originally coded Sagan, and Sagan threatened to sue) as a code phrase. And saying Marklar would actually make discussing things in public possible. (aka "So, did you figure out issue X with Marklar"?). But that would also indicate that it's a little under 3 years old (Starvin Marvin in Space airdate: 11/17/99). If they started around then on it, then that might work, but it's starting to sound implausible.

So, like most things Apple: who knows? only time will tell.

never gonna happen

[mattbland]

apple have already ported the core os to x86 with darwin.

they'd never get the third party support they'd need to port to x86. no one is going to report all the existing apps. only open source weenies (guys like us) will be happy, as they compile everything from source when possible. apple can not make money doing that.

they're going to use the ibm power chips, or maybe even alpha or sparc, but never intel chips. at a push i could see a closed architechure based on the amd hammer, but not for a long while.

by changing processor they would break all the old software out there. no matter what we'd all secretly love - os x for x86, i can not see it happening.

if it does i'll gladly buy it, but would you? i doubt it. closed source, no apps, closed architecture... i think not.

OSX for Intel likely != OSX for standard PCs.

[richie123]

I doubt verry much that Apple intends to release OSX for
PC computers anytime soon, but I do see how moving to PC
compatible mainboard/CPU could make Macs much more price
price/performance competitive with traditional PCs.

Marklar?

[DavidLeblond]

This just in:

Apple is releasing a lighter OS with fewer features for the PC called "Starvin' Marvin."

Re:Marklar?

[squiggleslash]

I'm using the BGA version of Mac OS X on my Amiga. It's sth'uper!

Let me get this straight

[WildBeast]

This is the slashdot crowd.

The same people who want to pass a bill that makes the use of Open Source software mandatory in the government.

The same people who want freedom of information.

The same people who complain about the DMCA over and over again.

Yet, according to the posts I've seen, many of you would be willing to forget about the DMCA, forget about Apple's censorship, forget the fact that Apple is as proprietary as a company can be and buy OS X.

Re:Let me get this straight

[vegetablespork]

It's like I've always said: Apple is just like Microsoft, except they're not as good at it.

Re:Believable you are wrong!

[linuxislandsucks]

ativec library ports were already completed by those who do graphics programs fro both chips..

Corel Bryce has the code in both ports windows and mac.. on windos the library is called becasue the ativec is not there and they need to use a virtual ativec..

Adobe has simalr library as well..

Re:OS X on x86

[mofolotopo]

That would carry more weight if you weren't posting AC. Then we could all come over and make SURE.

from a closet mac fan...

[f00zbll]

I would buy OSX in a heart beat and gladly pay upwards of 400.00. the only thing that has stopped me from buying Mac is all my development and business software are windows. If I had to re-purchase all the software, it would cost me 3-5K. Now if I can replace a buggy windows system with a solid OSX, then it would be financially feasible. Especially for the other systems in the house that are used just for word processing, internet and games. That's my bias perspective, but I think there are enough people out there like me who would love to switch over.

Something to keep in mind...

[ParisTG]

Something to keep in mind, is that x86 != PC. That is, just because it runs on an x86 chip, does not mean it will run on any run-of-the-mill PC. The most likely strategy, if Apple does indeed decide to switch chips, is that they will produce their own x86 processor based boxes. These would NOT be PC compatible, but would rather be Apple computers that just happen to use an x86 chip.

Of course then the only problem is backwards compatibility, unless the x86 has a large enough margin over the PPC that it can be effectively emulated (like what Apple did when they switched from 680x0 to PPC).

Re:Something to keep in mind...

[ChrisJones]

if it's any kind of x86, it means that you get x86 binary compatibility. OS X could theoretically run Linux and Windows binaries with the right tricks (you can do it already if you run bochs on PPC/OSX).
I have to admit that it would be really quite tempting.

Re:Something to keep in mind...

[vandelais]

The really interesting part will be to see which video drivers are chosen to be shipped native with the OS.

Just my humble opinion.

Re:Believable you are wrong!

[paploo]

So now this begs the question: Is the performance loss due to emulating AltiVec outweighted by either the higher clock speeds of the Intel chips?

-Jeff

Why not go with transmeta or IBM?

[Billly Gates]

Remember that the powerpc architecture is not all owned by Motorolla. IBM and Apple also have claims to it. IBM would gain lots of money if it helped apple not to mention it has some the best chip fabrication plants in the world. Both apple and IBM may be able to work some sort of deal with Motorolla and just buy the remaining IP off. Motorolla can no longer afford to keep upgrading its plants and this is why the G5 is so late.

I wonder if IBM could make a low cost version of its Power3 chip and strip out some of the high end features like its 2 chips in one, lower the cache, and simplify some of its fp registers and make the lower end power3 chips using the latest chip fabrication technology so it can clock high. After that, apple could have a nice 2 - 2.5 gig powerpc chip that could run circles around the g4.

Transmeta is also a solution but they do not own any chip fabrication plants.

IBM and Apple would gain everything. It would be very very bad for apple to switch to x86. Infact vendors are struggling to get OSX ports of there apps and many are switching to wintel. Another move like a major chip migration would hurt apple because many vendors would just leave and existing powerpc mac users would feel left out in the cold. After all only some apps have been ported and now the vendors may just switch to OSX/intel totally or leave for wintel.

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?

Re:Already done that

[GoRK]

Yep! I used it, tried some development with it, and filed bug reports. I was dissapointed that they did not make another public release available.

I have no doubt that they have most of OS/X and it's components running on X86 internally.

Great News for Anti-MS users.

[imnes]

For all of us trying to get by without using MS Windows, OSX would be a great alternative. I use FreeBSD but would jump at the chance to use OSX (okay, mainly because of the slick interface, but it is still kinda cool). I do see the point about just because it's X86 doesn't mean it will run on your computer. For example, I've downloaded the latest incarnation of Darwin, and it will not boot on any of my systems, so that doesn't leave me with much hope. I think if it does exist it is only a matter of time before it gets leaked. Look how quick Windows XP was put out on the p2p networks? We'll see.

Re:What Apple is hoping for instead of this...

[borgheron]

OPENSTEP4.2/Mach ran on Intel for years. Since MacOSX *IS* the Mach kernel with the Cocoa API as well as a hefty facelift (essentially OPENSTEP/Mach renamed), it stands to reason that they wouldn't need to start *from scratch*. In fact, I wouldn't be suprised if they had, as the article suggests, maintained the x86 version in parallel in case Motorola decided to be uncooperative.

Later, GJC

This is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

NeXT had NeXTSTEP and apps running on multiple architectures [680x0, Intel, SPARC, PA-RISC, NRW) using fat binaries. Compiling for all the architectures at once was just a compile switch. You could distribute the same application which ran identically on different architectures, and the user didn't know or care.

The year is now 2002. NeXTSTEP has morphed into Cocoa on PPC. It's the same dang libraries basically. Given that it's already pretty robust, why WOULDN'T Apple not maintain this technology just in case? Are they idiots? I think not.

As to Classic apps, Apple had 680x0 apps running in emulation on Intel a *decade* ago. Big deal! PPC classic apps are nastier because the PPC doesn't nicely map to Intel; but if Apple needs to jump ship they can just toss out Classic entirely and not look back.

The critical issue is whether or not Carbon apps can run on multiple binaries. Apple would have to figure out ways to handle the endianness issues, and then a recompile would probably be all that is necessary. Then again, Mac developers shouldn't be coding in Carbon anyway. It's a legacy library. And that's true no matter how much Apple squeals otherwise when Microsoft and Adobe jump on them. One day, Carbon will go away. And good riddance too.

Sum up: a pure Cocoa MacOS X would be a snap to get running on multiple architectures.

Marklar

[Aknaton]

Marklar is a good Marklar and, like the Marklar it is based on, would probably run well of the Marklar. Of course, Marklar whould then be on the same Marklar as Marklar, which holds a Marklar there.

Not too surprising

[linebackn]

Apple Rhapsody, the predecessor of MacOS X ran on Intel hardware as did OpenStep and later versions of NextStep.

PC Hardware support was very limited, however, and was probably one of the many reasons they decided to drop it.

More inbformation and screen shots of Rhapsody running on an Intel PC here: http://toastytech.com/guis/rhap.html

Rhapsody?

[Farley Mullet]

This is totally unsurprising; Rhapsody, something that was kinda like OSX's ancestor ran on both PPC and x86 Hardware (look here for screenshots). A whole wack of the NeXT and FreeBSD code that is under the hood of OSX runs natively on x86, so I don't think that maintaing code on both architechtures would be that difficult. But seriously, as probably half of the other posters have pointed out, Apple is a hardware company, and the only way you'd be able to run an x86 OSX would be on proprietary Apple hardware.

Besides, as much as people want to slag PPC chips for being slower than x86, they have certain advantages in terms of power use and temperature management which allow Apple to build neat-o computers like the new iMac and the TiBook. And even if neat-o doesn't cut it for the Slashdot crowd, Apple seems to be doing pretty well for themselves selling neat-o.

And even if Apple decided to radically shift their business model to selling OS software for x86 computers, Microsoft would squash that dream pretty quickly, using their agreements with OEMs.

NEVER (or) I HOPE NOT

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Listen... I'll all for more competition, etc, but MAX OS X is going to run like CRAP on your Dell Boxen, or whatever it is you have, because of NO QUALITY CONTROL of what parts are in you little box. Crappy video cards, horrific sound cards, hell, half of the stuff Creative Labs puts out is junk, and their drivers are worse. How is an OS supposed to work with all this? Answer: It doesn't (see Windoze and Linux compatability problems). If you want to spend hours inside playing with vi to get sound working, have fun! Use Linux. We don't need Mac OS X on Intel.

All we will have is problems, on the side of the vendors, who either make bad hardware, or bad drviers for their hardware.

Re:NEVER (or) I HOPE NOT

[gerardrj]

You're missing the point. Apple would not release OSX for Wintel systems, they would put the AMD or Intel chips in Apple designed systems. Without the Apple proprietary ROM code, Mac OS would not boot on another vendor's system.

Re:NEVER (or) I HOPE NOT

[be-fan]

This is the biggest load of crap I've ever seen. Apple PowerMac parts are consistantly of mediocre quality. Only the very highest-end Macs have real GeForce4 cards, while most have cut down cards like the GeForce4 MX (actually a souped-up GeForce2 for you morons who actually believe Apple's marketing department) and Radeon 9000s (slower than a Radeon 8500, for those same people). Apple used to use crappy crystal chipset sound cards, now they use some USB DMA crap with absolutely zero hardware acceleration. Compare this to a nice Sound Blaster Audigy (or even an SB Live! which goes for chicken feed these days) and the Mac dies in embarrasment. Then you have the Apple "Pro" speakers, which are a joke compared to a comparably priced Logitech 560 setup (or Klipsch, if you wanna spring for a little more change). And the stuff that isn't crap in a standard Mac is just PC hardware. What, you thought Apple made their own hard drives? As for Linux driver quality, that's bull. I've been using Linux for years on Dell machines, and the only driver issue I've ever had is a WinModem not being supported. Linux uses every single piece of hardware on my laptop (including my QuickCam) just as well as OS-X uses any piece of (much inferior I might add) hardware on an PowerBook.

Re:NEVER (or) I HOPE NOT

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Wow... you got me. That is actually a good idea. If I could get the new 17inch iMac with an AMD +2600 chip, that would be sweet like suga.

Now I'm hoping it happens. Guess I should read more than the first paragraph of an article, eh? :)

Re:NEVER (or) I HOPE NOT

[Bobartig]

Then you have the Apple "Pro" speakers, which are a joke compared to a comparably priced Logitech 560 setup

I'm not arguing the rest of your post, but Logitech Z-560 is @$150-200, Klipsch speakers are close to $300. Apple Pro Speakers are $50. Comparably priced my a$$

Re:NEVER (or) I HOPE NOT

[be-fan]

Whoops. I meant the 540s (2 channel). They're about $80, less on pricewatch. Being a Klipsch bigot, I'd never come near speakers made my a mouse manufacturer, but I hear they're quite good if you like the whole 2.1 thing...

Re:Lose Carbon & AltiVec? 3rd parties not gonn

[Orion_]

I doubt the Classic environment is making its way to x86! Not a big deal in itself, and a break from Classic would be super, but hang on... That probably means Carbon, the compatibility layer that helps apps written for Classic run natively on OS X, is also out. Now we're talking problems. Legacy 3rd party code is out the window in many cases.

Wrong. Carbon under OS X has nothing to do with Classic. It's not a "compatibility layer" and it doesn't make any app written for Classic run natively. It's a new API developed by Apple to be as similar as possible to the Classic APIs while throwing out all the old cruft, enabling the same apps to be run in both the old Mac OS and Mac OS X. Unmodified Classic apps will (99% of the time) not compile unmodified under Carbon.

If Apple's done their job right, it wouldn't hard at all for them to compile the Carbon libs under x86. And then any Carbon app would run natively on x86 with a simple recompile.

I think the main obstacle to Apple would be the necessity of having an integrated PPC emulator, but they've already proven their ability to switch processor architectures without too much pain, and this time they have the advantage of having an more well-designed OS that doesn't rely on huge amounts of undocumented assembly code.

And there's no reason Classic couldn't run using said emulator, either.

As an old Mac hand, it pains me somewhat to say this, but as time goes on, it's looking more and more like this is the way to go for Apple. It is true that the performance gap is smaller than would be implied by the difference in processor speeds, but the gap is there, and it is real. PPC is being left farther and farther behind, and although we'd have to deal with annoyances like fat binaries, and although there would be a performance hit at first for existing apps (since performance of a PPC emulator on a 2.5GHz P4 would be lower than a 1GHz G4), I think it would be an excellent idea for Apple to switch over as soon as they can. The PPC vendors obviously don't care too much about putting enough development money into their products to compete, so it's time to switch to a vendor that does care.

Marklar? Marklar

[sielwolf]

"Isn't it difficult to tell everyone apart when everything is called Marklar?"

"Oh, no. Hey Marklar?"

"Yeah?"

"You see?"

Re:Lose Carbon & AltiVec? 3rd parties not gonn

[Wesley Felter]

Apple would lose AltiVec, but they'd gain SSE and SSE2 which are almost the same thing.

Why wouldn't Carbon work on x86? It's just C code.

Reminds me of "The Blackmail Pads"

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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-)

Of course - the evidence is there to see...

[ducasi]

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.

