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Intel's Itanium Will Get x86 Emulation
pissoncutler writes "Intel has announced that they will be releasing a software emulation product to allow 32-bit x86 apps to run on Itanium Processors.
According to these stories (story 1, story 2), the emulator is capable of the x86 performance of a 1.5Ghz Xeon (when run on a similar speed Itanium.) Who said that no one cared about x86 anymore?"
I haven't seen enough info on the new IBM PowerPC 970 CPU expected shorty.
watch who you're calling shorty, farm boy.
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
http://www.macslash.org/comments.pl?sid=03/04/23/1 82250&cid=3
First off, the disclaimer: this is my pet theory, i.e., a total, wild, pulled-of-out-my-*ss speculation, okay. I have no inside info or contact with people who might know this, but here is my speculation of why this AMD thing keeps coming up despite the fact that the use of the IBM 970 is almost a certainty.
Put this AMD thing into a bigger context of recent events.
We've heard that 10.3 will include a more integrated Classic environment where Classic Mac OS apps will be given many of the benefits of Aqua.
Apple quietly releases their implementation of XWindows system, X11. Despite the fact that this news set Slashdot buzzing for days on end and probably should have had some mention from Steve Jobs in the keynote he'd given a few days prior, it was released very quietly. Interesting.
Next, the somewhat unexpected news that Microsoft was buying Virtual PC. What on earth could Microsoft want with VPC? We can speculate that they want greater control over emulation of Windows on the Mac, but that sounds weak. They still control the operating system that gets installed on VPC so from that perspective they've gained nothing by buying out VPC.
And then these weird, peristent, inexplicable rumors that Apple is in talks with AMD about something or other. Who knows what. It's very doubtful that it's about a chip that would replace the PPC since we've read many, many well-informed examinations of such a move and the technical hurdles would likely ruin Apple.
So what could all this possibly point to? Apple has given us a system that can basically run software from three different operating systems: the classic Mac OS, Mas OS X (the Next OS), and Unix. They recently brought the Unix world closer with the release of X11. Wouldn't it be amazing if hardware in the near-future included an "add-on" chip (something like Altivec that works in conjuction with the PPC processor) that emulated the x86 hardware? Maybe it would give Mac users the ability to run Windows and PC software, not via software emulation, but with hardware assistance. Imagine the interest Apple could draw if they presented the world with a machine that runs the Classic, OS X, Unix and Windows applications... all in one environment and almost seamlessly.
Now does Microsoft buying VPC make sense? Maybe? Maybe not. Maybe MS Mac Business Unit caught wind of this and wants to one-up Apple somehow. Any thoughts?
AMD would be a likely partner is such a move since one could imagine the problems with Intel assisting Apple with this. If it was popular, Intel would be killing their own business. AMD, on the other hand, wouldn't, if I understand the situation correctly.
Anyway... like I said... wild speculation, but that's what all this says to me.
If Apple can control the hardware on which it will run, an Opteron doesn't seem too out of the question. Running an opteron != Apple on PC board/hardware.
The party's over
If Apple starts producing AMD based systems, which I doubt will happen, don't expect an open architecture. You can bet that there will be proprietary elements to the platform and OS/X won't run on commodity x86 hardware.
If we do, I think it would probably be only for a brief transition period, like when they switched from the 68K line of processors to PPC. But who knows. I really hope they don't switch to AMD, that would make people less inclined to write software that is still compatible with the PPC architecture I own (assuming they don't make binaries compatible with both... i don't think they can, can they?).
today is spelling optional day.
Seriously though, it's leaner than Win2k, and most services are turned off, so it's a worthwhile desktop upgrade: especially since MS won't go after individuals using it as a desktop with the BSA Stasi.
Am I missing something? After extensive discussions/explanations on Slashdot and all of the Mac sites, why do some people still think MacOS will ever be released for the x86 platform?
The story missed a major source of information about the 970 directly from IBM:
PowerPC 970 2002 Microprocessor Forum presentation
This contains a link to IBM Senior PowerPC Architect Peter Sandon's detailed presentation in PDF format.
