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Apple Secretly Maintaining x86 Port Of Mac OS X
Earlybird writes "According to this eWeek article, Apple has ported the whole of Mac OS X to the x86 architecture and is maintaining it in parallel with the PowerPC builds. Dubbed Marklar, the project is perceived as a fall-back plan, and, quoth the article, 'has apparently gained strategic relevance in recent months, as Apple's relationship with Motorola has grown strained and Apple looks to alternative chip makers.'" Believe what you will ...
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
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.
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.
.09 (Or is it .06?) micron fab IBM just built that'll produce the next generation of Apple chip.
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
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Hello.. please stop staring at your cock, and please in future read posts before you attack the poster.
;;winces, hits submit;;
Furthermore, your assumption that PPC is automagically more powerful than Intel architectures is a clear indication that you are severiously under-informed.
Note that the poster you responded to never said the PPC was more powerful than intel. They referenced the fact that when apple changed from 68k to PPC hardware, they included an emulator so that legacy apps could be run on PowerPC computers. The emulation he referred to was for third party apps which have yet to be recompiled, not for the ported OS.
All the original poster said was that while it was no big deal to emulate the 68k on the vastly more powerful PPC, emulating a PPC on an x86 would be not so easy, as x86 and PPC are roughly equal. I am not able to see where your rediculous ad hominem attack comes from. They did not even advocate PPC as more powerful than x86.
That being said, it would indeed be extremely difficult to emulate PPC on the x86! This is simply because of the way the chips are designed. The PPC is RISC; it has simple instructions and lots of registers; the x86 is CISC; has few registers and complex instructions. RISC is not necessarily better or worse than CISC, and the x86 is not necessarily better or worse than the PPC. However, it is generally well-known and accepted fact that it is easier to write an emulator that runs on a RISC machine than a CISC one, and it is quite obvious to anyone who is familiar with the emulation scene that the PPC and x86 are good at different things, and one of the things that the PPC really shines at is emulation.
This will become blatantly obvious if you consider that there are multiple, at least three, separately developed programs-- one of which is open source-- which emulate an x86 PC on a PPC Macintosh. There are, however, no extant PPC Macintosh emulators for the x86 PC. None. And it isn't for want of trying; you can see here that there have been a number of macintosh emulators for the PC, just that none of them have done PPC emulation, only 68k. There have been many attempts to emulate the PPC on the x86, it is just that they have all come to nothing-- becuase the architecture of the two machines is simply such that it is relatively easy to emulate x86 on PPC and relatively extremely difficult to emulate PPC on x86.
I suspect i am responding to a troll. I really ought to submit this as AC. Oh well..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Back when PC boards were designed with red, blue, and black tape on mylar sheets, and UARTs were the cutting edge, there were two vendors of UARTs who had somewhat different designs. A small manufacturer of terminals had designed for one of 'em. But they were new and cutting edge, and the plant capacity was limited. So the vendor was being obstinate about giving them sufficient allocation to make their production targets.
Well the alternative chip was about the same side and functionality but had different pinout. And there was some extra room on the board. So a few days before the salesman was due to visit they hauled out the mylar master for the PC board, laid out the pad pattern of the alternate chip, and started taping up something that looked like reasonable circuitry.
Sure enough, the salesman saw the work in progress, concluded that the terminal was being designed so it could be built with either UART, and paniced. After that there was never a problem getting allocation.
I think the circuitry was never finished and tested. The pads made it onto the final PC board (no point in ripping the tape back off the master) but weren't even dirlled (at 1/2 cent per hole per board). And they came to be known as "The Blackmail Pads". B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Of course Apple have a x86 port of OS X. They want to keep their options open, and even if they don't move to x86 they will benefit by having an operating system that is already portable between architectures.
/Applications /DVD Player.app /Contents /Frameworks /DVDPlayback.framework /Versions /A /DVDPlayback | less "
l ePIVSupport
As for the evidence - it you do a "strings
(i've added spaces before each "/" to keep slashdot happy - you need to take them out again!)
Now, search for "Debug", and look at the three next lines:
DisablePIIISupport
DisableATHLONSupport
Disab
Now why would Apple's DVD Player have code concerning itself with PIII's, P4's and Athlons if they didn't have a version which ran on those chips???
Personally, I don't see Apple making the switch, but they've survived by surprising us time and time again...
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