As for the evidence - it you do a "strings /Applications /DVD Player.app /Contents /Frameworks /DVDPlayback.framework /Versions /A /DVDPlayback | less "
(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
Disabl ePIVSupport

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...

Re:Of course - the evidence is there to see...

[dacetone]

Wow, and I thought this was fake...sure as hell, it's in there. I wonder why?!?

Re:Of course - the evidence is there to see...

[geek]

The DVD player if I'm not mistaken was software aquired through an aquisition. Then ported to the mac. Its probably a remnent of the old application.

Re:Of course - the evidence is there to see...

[dacetone]

Interesting, I didn't know that...

Re:Of course - the evidence is there to see...

[TH4L35]

Are you sure that that particular portion of code isn't some how related to the quicktime frameworks? Quicktime, of course, is concerned whether or not it is running on a pIII, p4, or athlon.

pentium pro first to have risc-ish core

[Penis_Envy]

I may be wrong, but I always thought the pentium PRO was the first to have a risc-ish core. The pentium was just a 586 with a copyright-able name and a built-in (flawed) floating-point coprocessor.

Re:pentium pro first to have risc-ish core

[Scott Wood]

So, may I ask where one might find a "586"
without a floating-point unit (flawed or otherwise) or
trademarkable name?

Intel started using on-chip
floating point units with the 486, and no numbered
Intel chip is remotely similar to the Pentium in
terms of its inner workings (in particular, it was the first superscalar x86 chip).

You are correct about the Pentium Pro, however.

Re:pentium pro first to have risc-ish core

[leviramsey]

Starting with the 486, Intel had begun to incorporate some RISC ideas (first pipelines, then superscalar design, culminating in the P6's RISC core).

I always laugh when I read the late-80s/early-90s FUD (which some continue spout to this day) about RISC vs. CISC. Neither style won: they merged.

Re:what i wanna know is...

[MaxVlast]

"BTW, wont it be cool when you can set up a dual boot for mac osx and windows 2k/xp."

No.

Re:Believable you are wrong!

[DavidRavenMoon]

Corel Bryce has the code in both ports windows and mac.. on windos the library is called becasue the ativec is not there and they need to use a virtual ativec..

I don't think Bryce uses AltiVec at all.

I run Bryce in OS X, and I can attest that it's not all that fast.

Barefeats.com posted this comment:

"Although Corel claims it has been carbonized for OS X, but the rendering code does NOT take advantage of the G4 or multiple processors."

Even Apple has admitted to this before.

[Blaede]

Apple employee Vince Garcia once mentioned he had OSX running on an Intel at home back in 2000, nothing new here. And remember all those stories on Macworld of the old Mac OS ports running on Intel? Heck, I'm running OS7 right now, albeit via Basilisk.

Re:Even Apple has admitted to this before.

[Xenex]

"Apple employee Vince Garcia"

Who?

I can't find him, or anything in 2000 refering to him running OS X on an x86.

Do you have any stories you could link to?

Re:Even Apple has admitted to this before.

[mkelley]

According to "Apple Confidential": When Apple was working with IBM, they had project "Star Trek". That system was demoed using a PS/2 running a version of System 7.

All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your breath.

[phillymjs]

Apple will NEVER (read: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER) sell a version of the Mac OS that can be run on any cheap POS that you cobbled together from parts you bought in Target for $5 each. Wake up and smell the coffee, okay, because I'm getting tired of reading all your posts.

Apple sells the experience of using tightly-integrated hardware and software. They can't do that if they suddenly have to make sure their software will work with every home-built x86 whitebox on the face of the earth. What Apple does is something that Microsoft can never do, unless they start selling their own brand of computers and restrict Windows to only run on Microsoft PCs.

Even if Apple ever were to switch to making x86-based Macs (and you, the reader, are significantly more likely to bang Anna Kournikova than to see an x86-based Mac for sale), they would put something proprietary in those machines, maybe even in every component of those machines, and change the Mac OS to refuse to boot if it doesn't detect that proprietary something. That's the only way they'll be able to preserve the 'it just works' aspects that are a major part of their success.

Personally, I think Apple will,very soon, tell Motorola to go piss up a rope (and I say, it's about time!). The new IBM chip has something close enough to AltiVec, and IBM actually gives a shit about improving their products. Now that Mac OS X is truly ready for prime time with 10.2, all Apple needs is to be able to produce machines that will impress the MHz/GHz-obsessed, cock-measuring crowd.

~Philly

Couldn't have said it better myself

[geek]

I'm so tired of this rumor and the morons that propogate it endlessly.

Trump card

[vlad_petric]

More important than the relationship with the chip manufacturer is, IMHO, the relationship with Microsoft - the direct competitor. An X86 Mac OS X is nothing but Microsoft's biggest nightmare in terms of what it can do to the PC market.

So I strongly believe that such a project would serve as a trumpcard in negociations with Microsoft more than with the CPU manufacturer.

The Raven.

Re:Trump card

[bnenning]

Precisely. Microsoft has the threat of terminating Mac Office; this is Apple's counterthreat. Things will get very interesting if either of them pulls the trigger.

Re:Trump card

[DRWeasle]

If Apple were to pull the trigger first I think Micro$oft would be put in a really tough position. They obviously would want to cancel Mac Office, but ... I don't think they could chance that move being considered anti-competitave. I think they would be a little concerned about the DOJ. (Realizing the court cases haven't changed anything except cost Micro$oft several million dollars.

Re:All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your brea

[CrosseyedPainless]

I sure hope you're wrong.

Mmmm.... Anna Kournikova....

The x86 OS X Success Strategy

[Winnipenguin]

Quote:
By making an x86 version of OS X to coincide with the release of the G5, Apple could save face by showing in the inevitable side-by-side processor comparison that its computer is the performance leader. At the same time, it could appease PC users' demands that it be more open with its computing solutions.

Not only would the speed leader be obvious and indisputable, but Apple's mind-share would increase a thousand times over.

Suddenly, those OS companies that support only one processor family would acquire the unfriendly aura that hung over Apple's head for so many years."

Article here:
http://www.osopinion.com/perl/printer/17176 /

Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[gerardrj]

As others have mentioned, the x86 platform is all but end-of-life. Intel is pushing ia64, well as much as they can when they have to fight their own megahertz matters campaign.
If Apple where to jump ship from the AIM PPC alliance they would almost certainly not use x86 class chips.

Some options for Apple if they need to leave Motorola in the dust:
1. The ever popular IBM option. Either continue the PPC roadmap, or start using the POWER series.
2. Start their own fab and take over development themselves, licensing AltiVec from MOT.
3. License AltiVec (or clone it) and farm out fab to a third party like they do most other components.
4. Purchase the now very dead Alpha technology from HP. The Alpha EV8 chip design was almost completed before canning, and would scream past probably all other microporocessors currently in production or design. Of course Alphas are known for their heat output as much as their processing power.

Of all the things Apple could do as far as microprocessor choice, switching to x86 seems to make the lest amount of sense both technologically, and from a marketing perspective. After all, how will Steve do those glorious "shootouts" on stage if both platforms are running the same speed and type of chip?
Apple: Our 3GHz P4 runs Photoshop 20% faster than Dell's 3GHz P4.
It just doesn't work does it? Will Apple somehow cut a deal with Intel or AMD to get the newest high-speed chips 6 months before everyone else? Doubtful.

Apple keeps it's marketing edge by focusing on performance of end-user tasks, not joining the MHz train.

Is Apple maintaining an x86 port of OS X? Very likely. Does Ford keep a fleet of GM, Toyota and other vehicles around? Very likely. Apple isn't planning on making x86 based Macs any more than Ford is going to start building and selling vevicles with GM frames or parts.

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[be-fan]

Apple: Our 3GHz P4 runs Photoshop 20% faster than Dell's 3GHz P4.
>>>>
Yeah. That's the real reason an x86 OS X port would never happen. It makes it harder for Apple's marketing department to lie.

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[gerardrj]

There is no lie. In the tests Apple puts forth (and others verify), the PPCs at lower clock rates regularly keep up with, or surpass the performancof a P4.

I have yet to see objective test of real-world tasks where a P4 at 2x the clock speed will significantly outperforma PPC.

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[be-fan]

Ha ha, that's a good one. And I bet you believe that A G4 smokes an Alpha just because it gets higher RC5 scores? Don't make me laugh. The G4 get's killed in the SPEC benchmarks (which are real world, btw, gcc and mesa are part of them, among others) and most importantly, gets hammer in Quake III. I'm not going to dignify this post with a further response, except to quote my favorite ArsTechnica post:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;

"MHz Myth"

Def: When faced with a computer that is significantly faster than a Mac.. simply scream out "MHz Myth" and wave your hands frantically. This will magically make the languishing G4 faster than the current fastest Intel or AMD Chip.

See "Up to Twice as Fast as any Pentium PC" for more details..

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[gerardrj]

RC5 scores are not a real-world benchmark, neither are SPEC. The first is a highly specific, CPU/cache intensive algorithm the other two are artificial benchmarks designed to test particular parts of the sytstem. By real world benchmarks I mean, launch an app and perform some common tasks, much the way Steve does with the PS tests on stage or the BYTEmark system and media suites. Many CPUs are faster than the PPC at particular tasks, just as many CPUs are slower than the PPC at particular tasks. In particular, RC5 relies heavily on an instruction that PPC, AMD and Intel happen to impliment. Alpha, MIPS, and most other CPUs don't have this particular instruction and hence must execute many others to emulate it, slowing down their performance in this endeavor.

I didn't state that the PPC "smokes" any other chip, just that I've yet to see a real-world performance test where a 2.5GHz P4 ran 2.5x faster than a G4 at 1GHz (single CPU). Yes the P4 will win some benchmarks in any test suite, perhaps all. But not by a factor that equates to the ratio of clock speed differernce between the chips. In fact the best I've seen is that in some tasks a P4@2.5Ghz is 30% faster than a G4@1Ghz. Not very impressive for a system that has 150% more clockspeed to only run 30% faster at some things, and up to 50% slower for some things than its lower clock speed competitor. Please... point me to a relatively broad-based benchmark that shows a P4 outperforming a G4 by a factor proportional to their clock speed difference.

Saying the PPC is slow because it runs at much lower clock speed is like saying that an F16 should be slower than a 747 because the 747 has more and larger engines. Yet, producing 200,000lbs of thrust, the 747 reaches less than half the top speed(~mach .9) of the F16(~mach 2) that only produces 15,000lbs of thrust. In simple terms, despite having 13 times the thrust of an F16, the 747 only goes 1/2 as fast.
Some numbers just aren't meant to be compared, and you need to look at the whole picture to understand what's going on.
Thrust != speed and Mhz != performance

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[Anonymous Coward]

You state that a chip with 2.5x faster speed means the *system* has to run 2.5x faster...

You really believe a 2.5GHz P4 is 2.5x faster than the same system with an (underclocked) P4 1GHz?

Believe me (or look for the stats yourself), this isn't the case, it's *way* under this, cause the rest of the system (memory, harddrives, graphics card etc.) still keeps the same...

But you probably still won't believe me, so there are 2 figures out of the SPEC list for CPU2000, submitted by Intel, and using the same MoBo. The 1.5GHz P4 gives a value of 605, the 2.0GHz P4 a value of 702 (not 807, as to be expected by assuming linearity...)
That's only 48% of the "linearly-to-be-expected" gain, and that for exactly the same system otherwise -- and for a CPU-specific test, not real-time apps !!

And then you compare two *totally* different platforms, with testsuites compiled with different compilers, with different FSB of the CPU's, perhaps even different graphic cards etc. and you try to convince us that *there* the linear increase should be visible in real-world performance. Be reasonable!

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[be-fan]

Don't be ridiculous. Of course Mhz != performance. But the PPC loses in clockspeed by something like 2.5x. At that disparity, even if the PPC could keep its pipelines full 100% of the time due to its great architecture, it STILL wouldn't be as fast as the fastest P4. This is getting old. Go to ArsTechnica's forum, and look up G4 vs P4. Read the posts. A lot of people a whole lot smarter than you or me have put up some good info there. As for SPEC, go here. Yep, GCC and PERL sure sound like artificial benchmarks to me!

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[gerardrj]

How can you state that Mhz != performance, then in the very next sentence argue that Mhz = performance?
The PPC can keep up when it requires fewer instructions to process any task, and when vector processing allows massive scaling of clock cycle to work performed. Also note that there's nothing inherent in the PPC design that is limiting clock speed, it's Motorola's corporate issues that keep the speeds down.

The benchmarks in SPEC are artificial. They test particular oddball functions of a system. How often does an average user cross-compile pre-processesed C code files into Motorola 88100 processor machine language? When was the last time you needed to process the "lithography artwork needed for the production of microchips"? Never would be a reasonable guess. Of course, the point is moot as I can't locate a single PPC chip test result, never mind a PowerMac system.

A real-world benchmark in my opinion (for general use desktop systems) is using a program/code compiled and optimized for a given CPU to test some complete task that is commonly performed by the average user.
Ex: Rip an audio CD to .mp3 format, make some alterations and burn out to CDR. Load an image and perform some editing and convert it to a web suitable size/format.
Frame rates of games are pointless benchmarks. What's the point of having a graphics subsystem that can do 200FPS in quake when your monitor can only refresh at 120Hz max, and your eye can't see anything above 80hz anyway. It's like comparing the top speed of a cars when they'll never go faster than 80mph anyway. The speed becomes insignificant compared to other aspects of the system or car.

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[be-fan]

How can you state that Mhz != performance, then in the very next sentence argue that Mhz = performance?
>>>>>>
No, is said that MHz is a factor in performance. Performance = Instructions_Per_Cycle * Clock_Speed. If the Clock_Speed of a processor is 2.5x as much as that of another processor then the Instructions_Per_Cycle must be at least 2.5x as high to balance the difference. Even theoretically, the PowerPC chips cannot hit that kind of IPC.

The PPC can keep up when it requires fewer instructions to process any task,
>>>>>>>
Wrong! The PowerPC is a RISC chip. RISC chips, in general, require more instructions to perform a given task.

and when vector processing allows massive scaling of clock cycle to work performed.
>>>>>>>
True, but the Pentium4 has a vector unit as well. Not as good as the AltiVec unit, but in the current G4 the AltiVec unit is severely limited by the bandwidth of the PowerMac system bus. Thus, SSE2 is in the same performance league even at the same clockspeed, and on a P4, the floating point units (that processes the SSE2 instructions) have the advantage of running at 2.5x the frequency. Again, Performance = IPC * CLOCK, and with the clock being 2.5x as fast, IPC must be 2.5x as high, and AltiVec is nowhere near that much faster than SSE2.