Please mod story as (-1, Flamebait).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For those of us wanting to get away from Windows, but feel Linux is still not ready for the desktop yet, this might make Apple a more viable alternative.
You forgot "and have the extra cash". Lets face it. The only reason I haven't gotten myself an iMac, is because I don't have the extra grand or so to buy one.
Now if AMD jumps into the mix, things may get interesting...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Me and a few friends have long held the belief that Apple releasing OS/X for the x86 platform would KILL Apple. Unlike Microsoft, Apple's 'coin' is their hardware platform, rather than software. The software is just there to sell the hardware. If they released OS/X for x86, then their hardware sales would plummet.
:) But... that's still 'talks', isn't it? :)
Yes, they could make some money off selling OS/X. However, they would then have to become MUCH more interested in ensuring their software is not being pirated, and that means some kind of DRM. A lot of folk love Apple because of their anti-DRM stance, and a lot of that love would disappeaer if Apple went down this route. As it is, Apple don't seem THAT concerned about piracy of their software, instead relying on those that want to 'do the Right Thing' with Apple, which is a fair percentage of their user base.
Instead, this is my theory on the Apple/AMD relationship, if there is one.
- It would be STUPID of Apple to rely on a single-source for their new processors, so, who better than to ask as a 'second source' than AMD? Yes, I'm sure Apple/IBM will get a leetle percentage out of all the chips that AMD make, but I'd bet my dollars that's what's going on.
Of course, the other possiblity is that AMD HAD talks with Apple, and they consisted of "Hey, lets go do lunch." "No."
It's not exactly Mac OS X, but it's the Darwin core -- http://www.gnu-darwin.org.
Apple did make an "x86-compatible" Mac a few years back, I think it had a 486 chip alongside the PPC (or even 040?) I don't remember too much about this, I think it worked by pressing Cmd-return, at which point it would switch to the 486, while maintaining state on the PPC. Essentially like the Orange Micro PC compatibility cards they used to make. (NuBus what!)
I'd love to see an Apple/AMD collaboration, either a licensed port of the whole Mac OS X to x86 architecture, or a dual-processor machine. It'd be pretty badass.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
What's more, the PPC 970 is not shrouded in secret, (at least from an apple hardware point of view) If you think the 970 is shrouded in secret and is vaporware, I wonder what you think of the Moto G5.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I am a little ignorant on this, so please enlighten me. Can instructions for the PowerPC 970 be migrated to the Power4 chips without too much trouble? The point being, is there the prospect that Apple will put the Power4s in some new, really high end Xserves?
If so, that could let Apple break out of just the 1U market and compete with 2U and 4U servers with more than just two processors.
Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant. The population is growing.
but feel Linux is still not ready for the desktop yet...
Why do we have to have a story about "MacOS on x86" every few months on Slashdot?!
-psy
Most people are of course not interested in doing that. Nor should they be.
...because Apple would be like Microsoft if they had the marketshare. In fact, worse: try doing anything to Apple hardware or software (excluding the open kernel) and see count the hours until the C&D nastygram.
Remember, Motorola didn't even release the PowerPC 7400 (G4), much less any information about it, until apple introduced the Power Mac G4. Does that mean it didn't exist?
Apple probably can't play those same kind of "keep it secret until we announce our product" games with IBM, but keep in mind the only thing IBM has really done was introduce the concept for the processor at MPF. Judging from how Apple has rolled out new processors in the past, it wouldn't be surprising to find if further information about the 970 is being withheld at Apple's request (Apple being a potentially huge customer for this chip).
Also, remember that before CeBIT, IBM posted press releases on its German site talking about 970, the fact that it featured AltiVec, and how IBM was going to be demoing several 970-based blade servers at CeBIT. The press release suddenly got pulled and there was no further information about the 970 from IBM.
One way this could be interpreted is that the 970 is vaporware.
The more likely scenario, however, based on how apple has done releases of new processors in the past, including several iterations of the 7400 family, is that more information is being withheld until Apple releases a system featuring this processor. Then the floodgates will open.
The only reason we may know anything of it at all is that IBM felt it fundamentally important enough to present at MPF - we haven't heard a peep since.
My guess is that if Apple starts using AMD chips for anything it would be for a server product where you don't need high end graphics, just fast data schlepping.
So Apple says this is the year of the laptop, right? If I'm not mistaken, AMD chips run hotter than just about anything out there. So who wants a laptop with 15 minutes of laptop life and the capability of burning your wang to a small, blackened stump of carbon (or for the ladies a sizzling fajita)?
Besides, are they or any of the Mac software vendors going to support two versions of their Mac products? No.
The most recent article linked in the post is Feb 27. While I am looking forward to the enhanced Mac performance that the 970 promises, this doesn't bring any new information to the table.
This was posted yesterday: again rumors for Apple//AMD.
Linked to The Register article.
Animoog.org
Does nobody remember that both AMD and Apple sit on the consortium for Hypertransport? If you look at Apples current lagging hardware specs you'll see a need for two things. A faster Bus and a faster CPU.
AMD == Hypertransport && IBM == P970
While it's extremely unlikely that Apple would pursue two completely different platforms at the same time, I think we would be most likely to see different processors in different markets, i.e. the 970 in the consumer line, the Opteron in the server line, or some division like that.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Define "lucky". You mean, not only having to find Mac software, but now having to find software for your particular Mac platform? appleppc.slashdot.org along with appleamd.slashdot.org? Developers throwing up their hands in disgust and walking away when confronted with a platform redesign two years after the last one? Sounds lucky to me.
Seriously, give whatever Jobs has up his sleeve a chance. If he wants a decent PowerPC chip, he'll get one.
Not everyone wants to roll up their sleeves and start coding just to use "desktop" software. There *are* people out there who just need to write documents/work on spreadsheets/balance their checkbook, and not all of them share the Open Source agenda: do you really think they all ought to participate in Open Source, instead of just switching to some OS they feel suits them better ?
Apple has heavily optimized OS X and the so-called iLife apps (iTunes, iPhoto, etc.) for AltiVec, the special vector instruction set that the G4 has. That's why OS X runs much more nicely on G4's (which have AltiVec) than on G3's (which don't). The reason all the buzz started about Apple migrating new Macs to the 64-bit IBM chips in the first place was that IBM introduced AltiVec workalike instructions for their new chips, so Apple could move up without sacrificing the AltiVec optimizations. Moving to x86-ish hardware would mean that they'd lose all the AltiVec optimizations they've made, so it seems unlikely to me.
x86-64.
There's a difference. You won't be able to run OSX on Intel chips, nly high end AMD chips (Opteron).
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
ScienceSeeker.org
Come on, don't hide behind "not ready yet". Just spit it out: "I don't like the Linux desktops". Now, that wasn't too hard, was it?
That's fine, I don't like the OS X or Windows desktops either. That's why they make so many different kinds. But let's not pretend that there is a single desktop that is oh-so-much-better for everybody than any of the others.
Your statement makes about as much sense as saying that "vanilla ice cream isn't ready yet for the kids of America, but strawberry, which is clearly so much better, is too expensive".
Do you think these spreadsheet and checkbook balancers even use Linux at this point?
Seriously, who are you talking about?
The Huge Future Apple CPU Thread. A very informative read focusing on the PPC 970, 980, and Moto 7457.
I hope you die painfully and alone.
Motorola's 5th generation of PowerPC host processors - the "G5" - have been shipping for quite some time.
They're just not at all interested in the desktop market anymore.
I think everyone(*) is anxious for Apple to jump ahead in the GHz game. Considering how fast the Intel/AMD folks are cranking up the chips, it feels like we're being left behind.
We can talk until the cows come home about how CISC/Hybrid MHz are not RISC MHz, but the fact is we all want our machines to be faster. Even if they're already really, really fast.