Also note that there's nothing inherent in the PPC design that is limiting clock speed, it's Motorola's corporate issues that keep the speeds down.
>>>>>>>>>>
Actually, there are two things keeping the clock speed down, both technological. First, the G4's pipelines are short, which makes each pipeline stage more complex, which makes it harder to clock them faster. Second, Motorola's process technology isn't as good as Intel's.

The benchmarks in SPEC are artificial. They test particular oddball functions of a system. How often does an average user cross-compile pre-processesed C code files into Motorola 88100 processor machine language?
>>>>>>>>>>>>
For most of a compiler run, the source code is represented as a processor-independent parse tree. This what the optimizers work on, and this is what that SPEC test tries to measure. Only final instruction scheduling actually uses the specific architecture to be compiled, and the 88100 was used in this case because GCC's algorithms are optimized to various levels for generating code for the most popular architectures. Testing with something like x86 or PPC code would be unfair because the x86 instruction scheduler most likely has optimizations the others don't and vice versa. The 88100 is obscure enough that this isn't a problem.

When was the last time you needed to process the "lithography artwork needed for the production of microchips"?
>>>>>>
Read the whole thing. Its an optimization problem, and people in scientific computing do these sorts of things all the time. Hell, people running Quake run these sorts of optimization problems (in the AI routines) all the time.

Never would be a reasonable guess. Of course, the point is moot as I can't locate a single PPC chip test result, never mind a PowerMac system.
>>>>>>>>>
http://www.heise.de/ct/english /02/05/182/

A real-world benchmark in my opinion (for general use desktop systems) is using a program/code compiled and optimized for a given CPU to test some complete task that is commonly performed by the average user.
>>>>>>>
Apple does real world benchmarks, right? Like Photoshop (only 6.0, though, because in 7.0 Adobe added SSE2 support in addition to AltiVec and Apple loses now)? The way Apple pushes Photoshop benchmarks you'd think all those people with iMacs ran photoshop all day long! Okay, but I'll bite, here are compilation benchmarks: http://homepage.mac.com/nopea1/benchmark/ Guess what? They show a G4 running about 20% faster than a PIII at the same clock speed. That equates to about 30-35% faster than a P4 at the same clockspeed. Where is the 150% difference that's needed here to make up for the difference in clock?

Ex: Rip an audio CD to .mp3 format, make some alterations and burn out to CDR.
>>>>>>>>>>
Umm, you're mostly testing the speed of your CD drive here.

Load an image and perform some editing and convert it to a web suitable size/format.
>>>>>>>
Kinda like PSBench? Guess what, the G4 loses here too! (See ArsTechnica forum, search for PSBench)

Frame rates of games are pointless benchmarks.
>>>>>>>>
Uh, how? A 3D game is the perfect test for new media applications. The geometry transformation algorithms (a lot of 3D matrix multiplies) can take real advantage of stuff like AltiVec and SSE. Plus, the AI algorithms stress non-linear code performance (something the P4 is bad at) and the heavy use of textures really stresses memory bandwidth.

What's the point of having a graphics subsystem that can do 200FPS in quake when your monitor can only refresh at 120Hz max, and your eye can't see anything above 80hz anyway.
>>>>>>>>
Because when Doom3 comes out, a machine that can get 200fps in Quake III will be able to run it with full detail at playable speeds, while a machine that only gets 100fps in Quake III won't.

It's like comparing the top speed of a cars when they'll never go faster than 80mph anyway. The speed becomes insignificant compared to other aspects of the system or car.
>>>>>>>>
Other aspects, like how transparent it is? Seriously, though, this thread was never about transparency (or easy of use, or fludity of the GUI or workflow or whatnot) or other aspects of the system. It was about performance, an area in which Apple is sorely lacking.

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[gerardrj]

Lets stop making this a platform war and look at Intel's own designs:

The P4 Intel sells to consumers is designed such that is runs at high clock speeds with long pipelines.
The Xeneon and ia64 chips they market for performance in servers and professional workstations are all lower clock speed, shorter pipeline chips than the P4. Seems to me that Intel themselves are the best evidence that you get more real-world work completed with lower clock speed, more efficient chips. The last I recall is that at about 1/2 the clock speed an Itanium outperforms a P4 by a sizable margin.
AMD is also proving this with chips that run at lower clock speeds, yet provide the performance of Intel's clock speed gobblers.

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[be-fan]

The Xeon chips are exactly like the P4 chips except with more cache. They have only slightly lower (usually a 100Mhz or so behind) clockspeed but a lot more cache. The pipelines and such are exactly the same length.
As for the Itanium, the P4 outperforms the Itanium by a good margin, about 15% in SpecFp and 100% in SpecInt.
I don't disagree with you that a lower clocked CPU can't outperform a much higher clocked CPU. Happens all the time. A 1Ghz Alpha 21264C is just as fast as a 2Ghz P4 in floating point, and 75% as fast in integer (which is a more important measure, btw for most desktop programs like compiling or whatnot). How is this possible? Well, the Alpha has 4 integer execution units and two fully independent floating point units. In comparison, the Pentium 4 has three integer units and a single floating point unit. All things being equal (they aren't, the P4's floating point unit is stack based, which makes it slower clock-for-clock than the Alpha's) the performance figures make sense! The P4 is faster in integer because the additional integer instruction that the Alpha can do per clock doesn't make up for the clock speed. The P4 is the same speed in floating point because the Alpha has twice as many (better) floating point units. Great example of a lower clocked CPU performing as well as a higher clocked one. BUT, the G4 is no Alpha. It simply does not have as many execution resources as the Alpha, and simply cannot hope to compete at its level, much less the level of a P4. The G4 has four integer units, and a measly one floating point unit. On top of that, the integer units aren't fully independent, three of them can only do simple operations like addition and subtration. The P4, in comparison, has two simple integer units clocked at TWICE core clock (5Ghz in a 2Ghz chip) and a single complex integer unit. Note, that the P4 has quite an advantage here architecturaly. Not only can it (theoretically) complete 25% more simple integer instructions per clock cycle, but because it has only two highly-clocked units rather than four lower-clocked units, it isn't as burdened with inter-instruction dependencies as the three units in the G4e. So even architecturally, the P4 has an advantage here in terms of integer performance. Now, the P4's floating point unit is slightly slower than the G4's clock for clock, but not 2.5x as slow. When all this is factored together, the end result is that the P4 is a great deal faster than the G4 running regular integer code, and a little bit faster running regular floating point code. Now, let's take SSE2 and AltiVec into account. Theoretically, AltiVec blows SSE2 out of the water. The G4e can theoretically issue 2 floating point instructions per cycle, and be crunching on 4 simultainously. The P4, meanwhile, can only do 1 per cycle. BUT, and there is a huge BUT here. Altivec's 4 excecution units are all different. 1 is a permute unit, 1 is simple integer, 1 is complex integer, 1 is floating point. In any given application, it is highly unlikely that more than two (or even that) will be usable at the same time. Thus, being generous, AltiVec can do 2 vector ops per cycle. But there's another catch: 2 vector ops per cycle = 32 bytes of source data per cycle. Running at 1 GHz, assuming full throughput from the vector unit, that equates to 32 gigabytes of data per second! But the processor bus (running at a mere 167 MHz and 64-bits) can only deliver 1.3 GB/sec! Now there lies the problem with AltiVec. The unit itself is great, but the current G4 implementation doesn't have nearly the bus-speed necessary to feed it. Now, with its 533Mhz 64-bit bus, (4.2 GB/sec) the P4 can feed its vector unit much more data, and thus crunch many more numbers, even though its actual vector unit is slower. But how, then, can the G4 ever come close to equaling the P4 (because it does, occasionally). The answer is whenever Apple can make up benchmarks that utilize the unique quirks of the G4. The G4 has a large L3 cache, running at 500MHz (4GB/sec with 64-bit bus). On benchmarks where the dataset fits in the 2MB of L3 cache, and where the data consists of integer values, the L3 cache will be able to feed the two integer pipes in the AltiVec unit quickly enough to get some serious performance. Guess what does this? Certain Photoshop benchmarks! Of course, its use in reality is rather limited. If the dataset is small (less than 512K) then the dataset fits in the L2 caches of both chips and the P4 wins because of the clock-speed advantage. If the dataset is bigger than 2MB, the data spills out of the cache of both chips, and the P4 wins by even more because of its greater memory bandwidth. If the data-set consists of floating point data, then the AltiVec unit can essentially do only one per cycle, and the P4 wins because of the clock-speed advantage.

There you have it. A veritable treatise on why the G4 is a CPU weakling. Again, let me note that I'm not trying to say that people shouldn't buy Macs, or that they aren't nice machines in other ways ("she has a nice personality!") merely pointing out that Apple's marketing department is fully of bull.

PS> If you want to understand CPUs at some level, a good place to start is ArsTechnica (www.arstechnica.com). They are one of the only websites that actually give technical detail in their articles, much more so than you'll find in any Slashdot thread. Much of the info in this post can be found in their article "An architectural comparison of the P4 and the G4e."

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[gerardrj]

You keep calling the PPC a weaklink, underperformer, etc yet continually fauly to provide a link to any benchmark that shows a P4 syatem beating a PPC system by anything close to the ratio of their clock speed difference.

Your "treatise" is littered with opinion (apparently mostly quoted from Ars Technica). I prefer fact to opinion, and at this point, fact is that no-one can show me the benchmark results that show what I'm asking for.
Noplace has anyone shown (that I know of) that at 2.5 times the clock speed, that a P4 system is even twice as fast as a PowerMac.
My opinion remains that Intel builds CPUs, support shipsets and mobos that are designed soley to achieve higher clock speeds with actual real-world performance being far less than should be expected for that transistor count and current draw. AIM designs chips that are overall well balanced, and efficiet, Apple is now designing systems that are fairly well balanced and remove many previous bottlenecks (many with still exist in P4 systems).

I don't know why you say Itanium is slower than the P4. HP's testing shows that cycle for cycle the Itanium outperforms the P4 in the SPEC tests you like so much. Ex: a 1GHz Itanium is 2.1x as fast in FP than a 1.6GHz P4 Xenon.

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[be-fan]

You keep calling the PPC a weaklink, underperformer, etc yet continually fauly to provide a link to any benchmark that shows a P4 syatem beating a PPC system by anything close to the ratio of their clock speed difference.
>>>>>>>>>>
I pointed you to the ArsTechnica forum. They sum up the benchmarks much better than I ever could. There is a specific thread full of benchmark results. But if you want:
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/05_ may/fea tures/cw_aeshowdown.htm
http://www.digitalvideoed iting.com/2002/07_jul/fea tures/cw_macvspc2.htm
http://www.heise.de/ct/engl ish/02/05/182/

Go to the ArsTechnica site for mroe info.

Your "treatise" is littered with opinion
(apparently mostly quoted from Ars Technica).
>>>>>>
Like what? The G4 has 4 integer units? That's opinion? To feed the AltiVec units at full power you need 32GB/sec of bandwidth, while the Mac system bus only provides 1.3GB/sec of bandwidth, that's opinion? You have yet to give me a single factual statement that might confirm that the G4 is competitive with Pentium 4s. Point to some aspect of the architecture that indicates that might be the case. G4 proponents seem to believe that there is something magic in the PPC architecture that allows a G4 to process twice as much data in a given clock cycle than a Pentium 4, to make up for the clock speed difference. I'm showing you exactly how the G4 not only has no magic in it, but in many ways, its architecture is not as good as the P4's, clockspeed aside. Architecture aside, clock-speed aside, its not even theoretically possible for the G4 to be competitive with a P4. Most code doesn't have nearly enough parallism to feed an instructions per cycle number much higher than current x86 chips. In those special cases where where code does have that level of parallelism, the G4's memory bandwidth issues prevent the CPU from taking full advantage of its architectural good points.

Noplace has anyone shown (that I know of) that at 2.5 times the clock speed, that a P4 system is even twice as fast as a PowerMac.
>>>>>>>
Its not twice as fast as a PowerMac. Its more like 50-75% faster. In some cases its much closer to 100% (where memory bandwidth comes into play) and in same cases (much rarer) where the G4's L3 cache or vector permute unit becomes useful, the gap is much smaller. But remember that 50-75% is about the same as x86 chips with similar clock-speed differences. In this era of 2.5 GHz P4s, I consider a 1.5 GHz P4 to be a weakling/underperformer/etc, just as I consider a G4 to be an underperformer. And if you'd just go to the damn Ars forum, you'd see them.

I don't know why you say Itanium is slower than the P4. HP's testing shows [hp.com]that cycle for cycle the Itanium outperforms the P4 in the SPEC tests you like so much. Ex: a 1GHz Itanium is 2.1x as fast in FP than a 1.6GHz P4 Xenon.
>>>>>>>>
You're link pointed to an article about an Itanium2. I was talking about the Itanium-1. Read up on the architecture of the Itanium2 sometime. The thing has 6 integer units, 2 floating point units, a vector unit, megabytes of cache, 328 registers, can issue 11 instructions per cycle, and has 6.4 GB/second of bus bandwidth. OF COURSE ITS TWICE AS FAST AS A P4! But a G4 doesn't have all those things. What makes it faster? Nothing, because its not! Lets look at this mathematically. Well judge the performance of the G4 by making some relationships (see spec.org for benchmarks). The fastest P4 is more than 50% faster, in integer, than the fastest Alpha (1GHz). In order to be competitive with the Alpha, the G4 has to be faster than an Alpha at the same clock-speed. Both CPUs have 4 integer units. Both are RISC. However, the Alpha has twice the internal cache, 4x the external cache, many times the bus bandwidth, and is recognized as being one of the best CPU architectures ever built. Are you still going to tell me the G4 is faster clock-for-clock?

My opinion remains that Intel builds CPUs, support shipsets and mobos that are designed soley to achieve higher clock speeds with actual real-world performance being far less than should be expected for that transistor count and current draw.
>>>>>>>.
Nobody's arguing about which CPU is more efficient. But in the world of desktops, 40w vs 14w really doesn't make a single ounce of difference. That's the difference between one-sixth a lightbulb and one-half. What counts is ultimate, wall-clock performance.