But I can't see Apple making a transition to a platform that's not binary-compatible with PPC. It was painful enough when they went from 68xxx to PPC, and then to force everyone to buy all their applications again with the transition from OS 8/9 to OS X.
To do it again, within a year or two of the last major transition, would be disastrous. While I'm sure the software companies wouldn't much mind forcing everyone to buy a new version of all of their applications, how many users would put up with this? How long would people wait for Photoshop 8?
(* at least all the Apple users, and maybe a fair number of Unix/BSD users)
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
It is certainly possible that we will see Mac OS X on x86 at some point in the future. It is another question, however, if Mac OS X x86 will be able to run on any x86 hardware and not just proprietary hardware from Apple.
It is rumored that Apple do currently have Mac OS X running on x86 in the form of project Marklar and that it is kept up-to-date with the PPC version. It is also true that NeXTStep ran on 68K, x86, Sparc and PA-RISC so this shows that the Mac OS X team is likely to capability to easily port this software.
I suppose all we can do is wait and see...
For Apple to run OS X (or it's descendants) on Apple branded computers, they would have to create serious confusion and frustration among Apple users. Apple users don't want to think about "what processor version installer should I run." Sure there are so-called fat binaries that include binary code for multiple platforms, just as Apple used when transitioning between Motorola 680x0 (aka 68K) processors and PowerPC processors. However, that was a one way transition. People knew that PPC was the future or all Apple as well as an upgrade. PowerPC processors could run 680x0 code through emulation quite well with no user intervention. With a transition to x86, however, Apple would have a huge problem with backwards compatability for existing applications. PowerPC emulators are in the works for x86 (actually, at least one will work on most modern architectures), but believe me, they are not an acceptable solution for production use - especially among most Mac users.
Using two simultaneous platforms is a big problem for sales and developer relations. Which is better? Why even bother with the other platform then? Or, why is the new platform so much better yet it has little available software? Why bother porting to the second platform when sales are sluggish on that platform? Then existing customers get angry. Why is my platform being abandonned? New customers feel the same if the gamble doesn't pay off and gets killed. The only partial exception is if one platform does not substitute for the other, say appliances vs. desktops and servers. Think Sun's purchase of Cobalt.
linux desktops have had "a lot of promise" for the last decade.
It's always been a case of "just wait, the next release will solve everything!". Zealots chant it as their mantra.
It's not going to happen. FOSS, by it's very nature, will never produce anything more than a patchwork clone of other desktops.
There's no technical reason that a desktop as slick as OS/X couldn't be built on top of linux the way OS/X is on top of BSD, but that kind of effort requires management and discipline. Only a corporate effort can pull that off.
In the OSS world, if you dont like the way a projects going, you go ahead in your own direction. And that's fine, after all, its unpaid hobbyists doing the work.
But in a corporate environment all the coders have to be thickskinned when their nifty super-duper new subsystem proposal gets nixed, and buckle down and get the job done. If linux desktop was a corporate project, there would be no KDE vs Gnome vs Enlightenment vs blah vs blah discussions. There would be one project.
Short of some for-profit coming in and getting it done (which I think may eventually be the case), I just cant see it happening.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Don't expect the first family of 970s to be perfect. Its a very new platform for the Mac. I suggest waiting till the second revision comes along.
Aman
Hypertransport - good point. They could be using that. Why you didn't mention it in the post is beyond me though.
AMD doesn't run incredibly hot any more - check out the Barton and Opteron chips some time.
A common claim. Unfortunately it's wrong. Athlon XP doesn't really run any hotter than Pentium 4 does for example. In fact, you coulöd say that XP runs cooler than P4 does.
For facts on this issue, go here:
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=5000036
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
sorry but apple is a hardware company not a software one. If you check there income you'll see they make very little on there OS and ilife products. If Apple came out with a new computer using an AMD chip they would be hurt drastically by those building there own apple computers instead of spending the premium in the apple store. The ibm 970 will happen, AMD might be involved but only with helping Apple on hyperthreading i think...