AMD designs chips that are overall well balanced, and efficiet,
>>>>>>
Hah! Shows how much you know about CPUs! The AMD chips run hotter and draw more current than their Intel counterparts. Only for a short time (0.18 micron Willamette) did AMD draw less current. In terms of transistors, they're maybe 20% smaller, but that doesn't mean much.

Apple is now designing systems that are fairly well balanced and remove many previous bottlenecks (many with still exist in P4 systems).
>>>>>>>>
What kind of bottlenecks? Apple systems have some terribe bottlenecks. The measly 167Mhz bus being one of them. Everyone else and their mother has already moved to double and quad pumped busses, and Apple is stuck with technology slightly better than PC133. P4s currently have 4.2 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. AMD (with Clawhammer) is moving towards 6.4 GB/sec. Apple has 2.7 GB/sec (theoretical) and 1.3 GB/sec (actual). What bottleneck's does Apple fix? If you mean the stupid architecture "documentation" they've got on their site, its bull. Its a standard NorthBridge/SouthBridge architecture, and despite their claims of a "DirectPCI bus" its a standard PCI bus setup as well. In fact, the vanilla NorthBridge/SouthBridge connected via the PCI bus setup is quite dated. All modern x86 chipsets use either the hub architecture, or connect their North/South bridges together via dedicated high-speed busses. The only "bottleneck" breaking Apple does is add the L3 cache. Sure its significant, and allows the G4 to do well on certain benchmarks, but it only runs at 4GB/sec, slower than the main memory on modern P4 systems.

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[gerardrj]

I never said AMD makes well balanced efficient chips, I said AIM makes well balanced efficienc chips. If you knew much about the PPC you would know AIM stands for Apple, IBM, Motorola, the three companies that set the design standards for the PPC lineup.
Apple's system bus problems are not a limitation of Apple's design, but part of the issue of Motorola's lagging behind in keeping thing up to date. That is what lead to the initial discussion of moving to another chipset.

As for current draw I thought I'd read the P4s take something more like 65W, not 40W. IF I get ti right, Intel's own specs pin the P4 2.8 at a max draw of 75W.

The benchmarks you referenced are interesting but I must say I am troubled by comments like this in the text: "And, as expected, the Mac dual 1GHz G4 could not even come close to keeping up". While I don't dispute that the Mac looses many of the benchmarks (never said it was faster than a P4, just that the MHz gap doesn't provide as substantial a gap as one might think), I will state that it isn't soundly trounced. Many of their benchmarks are entirely too short running to be useful for comparison (1 to 5 second run times). Most of the longer ones show the x86 machines to be 60% faster at most. So again I state... 2.5 times the clock speed, and only 60% better performance?

Re:Switch? Perhaps, but not to x86

[be-fan]

You're right about the wattage, I was using older numbers from the 2.2 GHz P4. But, I'd also mention that the 1 GHz G4 draws a maximum of 30 watts, not 18. Either way, as long as its less than 100w, who cares? I mean most monitors use > 150w, so is the processor really an issue?

I will state that it isn't soundly trounced.
>>>>>>>>>>
60% is soundly trounced, especially considering the cost of the machine and the fact that when moving to even more data-heavy benchmarks the slow bus speed of the G4 will probably hurt it even more.

2.5 times the clock speed, and only 60% better performance?
>>>>>
Yes. Performance doesn't scale linearly with clock-speed, even among chips within the same architecture. A 2 GHz Athlon XP is not 100% faster than a 1 Ghz Athlon. Its closer to 50-60% faster. But that's still very significant, even $800 HPs are being sold with 1.5 GHz Athlons these days.

As for the runtimes of the comparison, 1-5 seconds is 1 - 5 billion clock-cycles. Short, yes, but entirely sufficient for CPU benchmarking.

Now, there is a lot of talk about benchmarks not being important. Is 60% faster really sufficient to brand one processor a slowpoke and another one wickedly fast? I contend, yes. Its not necessarily to say that one system is better than another just because of the processor, but the processor itself should cry itself to sleep at nights in shame. 60% (or more given data heavy benchmarks) will let you finish your work quicker, and spend less time waiting for your computer to respond to things. Personally, I noticed a very visible improvement when I moved from my 1.5Ghz Athlon to my 2GHz P4. In reality, the P4 is probably 20% or less faster, but my machine feels less unusably slow. /. isn't for average users who putter around with email and Word. Its for power users, and until every conceivable operation can be done in less than 0.3 seconds (human response time) then its still too slow.

Does anyone else see an Xbox like machine coming?

[Entropy_ajb]

I can't see Apple ever releasing OSX for an open x86 architecture, but I can see them releasing an Xbox like machine that runs on a x86 CPU, but can only run OSX.

This != Mac Clones

[feldsteins]

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.

Re:This != Mac Clones

[Reality Master 101]

The difference is that it's a lot easier to add a widget to a commodity x86 board than it is to completely reengineer a G4 board.

This is the same argument as "Microsoft will just change the APIs". Apple can't just willy-nilly change things, because they break backward compatibility with all the existing widgets. Apple is obnoxious about making everybody upgrade their hardware, but they can't do it every operating system release.

Re:This != Mac Clones

[BitGeek]

You see this said alot but it doesn't make sense. IF Apple moved to the x86 platform (which I don't think they are going to do in the next 5 years) then there would be no "widgets" on the mother board that the OS looks for in order to boot-- that would be impossible, without close-sourcing OSX.

Remember darwin is open sourced. Its there at anonymous CVS on the opendarwin.org site. OS X just runs on top of this, so it would be trivial-- in an x86 version of the OS-- to have the OS report that "Yep, I found the widget, this is genuine apple hardware!" even on a typical not-going-to-keep-working-for-more-than-six-months -because-of-solder-burrs-and-bad-joints PC Motherboard.

IF Apple moves to the x86 platform, it would mean they are giving up the hardware strategy and are going software only-- or that they have some magical hardware that they think will be compelling enough to get people to run OS X on Apple hardware even though it runs on clones. The latter I think is a lot less likely than the former.

I won't rule out Apple going to x86, but it won't happen soon, and if it does, there *will* be a "clone" market... or apple will be software only.

And the world will be a sadder place. Apple's hardware is wonderful. ITs especially nice to have a computer that keeps working after 6 years, let alone 6 months.

Re:All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your brea

[shepd]

>and IBM actually gives a shit about improving their products

ROTFLMAO.

1.5 words for you:

OS/2 Warp.

Negociating with microsoft?

[jmv]

That way, Apple can tell M$: "If you don't release Word for OS X, we'll release OS X on x86"...

Re:Negociating with microsoft?

[G0SP0DAR]

That's interesting, but would that be why OS X 10.2 still doesn't play nice with SMB servers? You'd think they could at least get WINS addresses via DHCP...of course that may be reading into the M$ thing a little too much

umm

[geek]

Maybe you should trade the crystal ball for a crack pipe. Your divination might be more accurate that way.

A good way to flush out the bugs...

[Spoing]

Apple already used a cross platform OS as the core of OSX; BSD.^

As we've seen with the other software from applications, services (Apache...), and operating systems (*BSDs, Linux, ...), porting to different hardware cleans up quite a few bugs -- from system design mistakes to simple coding errors that 'work' mostly by accident.

Even if there's zero reason to release an x86 port of OSX (or later), the benifits for the PPC OSX still exist.

^ - Corrections & clarifacations apprecated.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes no sense (sho

[twiztidlojik]

Personally, I'm betting that it'll be the new .09 (Or is it .06?) micron fab IBM just built that'll produce the next generation of Apple chip.

Yes, there's a new chip coming. I mean, what designer would put DDR-333 in a machine that can only do a 133 MHz FSB? The only thing is, IBM won't be makiing the next generation chip. They're too tight-fisted to license (sp?) Altivec, The Velocity Engine, etc etc from Motorola, and they're simply plodding along and making really friggin fast (and high quality) G3's to show off at the next microprocessor shebang. Unfortunately for all of us Mac owners, Motorola's going to make the next processor, which means high priced upgrades, high priced computers, and slower clock speed. Since Motorola makes other comsumer electronics goodies, they've got no incentive to increase the clock speed. I mean, you only need so much computing power to watch a DVD or listen to a CD. Once they get past that threshold (and they already have, which would explain the big slowdown in clock frequency around '97-'98), they don't have a big business need to produce faster and more resillient PPC-74xx chips for us poor Mac-using folk, because we're simply not their main consumer.

Question for OS X users.

[FreeLinux]

Can an OS X user copy an object from one application to another? Specifically, can you right click an image in your browser choose "Copy" and then past that image into your word processor or Photo Shop?

Re:Question for OS X users.

[RAVasquez]

Sure. But we prefer to drag and drop them.

Re:Question for OS X users.

[be-fan]

I've never understood drag and drop. Its so inefficient. I tend to run my web browsers full screen and my word processors full screen. I'd bet that this is something most people do. Thus, drag and drop becomes a very exacting process, where meanwhile right-click->copy and right-click->past is so much more efficient! Perhaps the real reason OS-X users prefer drag and drop is that they have to go all the way to the keyboard to "right-click."

Re:Question for OS X users.

[geek]

Traditionally Mac users have more than one monitor (being graphics people etc) so it's very nice, especially with dual 23" flat screens :)

If you run a browser in full screen on one of those you are wasting a whole lot of screen real estate.

Re:Question for OS X users.

[Slur]

Yes. In fact we've been able to do this since System 7, not to mention lots of other things that Windows users would have considered "cutting-edge" had they been aware.

Re:Question for OS X users.

[am 2k]

I'm not sure why, but I never use full screen windows on Mac OS 9/X, but always on Windows. Maybe because both were designed accordingly.

IMO filling my entire 1600x1200+1024x768 screens with a single web browser window would be a great waste.

Re:Question for OS X users.

[mbbac]

Running applications in full screen is ineffecient use of your screen. Mac users don't run applications full screen. Since they don't, drag and drop is very useful and faster than context-click, copy, set focus, context-click, paste.

Here's one use...

[MrIcee]

All the posts about how such a move might alienate apple from it's customers and vendors...

There is one use of X86 hardware that would not alienate customers and vendors... embedded systems. Similar to the iPod (but probably more capable... such as iPhones, or iWear etc...) X86 port might make very much sense. The hardware is faster, cheaper and better supported from the chip makers. If programming is not an option from the user/developer view than that will not alienate very many people.

The one thing Apple is king of is packaging and beautiful designs.... closed system owners won't care what processor is under the hood, and it might allow Apple to create systems with more choices (chip wise) and potentially at less cost.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes no sense (sho

[Tokerat]

Do you know where detailed information can be found about the Power4 chips? I've heard a lot of buzz lately around this and would like to see for myself.

It's really sad that Motorola is delivering as poorly as they are. I wished for the longest time that they where just "stalling" with the incremental upgrading because they had somrthing cool in the works that needed refining...however now I have lost hope. I was really looking forward to the period in time when the "G6" would be seeing the light (2005? 06?), because by then I'd have the money to buy a new top-of-the-line Apple, which, for a full, decent system-of-my-dreams, would set me back a good $12,000 or more (note: including a complete Dolby Digital 5.1 reciever and speakers, audio card to go with it, dual head 23" Cinema displays, etc :-) ). Now I wonder if I'll buy buying an Apple Macintosh Power5 or something....

...whatever, as long as it's fast and fundementally still Mac, I'll be alright.

Is it real?

[ricardo2c]

I think it is very interesting seeing many of you doubting the existence of a "Marklar" product. As Apple must be really disappointed with the PowerPC performance (at least I am), with PCs reaching the 3rd Gigahertz... it (Apple) must have a backup plan for its platform. They already use IDE, DDR, PCI and so on, what makes the machine so much cheaper because of the common technology. The question is: Is it a good idea to break compatibility with our own not-very-old platform, making our current customers and programmers angry because of the yet-one-more processor change, but giving them cheaper and more powerful machines? What are they going to say now? "My machine is faster because it has an Apple sticker on it"? Of course, they would still have machines designed entirely from the bottom up, with no need to support legacy stuff... but it would still be dificult to convince people that buy iMacs. Have you guys ever asked the marketing guys their opinion on this???

It's A Bluff...

[Shuh]

The x86 architecture is where old proprietary operating systems go to die... OS/2, BeOS, Novell, NeXT, etc.

Nevermind the illusion of "openness," the proprietary-by-way-of-monopoly-power P.C. standards (and OEM's) are all controlled by Microsoft, so anything that isn't given away free (e.g. Linux), will be squished like a bug in that space.

Apple's Trump Card against MS.

[cryptochrome]

I think the advantages of actually putting out an x86 version of os x (which by the way went by the name "Star Trek" before, IIRC) are outweighed by the various (mostly hardware-revenue related) disadvantages.

However, it's an invaluable asset to have anyway, because you can blackmail microsoft with it. Remember when MS bought all that Apple stock? Remember what dire straights Apple has been in in the past? Despite all that, Mac OS remains to this day the only consumer OS besides windows that has managed to gain and hold onto a significant userbase versus Windows. And it has a lot of software. So pretend you're Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs gives you a ring and says "If we start to go under, for any reason, we're releasing our x86 build of Mac OS X... as open source." There's not enough TP in Redmond to handle that kind of threat. Or any of the lesser ones they could make too.

Re:Apple's Trump Card against MS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's had these plans for years. There was a project nmaed "Star Trek" at Apple (to go where no Mac OS has gone before?) to get the old OS ported. It worked. This was in the early nineties.

It was killed when it became clear MS would bury them alive, mostly by enforcing licenses that at the time forbade OEMs from selling anything other than an MS OS with each box. And of course failing to support Apple with Excel and Word products.

Presumably once the remedy element of the MS trial is overwith and it is clear Apple can move they will.

My hope? They support AMDs 64 bit implementation as rapdily as possible. That would make it a killer, cheap, and pretty fun box wouldn't it?

Heck the rest of the hardware architecture has been PC compliant for years. Why not the processor? It might help lower the price of the box a bit too for that matter.

Re:Apple's Trump Card against MS.

[CavemanKiwi]

Yeah but the fact Macs are getting slower and slower when comparred to PCs doesn't help. Amiga had a good user base but because of the lack of hardware support ,poor support for the Hdd. And 2 exspenive a base unit. slowly making them fade away.

Article on Artificial Cheese

[batobin]

It's kind of late, but I wrote my 2 cents about the article on Artificial Cheese. Here's a link.