If apple were to officially port Mono to OSX and help build it into a robust development tool and environment then it would be possible for them to build .NET bindings for OSX that would run on both the PPC 970 and Opteron.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Not as hot as Intel's chips! Check these things out before making buffoonish statements! Just because you hear something again and again (on Slashdot), doesn't make it so!
even if Apple doesn't move to x86(which would, IMO, make them either the next M$ or dead), why can't the OSS community make a comparable variant? I mean, the whole Cocoa app structure is built to the OPENSTEP standard, with some whizbang additions. Why we start with GNUstep and make a source-compatible version using the Linux kernel? I mean, it would be fairly easy, much easier than cloning Windoze 'cause the groundwork is already done(again, GNUstep & WindowMaker).
Or, instead a bunch of wild speculation, why not realize that Apple and AMD are both a part of the HyperTransport consortium and are (presumably) both very interested in 64-bit computing on the desktop, and that:
1. One of HyperTransport's most commonly supported speeds is 6.4GB/sec;
2. Apple is desperately in need of a revamp of the entire desktop architecture, especially memory and system bus (aside from processor itself);
3. The IBM PowerPC 970 cooincidentally supports a system bus speed of 6.4GB/sec.
Doesn't the HyperTransport relationship seem a bit more logical than all this off-the-wall stuff about Marklar, Apple switching/adding processors, etc.?
this means that apple must do something drastic and something soon. but what are the alternatives?
What are you talking about? Didn't you at least read the post? Aren't you a little curious about the PPC970 and what kind of performance to expect? Why would you even write a three-paragraph post on a subject you have no clue about? I hope you're just trolling.
if MS can port windows to handhelds, why can't Apple do it?
Apple did it before anyone. Ever hear of the Newton?
Though I suppose if it were an "add-on chip" that didn't ship with Mac boxes by default, that might prevent the OS/2 syndrome. People would be less likely to rely on the Windows software running on Macs if most Macs couldn't run it.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
"Open Source requires participation; coding and community."
Does it? I don't think I have ever joined in the R-Project's mailing lists, but I use their software regularly. I know a lot of Linux users who lack the time or the skill to be kernel hackers.
You /do/ realize that most of us choose a platform that /does what we want it to/ and /works for us/ and not for religious reasons? For my purposes, Linux isn't ready for the desktop. If I joined the team, I could help it get ready, and in a matter of years, it might be with my help (it also might be without my help).
OTOH, I could just continue using my Mac and actually meet my deadlines and get my work done.
My spare time, incidentally, does go into an Open Source projects, either: The Swarm Project or Equation Service. You want me to start working on Linux now as well?
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
iBooks start at must run a Free OS, then by all means stick to them.
It looks like you never got any.
If Macs could suddenly run Windows applications (without something like VPC), why would anyone write anything except Windows apps? The big companies that now target both platforms could just drop their Mac software and tell Mac users to buy the Windows version. Companies that now specialize in the Mac market could start making Windows apps and sell to both platforms. Apple would totally lose control of the integration that has made the Mac experience what it is today. I just can't see any other reasonable result of what the poster suggests.
In short, NO.
Firstly, as everyone knows, Apple makes money off one thing, and one thing only - HARDWARE. They make great software only to sell their hardware.
The benefits of controlling the hardware are
- A better user experience
- Lower tech support costs
- Better quality control
- Specialized/customized designs with an eye toward aesthetics
They CANNOT allow others to create hardware upon which their software will run. This means that they have to use a special BIOS, and manufacture their own boards. IF they switch to an OS that can be run on an x86 processor (and custom mothboard/bios/etc), you will find, the very next day, a crack for the software which will allow it to run on any generic motherboard, and further down the line a BIOS image which will allow an unmodified software to run on a non-custom motherboard.Right now they can control it because a 'commodity' PPC motherboard costs more than the same apple motherboard. It would surprise me if Apple wasn't applying some pressure to various suppliers to prevent the widespread availability of commodity PPC equipment which is very similar to Apple's own. This is common in the industry. Furthermore, they may even have a slightly altered/customized version of the various PPC chips they use.