And here it is pasted: http://artificialcheese.com/story/2002/8/31/161044 /348

But imagine the damage to MS an OSX XBOX Port ...

[NZheretic]

... could do.

OS X.x for x86

[pizza_milkshake]

I would run out and grab OS X.x asap if it was released for x86.

Does this mean...

[asdfasdfasdfasdf]

that if your marklar is malfunctioning, you'll see the unhappy marklar when you boot up?

Re:Debian packaging is actually quite good

[jbolden]

> On another note, why isn't it possible for outside people to port JUST Aqua over? I don't
> care if the install programs can't detect my hardware in a snap (I can do that myself), but
> I'd sure love to have the pretty GUI on my desktop... It'd be a step in the right direction.

Well there is an X11 window manager called oroborosx which is based on oroboros window manager (available on x86) which looks look Aqua. So the mac crowd has already ported a Mac look a like to their X11. You could probably do a reverse port of the skin in now time.

I will never understand why...

[Kindaian]

Apple ignores the intel/pc market altogether... mayhappen now is too late because... when OS X was launched, there was momentum for a intel/pc launch of it... now i'm not that sure...

They really love to fire guns at their foots!

Cheers...

Think different, think LinuxPPC

[axxackall]

just to complete the picture: Yellow Dog is not the only Linux distro running on PPC. I've tried successfully: LinuxPPC (now dead, last distro is 2000'Q4), Debian and Gentoo. And I heard about some success of porting of FreeBSD and NetBSD to PPC platform, partiuarly into Mac/PPC.

Why am I telling it? I think Mac OS (including Mac OS X) users should use the same formula as was driving users from PC to Mac - "Think different, think Apple!", but now with a small change: "Think different, think Linux/PPC". Mac/PPC world should not be and is not limited by the dictated choice of the sector monopolist (Apple). And Linux is doing the same great job is it's doing on the PC sector - it's giving the choice for people. The choice of OS.

Seriosly, think about it. What kind of choice Mac gives to people? To spend another $1K for more expensive hardware and then to stick with Mac OS after discovering lots of Mac OS (even OS X) problems? With Linux/PPC people can buy Mac/PPC and use same skills as they have with Linux/x86.

I think that Apple, instead of porting of Mac OS X into PC/x86, should officially support (and contribute!) Linux/PPC. Eventually Apple should either port Aqua to Linux/X11 or to give up Mac OS at all.

Re:Think different, think LinuxPPC

[Gilmoure]

Don't forget Minix, MK Linux, AUX, etc. I've been collecting *nix's that run on Macs for a long time. NetBSD has been out for Macs for at least 10 years.

The reason that you're not going to see Quartz/Aqua supported on any other *nix's is that Apple doesn't want the GUI to get loose. It's what they use to get people to buy Apple computers. Selling Apple computers generates money for Apple Inc. Generating money for Apple Inc. allows it to stay in business.

Re:Think different, think LinuxPPC

[castanaveras]

For most people, it's worth $129 to not have to waste days fucking around with kernel modules every time they want to add new hardware.

Personally, I use Linux and FreeBSD for my servers, but I'm a geek. Joe Consumer just wants to be able to open M$ Office documents, use Photoshop and Dreamweaver, play games and mess around with their digital camera and DV camcorder, and OS X lets them do that without hassles.

Joe Consumer is never going to want to figure out how much of a swap partition to make, what kernel modules to compile in, how to tweak X Window to get a different resolution, or any of the other geeky things we can^whave to do with Linux or BSD.

What, exactly, do you think running Linux instead of Mac OS X will do for you? Other than keep you from running commercial applications, I mean.

You can basically build any unix app that runs on BSD on Mac OS X, but if you run Linux or one of the open source BSDs, you won't be able to run things like Photoshop.

Or InDesign.

Or Illustrator.

And forget commercial games.

Or watch QuickTime movies.

Don't bother bringing up GIMP until it does 4 color separations. Or proper color correction.

As irrelevant as these things may seem to you, they're what Joe Consumer wants to use their machines for.

You really think Apple is going to give up Mac OS for Linux? Get a grip. What makes a Mac special is that it just works for what most people want to use it for. They put in a second video card, reboot, and the second display just works, without spending an afternoon fucking around with X Window. They want to capture video, they just plug in their DV camcorder and it just works. No fucking around building a new kernel with 1394 support and trying to figure out how to get it to actually see the camera. Etc, etc.

What makes this possible is that Apple controls the software and the hardware, and the software doesn't have to deal with a hundred different 1394 cards, or hundreds of crappy old video cards that someone picked up at a garage sale. They built the hardware, they can be sure what is going to be there.

Re:Lose Carbon & AltiVec? 3rd parties not gonn

[jbolden]

> The PPC vendors obviously don't care too much about putting enough development money into their
> products to compete, so it's time to switch to a vendor that does care.

IBM cares, they've based their whole RS/6000 (pSeries now)line on PPC. I don't think they want to get knocked out of that market. Its the 32 bit PPC which is having trouble.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes no sense (sho

[Kashif Shaikh]

They'd alienate the entire Apple infrastructure just to gain a few points on hardware speed that they wouldn't even be able to sell anymore.

Another point: We are at a point where just over a year ago companies were racing to hit that magical '1.0 Ghz' mark for CPUs...and now we have CPU speeds close to 3Ghz! A question that needs to be asked, does anyone need that kind of power? I mean seriously?

We really need to look at the 'computer demograph' to see what people actually use their computer for. For example, both of my brothers regular computer users) browse the internet, chat with their friends on MSN/Yahoo/etc, listen to mp3s, transfer their pics from their digital camera and upload them to their site, and occasionaly use Office. But one of them has a P133Mhz laptop and another a plain old Celery 333Mhz. P133 isn't that capable, but my bro gets by(he doesn't use the digital camera on it though). The celery on the other hand is fully capable, but sometimes its a little sluggish with WinXP in refreshing/redrawing screen and processing the photos.

Now Intel is telling me(or my bros) that we need a Pentium IV 3.0 Ghz to 'Max out my PC'? My bro is already experiencing everything today, and a 10fold jump in Mhz isn't going to liven his experience 10 times.

Yes, there are certain people who are not part of the regular demograph: They want the last bit of FPS from quake3, do intense spread-sheet number crunching, or do gigabytes of video and audio processing. But even then you don't need the latest Ghz speed to have an 'acceptable' level of enjoyment. Lets take games, because I myself am a gamer. Its true that higher CPU Mhz make your games faster, but its to the point where even I don't give a shit anymore about having 300fps in Quake3. It's more important(for me anyways) if I can achieve a descent 60fps and have a good time. Plus games are becoming less dependant on the CPU, and increasingly dependant on the GPU/VPUs for all graphical calculations.

Point of all this discussion: This is why Apple is smart and don't need concentrate on the mythical mhz speed game, but rather focus on their add-on value(nifty looking tech) that is physically tangible by the consumer market.

Just look at the author's name

[hoytt]

One of the authors is Nick dePlume, editor-in-chief of http://www.thinksecret.com. This site has a bit shaky reputation when it comes to rumours. The have a few hits, but most of the things they publish are blanks. In the past this site has had various rumours about OS X on x86 hardware. None of which turned out te be anything. Just because they publish and article on eweek doesn't mean it's more credible.

According to sources, the Cupertino, Calif., Mac maker has been working steadily on maintaining current, PC-compatible builds of its Unix-based OS.

This doesn't shed any light. Unless they come with a more reliable thing than 'sources' I think it's a miss.

Apple doesn't want you to save money.

[geekee]

Apple will never release MacOS of x86 unless the powerpc architecture dies. This is because apple is more interested in making money than in providing a cheap mac solution for mac users. They do this by maintaining a monopoly on mac hardware, so they can charge as much money as they can get away with without forcing mac users to switch to pcs. That is why Steve Jobs killed the mac clone industry. He realized Apple could make more money as a monopoly.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes no sense (sho

[MoneyT]

I personaly woul dbe less interested in seeing processor improvements (since they really don't do much for me any more) and more improvements elsewhere. What good is a 3 Ghz processor and 5mhz memory when the PCI bus is still slow? Or the AGP slots are slow? What about HDDs? Those things haven't seen a significant speed increase in a long while, and SCSI is still too expensive to make it a viable alternative. Or instead of working on upping the processor speed, let's work on improving the current processors. Let's take our 15 and 20 stage processors and work on developing them so that they maintain their speed while running with shorter pipelines. Let's see some real innovations.

#ifndef __BIGENDIAN__

[ironduke-particle]

I wrote lots of code for NEXTSTEP3.3/OPENSTEP4.2, and I needed it to run on all supported architectures, and it did.

MacOS, even X, has never gone into public deployment on anything but bigendian hardware. This means that alls sorts of apps, and system software, is going to break horribly, or at least lose document compatibility, if built for Intel, because way too many people have not contemplated endianity.

The MacOSX Darwin stuff is another matter; that's publicly available for x86, and I'm guessing maintainers have diligently preserved/re-introduced/introduced hton...() and ntoh...() to keep it endian-neutral. Cocoa should be completely (or almost completely) architecture-neutral for the same historical reasons.

If Apple really wanted to deploy MacOS on x86, and they wanted it to work, it would take many man-years of reviewing legacy code, and too many third-parties would not have their apps or system software ready for the flag day.

Whatever plans Apple may have involving x86, it doesn't involve my desktop anytime soon.

CISC on RISC is easier than RISC on CISC.

[neurojab]

It's pretty easy for me to see why emulating cisc on risc would be easier than the other way around... I mean easier as in easier to make a usably fast emulator. The emulator needs to do its work at the opcode level. Think about it this way (overly simplified): let's say I need to do a chunk of work on each. The cisc architecture can do the chunk in N instructions. Each of those instructions takes X clock cycles, so the chunk is NX in work. On RISC, I take M instructions, and each instruction takes 1 clock cycle, so my work is M. Let's say that we have performance competitive machines so NX=M. My emulator is going to need a certain number of native instructions to emulate each foriegn one. Now I'm lazy (but still write in assembler), so I'm only going to emulate one opcode at a time. When I use RISC to emulate CISC, my minimum unit of work is NX, because I can use a certain number of RISC instructions for each CISC. When I go the other way around (because of my assumption that I'm too lazy to intelligently combine opcodes), however, I need at least one CISC instruction for every RISC. This puts my minimum unit of work at MX!
MX >> NX because of my earlier assertion that NX=M.

Re:CISC on RISC is easier than RISC on CISC.

[geekee]

If you believe modern x86 code runs as multiple microcode instructions, you are out of touch. Modern x86 code operates just like RISC code. You get one instruction completion per pipe per cycle, assuming the pipeline is full, just like RISC. There's no way they could compete on performance if they did it any other way. What would be the point of having multiple pipepines if each pipeline took many cycles to finish an instruction. When, you have millions of transistors to play with, the lines between CISC and RISC become very blurred. Just because a processor is a CISC processor, doesn't mean it operates the way they taught you in your intro class in college. It's just not that cut and dried. Basically the CPI of an x86 processor is probably about the same as a PowerPC. Therefore, it just be about as easy to write an efficient emulator on either platform.

Re:CISC on RISC is easier than RISC on CISC.

[J. Random Software]

There are wacky IA-32 opcodes like ENTER that affect several registers and memory locations. There are even circumstances (like CALL with a task gate) that affect all the registers and the page tables. The instruction set docs have huge pseudocode in places, and no reasonable pipeline can handle that without resorting to micro-ops.

Re:CISC on RISC is easier than RISC on CISC.

[geekee]

Believe me, they do piepline all this stuff. Out of order retirement of instructions is not uncommon, even in RISC processors these days. There is a performance hit do to the extra logic required for all the goofy IA-32 instructions they still need to support, but everything is still pipelined. Of course there is a performance hit due to the extra logic, which is why you'll get 10%-20% better performance out of a PowerPC chip with a similar microarchitecture clocked at the same frequency, since the PowerPC is a cleaner architecture.

Re:CISC on RISC is easier than RISC on CISC.

[neurojab]

And on the PowerPC architecture you're going to have more instructions to do the same work (that's fundamental to RISC)... 10-20% better performance at the same clock rate, and more instructions to process...It seems like the RISC chip really is getting a lot more instructions through for the same number of clock cycles. Couldn't you generalize that to a multiplicative factor (perhaps more than 1 and less than 2)?

Re:CISC on RISC is easier than RISC on CISC.

[geekee]

If you look at a x86 microinstruction, it probably looks a lot like a powerpc instruction, and is executed in a similar manner. Now, Im not familiar with the IA32 instruction set, but I would imagine by the time it was designed it occurred to the architects that these microinstructions would make good instructions. So, if you have this set of instructions and a set of hardware similar to that of a PowerPC, You get similar performance at the same clock rate. Hard to get into performance specifics without running code traces through a processor and collecting statistics for CPI, number of instructions the compiler produced, cache hit percentages, how many pipes are being used on average, etc. BTW, you might as well throw out the textbook definition of CISC in regard to an x86 processor, because people simply do NOT design processors that way anymore.

why care about energy use?

[yerricde]

"More per clock" only matters when you are worried about energy use and heat generation (embedded market)

or (fanless workstations)

or (energy star guidelines to meet certain government customers' bids)

or (intel P4 is a big fat clock divider in front of an overclocked 486)

I can buy a P4 machine that will solve my problems faster than an Athlon.

Including the time it takes you to wait tables to earn money to pay for the electricity a P4 eats?

Re:Why PPC is a lower form of life

[MoneyT]

Funny, IE loads in 1 second on my 300 Mhz iBook as compared to 2 seconds on my Athon XP 2000+

My mac can easily handle me opening 4 applications at the same time and open them all in a reasonable amout of time. My Athon on the other hand has a heart attack when I try to open AIM, IE, Outlook and WinAMP at the same time.

Did I mention that the mac is just a hell of a lot easier to use, and hence faster on the user end?

Re:All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your brea

[Jay Carlson]

Even if Apple ever were to switch to making x86-based Macs (and you, the reader, are significantly more likely to bang Anna Kournikova than to see an x86-based Mac for sale), they would put something proprietary in those machines, maybe even in every component of those machines, and change the Mac OS to refuse to boot if it doesn't detect that proprietary something.

In the world I come from, proprietary hardware gratuitously inserted into a system to control where software can be run has a name.

It's called a dongle.

Apple's in a funny position. What they sell is hardware, but the core value provided to customers is software.

(Don't believe me about the software? Look at how well the Mac clones sold, and how many people here are drooling over the possibility of inexpensive, non-crippled hardware to run OS X...)

It takes 20 years for some tech to take off

[yerricde]

I'm kinda despairing tho; the paper is several years old, and any 27 obvious applications have failed to use it.

It takes twenty years for some technologies to take off.

Coincidentally, that's the term of a United States patent.

Re:All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your brea

[tshak]

And here we go with an uniformed Apple elitist droning on about his superior hardware quality. I will commend Apple's recent efforts and say that they offer the most elegent package for the home user, however, they could do the same with x86 hardware. Just because you can but cheap x86 hardware does not mean that you can not build a very high quality x86 box. As an x86 OEM, apple could still build their funky cases, still design a proprietary motherboard (which most OEM's do currently), and still tightly control the hardware.

Now that Mac OS X is truly ready for prime time with 10.2, all Apple needs is to be able to produce machines that will impress the MHz/GHz-obsessed, cock-measuring crowd.


Actually, since Apple is so focused on the multimedia segment, they are really hurting on the hardware side. My $1000 Athlon box is out rendering $3000 G4 boxes. Why? Mainly because of Apples very slow FSB, and relatively slow chips. And no, I'm not just talking about clock speed, even Carmack admits that PPC's are slower then x86's for Doom, and that optimizations for Altivec only have significant value in a limited number of situations. This isn't to say that PPC's are awesome for certain tasks, especially where raw performance is not required. As you said, coupled with OS 10.2, Apple has a very good consumer product.

I'm not saying as a business decision that Apple should do this, but I'm saying that from a purely technical standpoint it would not affect the quality of Apple products.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes no sense (sho

[AlexeiMachine]

I think Apple could make money selling OS X on the x86 platform. Right now their main cash cow is the hardware; I don't know for sure what their margin is, but let's assume for a moment that it is 20%. So on a 999$ iMac, they gross 200$. Their market share is tiny (2-3%?). If they sold OS X competitively priced with Windows XP, they could sell a lot more volume at a profit margin of close to 100% (once the software is ready, the cost of the CDs and the boxes is negligible...) Whatever losses in hardware sales would easily be made up by the software sales. Look at the cash Microsoft rakes in with software alone.

For the hardware side, I'm sure many people would be interested in Apple's x86 platform. The hardware they engineer looks good and is well thought out and well built. Compare any PC notebook with a Titanium PowerBook and see which one gets you drooling. Furthermore they could offer "certification" services for third-parties that would like to have an "Apple Certified" label for their hardware; giving customers who prefer to assemble their own machine some guidelines to what is and isn't supported by Apple's tech support.

Lazy assumption

[yerricde]

When I go the other way around (because of my assumption that I'm too lazy to intelligently combine opcodes)

Transmeta's Crusoe processor, which uses a Code Morphing emulation front-end to run x86 software, does intelligently combine opcodes. So does HP's similar Dynamo technology.

Lots of talk about emulation...

[Dunkalis]

If they jump to x86, they won't go to a pure x86 architecture. By the time they switched to x86, the dominance of x86-64 or Yamhill will have been decided, and Apple would have a 64-bit processor, and they would have more then enough power to emulate a PPC machine...

OS X on Crusoe?

[Tumbleweed]

OH MAMA, if I could have OS X running on a Sony PictureBook, I...I don't know how I'd take the ecstasy!

To quote Wayne and Garth: "*Schwing!*" :)

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes no sense (sho

[PythonOrRuby]

Actually, the prices for an Apple-branded x86 machine would likely be higher, as processors from Intel and AMD are quite a bit higher than prices for PPC chips.

I'm not an expert on this subject, and this might be nothing more than uninformed speculation, but I'm guessing this is the price OEMs pay for having lots of frequent updates in processors. Intel and AMD spend a lot on R&D for these things, then have short, relatively low volume production runs leading to lower marginal profits on each unit sold.

what about......

[jomast]

if Apple is not happy with Motorola, why not keep the PPC architechure running on top of a Transmeta chip? Isn't this what code morphing is all about? Apple could work with Transmeta to work up the PPC code for the chip.

and who knows... mabey you could duel boot between PPC and x86 architectures also!

just a though.

I got it, Apple is planning the OS-X-BOX!

[JoeCommodore]

Yep once the inroads to Linux are completed Apple will produce CDs to scuttle the X-Box and turn it into their digital lifestyle hub. :-)

Missing the point

[videodriverguy]

In several ways... There have been many rumors about how MS was going to develope it's own chip for 'Xbox 2' - almost certainly to pin their suppliers to reduced prices. Rumors about Apple having an x86 port of OSX are just the same old story - putting pressure on their suppliers to reduce prices etc. Personally, I don't believe that Apple would EVER try to take on MS - they would be crushed, and they know it. Swatting annoying flies is easy for MS - they have a good track record at doing it. Frankly, I'm a little suprised that the readers of slashdot don't find it difficult that someone like Apple is prepared to make significant sums of money from open source code - if MS did the same, the screams would be audible in Redmond. OpenBSD for $120 has to be fair, doesn't it? Perhaps, we would all like to pay over the odds for our machines - maybe we're just tired of $35 DVD drives etc., and would much prefer to pay someone (e.g. Apple) for higher priced drives. That is exactly what we would have if Apple was in control. Apple's pursuit of dealers offering cheaper DVD drives shows how far they will go in this respect. Let's all pay Apple prices - anything cheaper must be bad, after all.

Transmeta?

[jjonte]

why not just develop their own custom hardware and throw a Crusoe chip onbaord to handle legacy code?

What about Transmeta?

[CreamsicleSeventeen]

If they could go so far as to contract their own fabs or recussitate the Alpha EV8 how might Transmeta work into these equations? That company's design philosophy harmonizes with Apple's better than Intel's or AMD's. "Code Morphing" could be very friendly to Virtual PC and legacy Mac applications too. Would an alliance between these two give Transmeta anything that might make it competetive on the high end of the performance spectrum?

Just speculating...

Re:All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your brea

[phillymjs]

I will commend Apple's recent efforts and say that they offer the most elegant package for the home user, however, they could do the same with x86 hardware.

Show me in my post where I said they couldn't. I think you were so excited about hitting "Reply" and calling me an Apple elitist, you saw things that I didn't write.

From a technical standpoint (software developer alienation issues aside), I believe Apple certainly could pull off switching to x86 from PPC. Look how seamlessly they moved from 680x0 to PPC. It would just be a bad idea to move to x86, IMHO, because Intel, etc can't keep wringing additional cycles out of it forever. The architecture is old and tired, and it's time to take it out back and shoot it. Not time for another major comptuer maker to adopt it.

Just because you can buy cheap x86 hardware does not mean that you can not build a very high quality x86 box.

I know that. I've built several PCs in the last few years, and I know that quality components can be had for reasonable prices. But I'm in the minority who is willing to pay for quality. My post, on the other hand, was railing against the majority, who expect to run Mac OS X on a $299 PC from Wal-Mart or their home-built shitbox made from components they found in the dumpster behind CompUSA.

You can't have it both ways. You can't build a system yourself for pocket change, out of components chosen by lowest price, from hundreds of different manufacturers, and have everything work 100% seamlessly. If it were possible, Microsoft would have done it by now.

~Philly

It's a fallback position

[artemis67]

Apple is just keeping their options open, they don't have a serious desire to switch. If their relationship with Motorola totally falls apart, and IBM isn't an option, then Apple has a fallback position. They don't have to scramble and spend a year or two trying to port OS X to Intel.

However, remeber OpenStep? Jobs was never terribly successful with NeXT, and determined to ride it out to the very end. He ditched the hardware and ported OpenStep to x86. Unfortunately, NeXT continued to decline; selling a shrink-wrapped OS for x86 was not the solution.

I guess it might be a viable alternative for Apple, though, in about 5 years, when most of the new apps are written in Cocoa and can be easily transferred. It would also require that Apple have a string of successful software titles that generate the bulk of their revenue, much as Microsoft has, because Apple wouldn't be able to rely on generous hardware margins anymore.

Re:Ditching X11 on Linux

[borgheron]

Start from scratch when you have a solid, time tested, standardized, network capable window system? A fool's venture.

Anyone who thinks X11 is ugly, ungainly, or problematic is probably using it incorrectly.

GJC

Nice attitude...

[dusanv]

If that indeed is Apple's attitude they will stay exactly where they are now - a 5% niche. I mean my friend built a mean dual Athlon for less money than a low end iMac. You wanna see Photoshop running on that? There are a lot of people interested in buying just the Apple's OS (whatever it costs) but not their ridiculous hardware - me being one of those. Now label me a flamebait all you want but I think Apple were greedy and stupid ten years ago (or just not wanting to conquer the PC market at all) and they still haven't learned anything.

Apple uses Office

[Bobartig]

Just like the rest of the world, they use Microsoft Office for internal documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Appleworks is not a professional level tool. It's marketed and designed towards home/school use. It can translate simple Office docs, but not Powerpoint. Additionally, the Presentation module in Appleworks lets you very quickly generate powerpoint-esque documents, but it's nowhere near as refined or powerful.

I managed to use Appleworks all throughout college (translating a few excel and word docs as necessary), maintaining my Macs with zero microsoft software, but as soon as I went to Apple, I *NEEDED* Office to work with all the docs I got.

Marketing-wize, Steve takes potshots at M$, but internally, they're a highly valued partner. M$, and more specifically, the MacBU is the second largest publisher of Mac software (a close second to Apple), they publish the defacto Productivity suite, and work very closely with Apple on a regular basis.

What porting decision?

[vonkraken]

I just went to Fry's and picked up Warcraft III. Interesting thing is that they didn't have it in the Mac section. So I happened to know that Blizzard releases for both platforms simultaeniously. I just strolled over to the 'PC' section and picked up my copy which runs just great on my PB G4. So, how hard would it be? Should be we look to Blizzard's development model for mining a lucrative vein of customers with minimal to reasonable effort and great margins? Maybe there's something in the water over there that makes them smarter than normal humans? Maybe they aren't even . . . o .. m .. g ..

Over and Out

VonKraken

This isn't just OS X they've done this for...

[Anonymous Coward]

I read this and thought... ya, so?

Why did I think that? Simple... because Apple has ported *EVERY* (major) OS to x86... the fact that it got out that Apple made OS X for x86 doesn't mean anything.

I read over most of the posts... and I didn't catch one that said Apple's done this for more OS's than just OS X.

Let it be known, this doesn't mean they will use x86 processors... just that word is out that it's been done.

I'll probably me marked off as a troll if at all, but I know this is a fact... I've beta tested Apple's OS's before... if you know what I mean.

Re:Lose Carbon & AltiVec? 3rd parties not gonn

[demon]

If Apple's done their job right, it wouldn't hard at all for them to compile the Carbon libs under x86. And then any Carbon app would run natively on x86 with a simple recompile.

Or using fat binaries. Have the compiler target both x86 and PPC architectures at the same time with a single fat binary. Apple's done it before with the 68k-to-PPC move. NeXTStep supported fat binaries, so I'm sure the infrastructure for them is there in OS X.

Processor-driven decision?

[Reziac]

The article points out that Apple is less than thrilled with Motorola's "slow rate of development" of upcoming CPUs. Occurs to me that unless Apple *does* have a credible threat of being able to jump ship to Intel/AMD, Motorola pretty well has Apple over a barrel.

Mac OS on Intel? Fuggedaboudid!

[crovira]

Why would Apple try to push into a confrontation with M$? They get far more press NOT doing it and make M$ look like the trailer-trash it is while winning a battle not fought.

Things come to Windows only once M$ finds ways to enfold and embrace (choke the originality out of,) somebody else's work.

The ONLY persons who think that M$ has a loyal customer base work at M$. These idiots conveniently forget how they themselves got to to the plate in the first place. By being cheaper that IBM.

Now Linux is cheaper than M$.

The handwriting is on the wall and the defections are entire governments and large institutions with multy-K seats.

Meanwhile, Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. They are NOT going to be drawn into as fight with anybody. Fights have winners and losers. Apple is winning by default since its not fighting.

They have much more interesting things happening than Linux can ever aspire to until the Linuxen get away from wasting energy, talent and resources fighting with M$. M$ fight dirty. They use FUD, they use lawyers, payents, collusion, coercion and tactics Tony Soprano can only wish he had the balls to try.

The best way to fight M$ is to embrace and enfold Windows and cut the fiscal legs out from M$ by even a dollar per seat. M$ has NO friends. Not in government, not in the military, not in business. They are utterly vulnerable with respect to security. They are utterly vulnerable with respect to price.

Their dirty tactics have come home to roost and clients are filing class action suits. M$ can't "divide and conquer" and screw their clients one at a time anymore.

Make a Windows work-alike GUI and M$ won't last out the decade in the computing marketplace.

Re:Mac OS on Intel? Fuggedaboudid!

[Flywheel]

The development of the PPC for Desktop has been cancelled severel times....What should Apple do if that became permanent, go for the Alpha or PA-RISC or perhaps the cheaper but continously developed x86 ??

IA64 Would be another Possibility

[herbierobinson]

IA64 would be another possible target for OS X (assuming Intel ever makes one that's fast enough to matter). It would be much better because it can be run big endian -- That would make application porting (including Carbon apps) pretty much a recompile -- Most developers wouldn't even know.

It's also a great machine for emulating other architectures (huge register set).

Re:Ditching X11 on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont know what happend to my last post ..
But all of X11 is supported 100%
I'm building and alternative inside the existing X11Server. See the screen shots at

janux.sourceforge.org

Thats netscape and gnome terminal and jedit all running side by side inside real JInternal frames.

As far as using X11 inorrectly
Thats exactly what I'm doing

dont be silly

[fferreres]

Apple makes money by selling hardware

They don't make any money selling hardware, they make money selling complete systems, the Apple way to computing.

Nobody really cares what hardware is inside the box as long as everything works and there is not uncompatibilities or special configurations like with x86 hardware.

The part that makes the hardware sales is their software and way of making computers usable and stylish.

Re:All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your brea

[fferreres]

Who says the Apple hardware doesn't cost more or less than a quality built x86? It may be indeed cheaper, but you'd be required to pay a system price (bundle price) that doesn't reflect hardware costs.