The only way for Apple to play against WINTEL is to not compete - not competing means selling essentially different products. Apple would die if they had to sell their OS and try to make a profit at it - the company is simply not designed to compete against MS. (Although if they did Windows would improve dramatically)
Put another way, Apple is a whole user experience company. They don't want the user to go to a generic theatre, sit in seats made by some strange company, eat food purchased from GFS, and watch a movie made by three different movie studios. They want you in their theater, their seats eating their food, and watching their entirely controlled movie.
This is good for those who only want to deal with one company, and are willing to pay for it. They know their market. They may be trying to expand it a little towards the geek segment that play with software but don't care about hardware (we run unix!). It is unlikely that they will ever capture the imagination of the hardware geek, they know it, and they aren't courting us.
So stop posting freaking stories about OS X on any commodity hardware, ok?
-Adam
Could someone please explain to me why there is such a "need" to have Mac OS X on an x86 processor? Why is it a good thing to run on a processer with 4 registers (8 if you use the address registers for non address calculations) and an outdated asm languages when 32 registers and risc is just so much fun? Their are a lot of different processors out there and I really don't think x86 is the best in the world. Why would anyone what to run any code on anything made by intel. I'm not trying to start a flame here, I just want to know why so many people want x86 over anything else (mips, sparc, hp-risc, power-pc).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think it was back in '95 or '96. IBM and Motorola were in development of dual-platform supporting processor called CHRP or Common Hardware Reference Platform.
The Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) Specification describes a family of machines based on the PowerPC(tm) processor that are capable of booting multiple operating systems including Mac OS, Windows NT, AIX® and Solaris(tm).
Wouldn't that have been cool? What ever happened to that idea? Here's the old documentation.
It appears that IBM has some information on their site that is still recent, dated Sept. 2002. Weird. I'd love to have one of those machines. PowerPC 970? Forget about it.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
My god you're dumb.
would make things more expensive, but shouldn't it be possible to make a multi-processer system using differnt CPU types ? I mean, like a SMP system with an AMD running the kernel and an aditional PPC chip running all "non-new-fat" processes or binaries, while using the same shared RAM ? would require some magic, but shouldn't be impossible, though.
Why isn't this a possibility? Didn't AMD's fab in Dresden take over some slack for Motorola at some point in the past?
I think its quite possible that Apple wants AMD to fab some chips with some spare production time they might have. IBM might not be able to fab the amount of chips that Apple wants to have ready by September.
Seems like a reasonable non-conspiracy related theory to me.
The biggest reason those cards weren't "wildly successful" was their price, if I recall correctly.
In the heyday of these offerings, it was about the same price to buy a complete, seperate PC system. Many folks said "Where's the logic in adding PC support to my Mac when I can own a full PC system for the same money?"
The only market they really captured was the niche of people wanting to run both PC and Mac applications, but not willing to give up any more space in their home or workplace for another computer.
Also, these devices were still add-on cards, which always lack some of the integration of having the compatibility truly "built in" to the system. The beauty of a PC, in many ways, is the "box of slots" nature of the thing. You have thousands of possibilities in the way of PCI, AGP (or in the past, ISA or EISA) cards. Want a special purpose graphics card? Just buy it and drop it in! Special high-speed serial ports for a multi-line BBS system, perhaps? Just buy a "Digiboard" and get 8 or more ports. With a PC on a card, you're limited to what's actually on the card itself, or what it's able to use on the Mac's own board.