The OS and applications are the expensive, non-commody things here. Locking you to a different hardware than x86 makes sure you can't later switch to Windows if ever need.

oh, like it's SO TRUE!

[ztwilight]

Like, oh my gawd, me and Steve Jobs were hanging out at the Jaguar release party at the Palo Alto Apple store last week, and I said, "Like, Steve, are you, like, going to make Jaguar run on PC's? Like, gag me with a spoon!" and Steve said, "Well, you know how it is man. I was just looking at those PC's, I started to trip out, and I said, man, those PC's are so much faster. I was just trippin' out and stuff."

Why would they go with x86 over Itanium?

[Rudolf]

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?

Collect them all!

[phillymjs]

Moderation Totals: Flamebait=1, Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Informative=1, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=6.

Whee! All I need is "Funny" and "Troll", and I will have hit for the cycle. Will two moderators please oblige and mod my parent comment accordingly?

~Philly

marklar defined

[charnov]

marklar: A noun standing in place of any noun you have temporarily forgotten. Synonym of thingy, thingumbob, whatsit. Also may be used deliberately when the meaning is abundantly clear anyway. Derived from its use by space aliens in an episode of South Park
Example: On Marklar, everyone and every thing is referred to as marklar. We come in marklar. Take us to your marklar.

Re:Why PPC is a lower form of life

[jeff4747]

Big endian is bad? How? It's a _byte order_. It only affects performance if you have to _change between_ byte orders. If your whole system is big endian, it's fine. If your whole system is little endian, it's fine. Neither has anything to do with the _performance_ of the machine.

After all, there are plenty of SPARCs, Alphas and Power4's out there that can slaughter any x86 in performance.

(Not to mention if you reallllly want little-endian on a PPC you flip a bit in one of the control registers...it's part of why it's easy to emulate x86 on PPC)

Re:All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your brea

[Alien Being]

Apple won't go after the x86 market because MS would never agree to build "MSOffice for MacOSX x86".

In MS marketing parlance, it would be "Where the hell do you think *you're* going?"

OT: Dylan

[annodomini]

Actually, there are a decent number of dylan programmers; as many as any relatively obscure language. Look at Gwydian Dylan for an open source implementation or Functional Objects for two implementations. The key here was that they got third parties to jointly develop implementations. Although theirs was killed, Dylan lived on. Just goes to show the value of standardization. BTW, I'm a Dylan programmer, and I know several others. In fact, until recently, my college (Dartmouth) used Dylan for it's second CS class. The reason that they stopped was that they were using the older, prefix syntax, which was only supported by one aging implementation that really needed to be killed. They decided it would be easier to switch to scheme with TinyCLOS than infix Dylan.

Re:Nope.-Another reality check.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Of course, just because the port is possible doesn't mean that Apple will ever make it a product. Support for such a thing would be a nightmare given the huge number of hardware options in the x86 world. Apple is barely capable of keeping up with drivers for there exremely limited set of hardware options."

You were doing fine until you got here. First a lot of the hardware that plugs into the PCI bus on an apple is little to no different than what plugs into the PCI bus on an x86 machine. On all the *standard* buses offered the *only* issue is drivers and that's because the OS it has to interface with is different, not the hardware.

Second ALL Apple has to do is what it already does. Build a *packaged* system, just like Sun, IBM, and others have been doing for years.

Third. The hardest part for Apple is going to be redesigning the *custom* mainboard it uses.

Forth and in conclusion. Ask yourself who does driver development for Apple presently, and how's that any different than what's on the x86 side?

Hint:Your argument is a red herring nothing more.

Another 'back when'

[Cato]

Back in the days when computing revolved around IBM mainframes, Amdahl was a plug-compatible mainframe manufacturer. There was a saying that just having an Amdahl mug on your desk was worth a significant discount when the IBM salesman came calling.

I see the x86 version of MacOS X as just a bargaining chip - given the huge hassle of converting to x86, and the danger of commoditising Mac hardware, I think this is really a way of getting a better deal out of Motorola and IBM.

Re:Another 'back when'

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Back in the days when computing revolved around IBM mainframes, Amdahl was a plug-compatible mainframe manufacturer.

Still is. I worked for 'em a couple projects, the last just before Fujitsu sucked 'em in.

There was a saying that just having an Amdahl mug on your desk was worth a significant discount when the IBM salesman came calling.

B-)

I see the x86 version of MacOS X as just a bargaining chip - given the huge hassle of converting to x86, and the danger of commoditising Mac hardware, I think this is really a way of getting a better deal out of Motorola and IBM.

Sounds right to me.

A secondary goal might be to keep the rust out of the multi-platform build environment and processor-independence code, in case they ever need to port to some THIRD archetecture. Having your code working solidly cross-platform between a Power PC and something as hysterically asymmetric and other-endian as the Intel archetecture should make it a breeze to port to any other chip - or any future variant of either.

A few corrections

[0x0d0a]

Nobody said anything about emulation. A port is a native compilation, and therefore no performance hit is taken.

This is a quarter-truth. However, you're ignoring a fair number of issues:

* A port would likely be less tweaked for the architecture (run out of registers more likely, cause cache misses, whatever) for some time.

* Apple didn't port all of the MacOS to the PPC for *ages* (actually, I'm not sure the entire OS ever went native). They just ported critical chunks, and emulated less used bits. If you want to avoid emulation, you're looking at a much larger porting task in a short period of the time.

* Apple could port the OS -- but 99% of applications won't be recompiled for the x86. That means a lot of apps need to be emulated.

Furthermore, your assumption that PPC is automagically more powerful than Intel architectures is a clear indication that you are severiously under-informed.

Actually, he's right, though he simplified things a bit. The PPC has far more registers than the x86 architecture. Any emulation would involve extremely expensive swapping of registers very frequently. I'm don't remember what L1 fetch time on the x86 is, but it's at least one cycle. That means that your PPC code is going to run, at best, at half speed a fair bit of the time.

The reason the PPC could emulate the 680x0 so efficiently is because it had so many registers and didn't have to execute many instructions to handle any single 680x0 instruction. Also, the PPC was a faster chip, so running slow 680x0 code still seemed reasonably peppy to the user -- trying to port PPC code to the x86, a *competitive* line, means looking at some serious slowdown issues.

I won't go so far as to call you a newbie, but your bias suggests that you have a ways to go before you become a seasoned professional. Keep on plugging though, and try to be more open-minded. Consider doing research before forming conclusions, for example.

I think that you owe it to the parent poster to do the same yourself.

It's not OSX on a PC that I want ...

[EnglishTim]

... it's Windows on a Mac.

It would be perfect - a dual boot Mac. My reason for not buying a Mac is that when I get to the point of buying a new computer, I generally can't afford to go and buy *two* new computers - and I have enough reasons for needing to have a Windows box that I get a PC. If with my next computer purchase I could buy a Mac and dual boot it with Windows, then that would be great for me - I'd be able to try out the platform without the cutting myself off from the Windows world. And their computers are might purdy, to boot. (Although I'd have to get a mouse with a sensible amount of buttons for it... )

Re:Why would they go with x86 over Itanium?

[Flywheel]

The target has most likely been changed from x86-32 to x86-64.
The Hammer is extremely cheap even if AMD set the prise higher than they promised this spring (In the neighborhood of the Athlon) .... going for the IA64 could double the price of a Mac, IMO they pricey enough.

Those were the days

[rkit]

Once upon a time, when salesman were competent engineers, ...

what a crap.

[Otis_INF]

Sorry, but you don't know a lot about the x86 world with their OS-es. When you buy a system from, say, Dell, with OS, say, Windows XP, you get hardware and software that is thouroughly tested to work together well, on par or better than Apple's hw with their software. Where's the el cheapo x86 stuff you're referring to? Nowhere in sight.

Oh, and the Dell box with OS from a different vendor is way cheaper than the Apple solution. True, you're then not owning an Apple product, but not every person on this planet gets a woody by touching an apple keyboard.

Re:what a crap.

[phillymjs]

When you buy a system from, say, Dell, with OS, say, Windows XP, you get hardware and software that is thouroughly tested to work together well, on par or better than Apple's hw with their software. Where's the el cheapo x86 stuff you're referring to? Nowhere in sight.

Here's another brainiac so anxious to take a potshot at me for preferring Apple, that he sees something in my post that wasn't there.

Where did I mention Dell in my post? The "el cheapo x86 stuff" I was referring to, are commodity parts bought from places like CyberGuys, Directron and Access Micro, and used by the buyers to build their own PC. The 'cheap hardware idiots' are the people clamoring for the ability to run Mac OS X on such home-built, no-two-exactly-alike boxes. This is a pipe dream, and always will be. Even Microsoft can't make an OS that will run seamlessly on all of those machines, and they've been throwing money and programmers at the problem for years.

~Philly

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes no sense (sho

[nojayuk]

Another point: We are at a point where just over a year ago companies were racing to hit that magical '1.0 Ghz' mark for CPUs...and now we have CPU speeds close to 3Ghz! A question that needs to be asked, does anyone need that kind of power? I mean seriously?

Perhaps you recall Bill Gates having a new asshole surgically installed when he claimed "640k should be enough for anyone?"

Work expands to fill the resources made available to it. You say you're a gamer -- have you seen the current hardware spec required to run DOOM 3 in anything other than a limping manner? It takes more than enhanced GPU performance to model and manipulate the pocket universe most hi-reality FPS games present to the user. That's where all those clock cycles go, and that's why the speed race is continuing. Unfortunately for Apple, they hitched their wagon to PPC architecture a while back, and the wheels have fallen off. Their only solution, I think, would be to licence the PPC architecture and commission their own G5/G6 designs, but this would cost serious time (two years, maybe three) and money (at least a billion, maybe two). Apple users tend to be rich types but even they might cough at having to pay an extra five hundred bucks per box because the cost of the new CPUs has gone waaaay up.

I could easily believe Apple have a small project team whose job it is to make ports of OS/X to target x86 hardware *just in case*. The current G4s are only made in a couple of fabs; bad luck or an Enron could leave Apple with lotsa boxes and no CPUs to install in them. That doesn't mean that they would ever release an x86 port unless they really really had to, to save the company.

Re:All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your brea

[toddhisattva]

My $1500 'cheap hardware' PeeCee smoked out after just two years. My $2500 main Mac is seven years old.

If they weren't so stupid, the 'cheap hardware' idiots would realize they are comparing a disposable Bic to a Zippo.

And, that PeeCee would not run Linux until I painfully admitted that AMD is shit. My Mac offered more OS choices.

To stay on PeeCee for seven years means replacing it 3 times.

Of course, most of these 'cheap hardware idiots' aren't much more than seven years old themselves.

Re:Remember--Microsoft is an Apple Investor...

[toddhisattva]

lol, microsoft has never bailed apple out of anything, and the event you're thinking of isn't a bailout, unless you think that paying $150m to a company that could afford to spend $400m on next counts as a bailout. Conceivably yes since /.ers have no grasp of finance.

It's the New Accounting pioneered by Arthur Andersen and used so successfully by Enron.

Microsoft actually has paid liars in public forums like this spreading these obviously ridiculous analyses. We've just witnessed some of this "astro-turfing," or its result.

i told you so....

[mydigitalself]

so i write this and you will note the very dismissive response by Frymaster.

i think it makes a lot of sense because it will allow apple to make money (like microsoft do) off selling software rather than boxes. everyone knows that the margins in pc manufacturing a miniscule and that heavy competition has driven the prices down immensely - which doesn't quite happen with apple.

i appreciate the fact that hardware compatability could become an issue - but then you take the BeOS approach by having a limited list of supported video cards and network devices. that way, people who want to run OSX on an i386 can put one together using supported hardware.

quite frankly, i'm very excited about this prospect.

As a wannabe Apple customer

[Ilgaz]

Its simple... I have plans for 2 months to move to apple, if they use that x86 thing (not calling it names), I'll buy an AMD and stay.

It would be the worst wrong thing ever done on IT history. I want to move to Apple since I started to hate this Wintel thing, linux fight etc...

I will be so glad....

[leereyno]

When Apple finally dies. I won't have to put up with idiots trying to tell me that the Mac is better than the PC. Any grounds for such an argument ceased to exist a long time ago. I know, I've owned several macs and I got sick and tired of the performance, instability, and severe lack of software that was available for it.

The truth is that the Mac freaks simply have an emotional attachment to the architecture and/or the company and are trying to justify it with excuses that passed the criteria for being bullshit a long, long time ago. They're like creationist apologists who have been painted into a corner by their own religion and the progress of science. They don't have a leg to stand on, but that doesn't mean they won't still pretend otherwise. But then again no one else cares except while harrassed by one of them. The Macintosh isn't a computer, its a cult. For a cult, the church of the one true computer doesn't have much to offer. Where are the sex orgies? I mean if I was going to stick my head up my ass far enough that I wanted to join a cult, you can be damned sure it would be one where sex orgies with teenaged girls in cheerleader outfits was an everyday event. You mean I'm supposed to worship Steve Jobs? Right........

I personally don't give a rat's ass what computer anyone else uses. I just don't care because it does not affect me. What does affect me are prissy condescending assholes, who know about as much about computers as I do about the social customs of Mongolians, trying to tell ME that a second rate has-been platform is somehow better than a standard PC.

Maybe once Apple has finally bit the dust these cretins will go craw in a hole someplace and leave the rest of us alone. I'll probably have a T-Shirt made that had the apple logo with R.I.P. below it in big black letters.

Re:I will be so glad....

[TheBillGates]

You obviously have not played with OSX. I was a die-hard PC fantatic who was hired by my college to do Mac support.

Yes, I absolutely hated Macs. But when OSX came out I changed my tune. OSX is much more reliable than OS9 and Windows.

And talk about fast load times: Powerpoint loads in about 7 seconds. The hellacious caching they are doing in OS 10.2 makes reloading PowerPOint down to 4 seconds. Try doinng that on a PC!

Don't knock it until you've tried it......

Carbon is part of QuickTime for Windows

[yerricde]

Carbon is not part of Marklar.

No, but there's no reason for that to be true. Carbon is almost precisely the subset of Mac Toolbox that was included in QuickTime for Windows. Yes, Apple wrote a Mac source compatibility layer to port its media layer.

x86 Mac OS X spotted...

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work at Apple and a friend of mine who worked with me was involved with design and started to help out the part of the team responsible for Mac OS X system graphics. He told me that a few times when he went into the X teams offices they were using little VAIO laptops and would slam them shut and refuse to talk about what was on them. We always thought it was X for x86 but not sure until he got a small eyefull of the VAIO open one day. He swears it was Mac OS X running on the VAIO. Also some team members would act funny when queried about x86 and OSX. I for one, am a firm believer that they have the software. I mean, Rhapsody was to include the capability of compiling for x86 (at least the apps). Open/NextStep had it... Darwin has it, BSD has it... I mean WTF, why would are fearless one trick pony (Steve Jobs) changs his game now?

The real question, is WILL it ever ship? NO, I fucking doubt it.

Moderators who I know are going to give me a 1, can suck it.

The act of flogging a deceased equine

[keith_veleba]

...is what you guys are doing now. I'll flog it one more time.

Think different, for a moment, will you all?

1) Apple is a hardware company, plain and simple. OSX just helps them sell hardware.

2) OSX on Intel or AMD will run on Apple's hardware only. (Personally, I'd like to see a new Power Mac based on AMD's forthcoming SledgeHammer chip)

3) Apple continues to survive due to relentless pursuit to making the best products they can. They have capitalized for years on the shortcomings of Windows and commodity PC hardware. Why would they want to throw themselves at the wolves of the existing PC market? OSX on current PC hardware means supporting all the bad design decisions and bugs PC hardware designers have had to make over the years. Supporting the existing PC market is the worst bad idea in the history of bad ideas.

Bad move to switch from PowerPC to x86

[Anonymous Coward]

If Apple migrates to a PC platform then why even
bother being a PC manufacturer? I believe each
platform has it's nich. And a powerpc processor
is pretty cool! I have both platforms and I run
Linux on Both! I do think the speed of a PowerPC
processor is more effecient than the x86 platform.
By effecient I mean you get more done per clock cycle. My G3 is pretty quick, My Presario 1.3Ghz
AMD box with DDR ram is quicker, but the G3 has
a slower clock speed but does pretty well.

Re:Why Mac OS X on PC platform makes no sense (sho

[PythonOrRuby]

I don't know. I think if Apple were to go down this road, it'd be a distinct product alongside PPC machines, targeted at a market that can afford to primarily use Cocoa apps.

I don't think they'd be ordering millions of CPUs, and not at one time. More likely they'd place the CPU on a daughtercard and update it to keep pace with the rest of the x86 world.

On the other hand...

[mblase]

Apple is currently a hardware company. There's no reason they should have to stay one forever.

Think of what a fully-compatible x86 release of OS X could mean for Apple: massive consumer adoption. A new copy of WinXP costs $200, but a new copy of Jaguar costs $70 less. Apple gets to benefit from the "Megahertz Myth" instantly as non-techy computer buyers run their OS on 2.4GHz Pentiums. Consumers who honestly don't care about getting the latest games for their PC can be convinced that all the commercial software they really want is OS X compatible, and get a good package bundle to prove it.

And of course, this only means Apple gets out of the hardware business if they refuse to make Apple computers with x86 processors. They can do that, you know, and people who have come to trust in Apple's reliable hardware and slick design (think the hinged door which you can open while the computer is still running, not to mention the G4's unique external style) will continue to buy Apple's computers, knowing that any Apple software will be designed to work first and best on Apple machines and Apple drives.

At least half the reason Apple hasn't switched to PC hardware is the gazillions of configurations they'd have to support, something even Microsoft has trouble keeping up with. But if OS X gets widespread, or at least wider spread, Apple can start to count on third-party vendors developing the drivers themselves, just as Microsoft does.

Apple will lose money from the hardware, of course. But it's possible that the widespread adoption of a new, more usable Mac OS will be worth it to them.

OS X is NOT based on FreeBSD!

[Builder]

Damn, I'm tired of hearing that OS X is based on FreeBSD. This is just not true. One very small part of OS X is based on a fork of FreeBSD, but that is only one part. Not even the kernel is FreeBSD.

Getting Quartz to run on another platform with the performance that it currently delivers would be a non-trivial task!

For anyone who actually gives a damn about accuracy, check out the architecture diagram at developer.apple.com/macosx for more information.

Re:All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your brea

[Erich]

How outspoken and incorrect you are!

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

Re:All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your brea

[phillymjs]

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

CISC/RISC

[ehiris]

They ported a x86 OS to Apple hardware and now they are porting it back.

Does this mean that the RISC/CISC battle is over with CISC winning?

Other then that, it would be nice to have an user friendly Unix based modular OS for x86.

Re:CISC/RISC

[Tune]

> Does this mean that the RISC/CISC battle is over with CISC winning? ...Or does it mean that contemporary Operation Systems are becoming more and more architecture independent? (...And this might kill Microsoft, eventually...)

Anyway, hasn't the RISC/CISC-war been fought through hardware marketing rather than software all along?

If I had a beer...

[Orbital Sander]

... for every time someone describes the relation between Apple and either IBM or Motorola as 'strained', I would have no liver.

I'll believe it..

[Suppafly]

I'll believe it when I can download it from IRC.

Fat binaries

[rweir]

One interesting thing about OS X is that it supports 'fat binaries', which are binary files that contain executables for different architectures. If Apple ever releases OS X for Intel, and it's source compatible with OS X for PPC, developers can ship a CD with their app compiled for both architectures, and it will Just Work(tm) on whichever platform. Sure, it's a waste of space, but disk is cheap and convenience is king.

Hardware

[SkewlD00d]

Apple could get on the ball and make a line of sleek, pimpy PCs, pre-loaded with OS X interchangeable with commodity hardware (remember Macs, LOL), and they could use any chips they want, Transmeta, Amd, Intel, Motorola, MediaGX, etc. That way, they leverage against the chip mfgrs by having multiple vendors.

Mot and Apple

[real gumby]

as Apple's relationship with Motorola has grown strained and Apple looks to alternative chip makers.

Silly eWeek. Sure "Apple" has such a port -- "they'd" be dumb not to. It's not like they're a monolithic entity; any engineering organization worth its salt would have one in case management needed to move that way.

And as for Mot: Motorola semiconductor is for sale, and more importantly Motorola's original PowerPC license expired about a year ago. Jumping to another mfr is a good idea, and IBM's the only game in town.

This whole article is a "yes, but..."

no problem with linux kernel on Mac

[axxackall]

Kernel problems? What are you talking about?

I've installed YDL 2.X and had all hardware modules you've mentioned above either automatically loaded or after just a couple of commands. Without recompilation - out of the box. Dual-head? Well, at least it was not more complicated than on PC. Although, I agree, Linux/PPC installation and configuration is not for housewives (except ones with smart hasbands), yet. But it's already usable by housewives. And it should already meet expectations of corporate IT personnel. It's perfectly managed remotely, it's secure (hack-proof) and safe (fool-proof).

I agree, that Linux/PPC user have problems with commercial applications. And sometimes it is not acceptable. But not all times. People in our company use GIMP for graphic UI mockups and similar tasks. And they use Open Office for all typicall office document work, connecting to M$ Office users without major problems. And that saves a lot of $$. Well, most of users and all servers use PC (win2k), but some use Mac (OS 9). After MSFT decided to milk money on license fees, we've decided to go with Linux. And Linux/PPC might be a good way to make a desktop and an application set of Mac users unified with PC users. Besides, it will integrate better with Linux servers (I hate Apple proprietary network protocols).

Give just another year for Linux (all platforms in general) and it will surpass both Windows AND Mc OS X in end-user usability, inlcuding installation and configuration. One year ago I had problems with M$ Office files and Java, both KDE and GNOME were unusable and unstable, Mozilla was just out of control. USB, Firewire, DV, SANE, *Pilot - it was a beta. Linux was the platform for servers. Things have been chenged. And they are changing right now. GNOME 2 , Mozilla 1.x, Office v1, USB, Firewire, DV, SANE , jPilot - the application set is basically completed. The last set of details for a home user is in self-configuration improvement and for a corp user is RBAC. And we know that people are working on it. One year and the desktop market will be shaken again. By OS which works for end-users same way on PC and PPC (and on Alpha and on Sparc).

OK. We know that hardware self-configuration is not gonna be a problem in Linux, eventually. How about RBAC? Mac OS X is not better than Linux/PPC either. What Mac OS X has left to compete with Linux/PPC? Aqua and a commercial application support.

Aqua is not a threat for GNOME 2. I've shown both Aqua and GNOME 2 to non-technical win32 users and they found both same usable. Personally I think that Aqua is a buzz only for Mac OS 9 users to move to Mac OS X. Win32 already saw win2k and XP. GUI tricks in GNOME and Aqua are just new themes for them.

Commercial application support is not a need for an average computer user. No commercial application in exchange to robust open source equal applications? Even better - no fee, good for budget. Commercial games? It's not a question to arise in corps. And a home users did not have enough commercial games for Mac either - most of commercial games are for PC, check yourself in the closest store. There are some commercial games for Mac OS (X?), but there some games for Linux/PPC as well.

Big Endian Says:

[slowtonejoe75]

I can dig little endians. I 'll write my own drivers thank you.

Apple and Palladium

[RobertFisher]

Even if Apple ever were to switch to making x86-based Macs (and you, the reader, are significantly more likely to bang Anna Kournikova than to see an x86-based Mac for sale), they would put something proprietary in those machines, maybe even in every component of those machines, and change the Mac OS to refuse to boot if it doesn't detect that proprietary something.

The "dongle" which some posters have referred to is already in development -- it is called Palladium. In principle, if MS does indeed open the specifications to Palladium, and if Palladium turns out to be a workably secure platform (two big assumptions, which we will make for the sake of argument), Apple could in principle authorize their x86-based OS only on Apple hardware. Somone going out and buying a cheap generic Intel box would not be able to run the Mac OS on it. This would allow Apple to bundle an x86-based hardware box with their OS, while still maintaining a large profit margin. In addition, although the /. crowd may not like to admit the possibility, Palladium DRM may turn out to be quite successful, and may indeed be the only way to (legally) download media from the major media providers in a few years. Running an x86-Mac OS, Palladium-enabled box, will allow Apple to dodge the DRM bullet (more like a cannon shot) as well.

Perhaps Anna will need to prepare for a big /. gangbang...

Bob

Why *parts* of Mac OS X on x86 makes sense

[Saint Fnordius]

Instead of becoming a full-widget PC architecture, Apple may be playing with strengthening the open source Unix derivatives like *BSD and Linux with partial ports and APIs. Why would they do this?

It's all about getting more developers into the boat. If they write their apps on Mac OS X, then Apple could be promising them a painless port to BSD and Linux. That way, they can also suggest that Windows is less important (more apps for Linux helps weaken Microsoft's biggest lever).

I think Apple would *love* to see Linux/BSD win on the x86 front. Then they can compete on the merits of their widgets, and worry less about fighting Windows software lock-in (and let's be honest: that's what scares a lot of people away from Apple).

Palladium

[X-rated Ouroboros]

Apple sells the experience of using tightly-integrated hardware and software. They can't do that if they suddenly have to make sure their software will work with every home-built x86 whitebox on the face of the earth.

Who says they have to? I don't call up Compaq, HP, Dell, Gateway, etc. whenever I have a problem with my box of $5 flaming shit. Why? because I didn't buy my computer from them, and have no reason to expect support from them. Apple could put a similar kind of caveat on a publically available OSX86. If you haven't bought one of their computers you get no guarantee, no warrantee, and no support... from them, anyway. I'm sure other companies would pop up to fill the service void.

What Apple does is something that Microsoft can never do, unless they start selling their own brand of computers and restrict Windows to only run on Microsoft PCs.

Oh... you mean like Palladium?
Even so, I still like the idea posted by another user pointing out that they (Apple) could start from scratch with an x86 motherboard w/o all the mistakes and legacy of the past. THAT would be nice.

Remember OS/2 for x86?

[capmilk]

Yeah, exactly.

Re:All the 'cheap hardware' idiots, save your brea

[sql*kitten]

Personally, I think Apple will,very soon, tell Motorola to go piss up a rope (and I say, it's about time!).

Well, if Apple hadn't screwed Motorola on the whole Mac-clone issue, they'd be a lot friendlier today. What goes around, comes around.

Don't Get Your Hopes Up

[kalidasa]

Just because Apple has an OS X port for x86 hardware, that doesn't mean that it works on more than just their reference hardware. See http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/1. 4/x86_install_notes.txt , the install notes for Darwin for x86:

IDE:
Only the PIIX4 IDE controllers have been found to work.
Attached devices must be UDMA/33 compatible or better.

Ethernet:
Intel 8255x 10/100 ethernet controllers are supported.

Video:
You must have a VESA 2.0 compliant video card. Almost all modern graphics cards are VESA 2.0 compliant. However, emulators such as vmware do not have VESA 2.0 compliant emulated video cards.

Successfully tested hardware:
All 440BX motherboards tested have worked with their internal IDE controllers.
IBM ThinkPad A21m (with onboard Intel ethernet)

Known to not be supported:
All AMD and VIA based systems.

I would imagine that any version of OS X for x86 has only been tested on the supported hardware. This does not an x86 product make. Apple is just letting Motorola know that if they have to make the switch, they can.

Moderators on slashdot are biased

[geekee]

Yet another example of poor moderation on slashdot. I get called a troll for posting a dissenting opinion.

Re:Nope.-Another reality check.

[antijava]

Yes, the lack of driver support would be the problem. It doesn't matter that Apple has a standard PCI bus. There are hundreds of standard PCI cards on the market that I can't use on my Mac due to lack of drivers.

Apple does a majority of the driver development themselves, since most vendors honestly don't care enough to make OS X drivers. In the WinTel side of the world, the vendors DO care enough about Windows support to write the drivers. So, drivers are not Microsoft's responsility.

I with 3rd parties cared more about OS X. I would love to be able to buy any PCI card on the shelf at CompUSA and have some hope of using it in a Mac. After all, the hardware is compatible...it's just a matter of software.

Office

[Hugonz]

They're really waiting for Star/Open(Office ) to catch fire. That way they can compete with Windows (and beat the crap out of M$) without fearing retaliation.

Hugo

Wait just one momment please

[Orion Blastar]

didn't Next made an "OpenStep" that they shared with HP and Sun and others? Whatever happened to it? Hello?

Why doesn't Apple just made Aqua a KDE or GNOME type of program that loads over X-Windows in Linux, OpenBSD and others? Add in a Carbon library and more, and then that GCC compiler to make OSX binaries, and there you have it!