While I'm not so sure Apple has any interest in going the "PC compatibility" route again - I do think it would be a much different story if the compatibility was truly on the motherboard.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, participation is key. I cannot code. I cannot write even a shell script, but what I do do is provide feedback to developers of open source software I use. Developers appreciate constructive feedback and suggestions for changes or improvement. I have never once encountered a developer who said, "Don't like it, code something else". I've gotten many "thank you for your feedback"s or "I'll keep that in mind for a future version". In this way, the whole development process improves.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
ArsTechnica to the Rescue:
0 -1.ht ml
4 5.htm l
* Inside the IBM PowerPC 970 Part I: Design Philosophy and Front End
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/02q2/ppc970/ppc97
* Ars Technica Newsdesk A Brief Look at the PowerPC 970
http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/10347562
* Ars Technica - CPU and Chipset Guide
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/
Hope it helps fill that Gap.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In a word . . .
PRICE!
More specifically, price per performance (bang for buck). It is generally agreed that x86 CPUs, while not the best architecture, has the best bang for buck .
If you read the IBM link, you can see that the 970 is multiprocessor enabled. Once apple gets their hands on it they can easily create 2 way systems, and probably 4 way systems and up. I'm not sure about benchmarking, but linking processors in this way will help offset the x86 processor speed advanatge. And with IBM technology behind them, I'm sure it's easily possible.
BTW, I think AMD are trying to pull off a similar trick with the multiproc. Opterons, and eventually Athlons.
Apple need another supplier so they limit their risk. They maybe getting AMD to fab a PowerPC type chip.
Alternatively....
Maybe they are just going to use AMD64 chips to build 8 and 4 way XServes?
NeXT used to have fat binaries compatibility across NeXT Black hardware, Intel, Sun, HP and Alpha.
Anthony
Ok, we know, we all know - Apple is a hardware company, they make their money selling hardware. You are not any cooler for saying that yet again. It's common knowledge, you are not smarter than the rest.
sic transit gloria mundi
Apple need another supplier so they limit their risk. They maybe getting AMD to fab a PowerPC type chip.
Alternatively....
Maybe they are just going to use AMD64 chips to build 8 and 4 way XServes?
NeXT used to have fat binaries compatibility across NeXT Black hardware, Intel, Sun, HP and Alpha.
Anthony
Actually I think there is a very good reason for Microsoft to buy VPC that has nothing to do with Apple. Intel has indicated they are switching focus over to the Itanium line, and over the next 5+ years the limits of the x86 platform are going to become more troublesome (things like 64 gig limit of addressable memory...).
The Itanium's x86 emulation is only so-so. VPC makes a product which allows an entirely alien architecture to run x86 apps almost perfectly providing you have an x86 OS. It would be possible for the VPC guys to take their PPC code and recreate it for Itanium to create the same level of compatability for Itanium architectures. That would be functionality that Microsoft would want to offer their customer base.
I have a better reason: AMD can fab those CPUS easily and IBM has better things to do than fab chips for Macs. Apple needs to make sure it doesn't have to stop the assembly line for IBM to fab more CPUs. My guess is that Apple will have AMD produce IBM 970 chips alongside IBM. IBM probably doesn't want to be the first in line for Macintosh CPUs, there's not enough money in it for a multi-faceted operation like IBM. AMD can produce ample chips and they might be able to make a profit doing it.
This has nothing to do with Macs and x86, AMD produces a LOT more than just athlon chips, they'll be pumping out AMD-970s with their extra capacity.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
if you're looking for 970 info, Hannibal has a decent article over at Ars Technica, and a followup is on the way. also there's a +1 thread of deth in Ars' forums.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
not scanning the replies, but anyone notice how not a damned article from that post is less than a month old? honestly, i read that Ars article six months ago.
Inside the IBM PowerPC 970 Part I: Design Philosophy and Front End
Ars Technica Newsdesk A Brief Look at the PowerPC 970
Ars Technica - CPU and Chipset Guide
Added a MS benchmark I found interesting vis a vis Opteron
Opteron the curent King
Help fight continental drift.
Would you install MacOS in your Intel/AMD machine if you had the chance to test how it behaves?
I really like OS/X, but I'm not going to spend $5000 in the near future to test drive it and develop a few apps for fun.
If OS/X were a pluggable module you could install over Linux (for a fee), probably Windows would be history in a few years.
I don't think Apple realizes how important is to dominate the Intel/AMD architecture. It is an open architecture, new manufacturers can enter this market freely, no royalties to pay to anyone, and that means this architecture will be constant source of revenue till the end of times.
In the past, the Mac was way ahead of IBM, but IBM had an open architecture. It was so open that IBM was even outside the market for a while. OS/X is patented and they invest constantly on improving it, so the same would not happen to Apple.
For example, the quiet release of X11 is perfectly logical without any of this. It's clearly a Good Thing(tm) for to be able to run just about any bit of Unix software on Mac OS X. But X11 just isn't part of Apple's way of doing things. For years they've succeeded in making their system predictable and easy to understand and use by keeping everything consistent: the same menu entries in the same places doing the same things, the same keyboard shortcuts, the same icons and GUI elements that work in the same way, the same mindset and way of working, &c &c.
Unix programmers, OTOH, often seem to hate this sort of restriction, and rejoice in the freedom to make their apps look and work competely differently from everyone else's. Unix users may have no problem with this and are used to it, but non-technical Mac users might well find it confusing and awkward, especially when sharing a screen with Aqua apps. (I probably would, and I'm far from non-technical!)
So it already makes perfect sense for Apple not to promote the release in their usual way. Unix enthusiasts will get to hear about it anyway, and will realise its significance. But it will make clear the separation between Unix GUI apps and the core platform they've worked so hard on.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
$5000?! Which Mac are you buying? The average Mac is about $1500
The PowerPC isn't a proprietary processor. If you'd like to design a motherboard that uses it, go ahead. No one's stopping you (unless it infringes on an Apple design, that is). The hard part would be selling it...
Apple will not destroy its PPC customer- and developer-bases by tossing them aside after all the time, money, and effort expended on Mac OS X. Apple will adopt the PPC 970, take Motorola out of the CPU development loop, and provide Mac OS X for a tightly proscribed x86 configuration (including its own branded boxes--almost everything but the CPU in a Mac is now commodity parts, so that perceived barrier is long gone).
Steve Jobs is a patient man when it comes to the world-at-large. He knows that Apple probably won't ever replace Microsoft as the dominant player in the x86 market, but he also knows that this is probably the perfect time to give them some competition. Microsoft faces a number of challenges to its dominance: its attitude toward DRM, its "trusted computing" initiative, the quiet debacle it's weathering vis-a-vis virtual weekly security updates to XP and other critical software, the growing popularity of open source software, its enterprise licensing scheme, and the increased scrutiny it's under after losing the anti-trust case (like IBM before it, the loss itself will prove more damaging than the punishment).
Apple will continue to produce Mac OS X for PPC. The x86 version would be--in the beginning--a loss-leader. It would get noses into the tent from every market segment. That interest would fuel developer interest (notice how quickly the "there's no software for the Mac" discussion abated in the flood of Open Source offerings it now enjoys).
Once that interest is cultivated, Apple has a whole slew of products/ideas "on the shelf" that would benefit from this renewed interest. There's an advantage to being ahead of your time if you survive long enough.
Mac OS X apps are "bundles" which means that they are a directory with a structured content inside. Grab a terminal on OSX, cd into your /Applications directory and then cd inside of an app and look around. This paradigm fits perfectly with multi-chipset binaries inside of the bundle. So imagine a Photoshop.app that has both PPC and 970 and 64bit and x86 code inside of it. Sure, the app size is larger, but all of the platform-independent resources are conserved. I can't really imagine a cleaner way to handle multi-platform compatibility.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
.__________________________________________. ,^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h. | /__| // gggg_ ___________| /_______| ______ / @)gBggg ___________| /- A______/::| __________|
.__________________________________________.
|Meanwhile, _______ |______________________|
|in mom's basement: |________________ ^____|
|___________________| _______________/ \ __|
| _________________ / Sweetie!! I asked \ _|
| _________________ |you to take out the| _|
| _________________ \ garbage YESTERDAY!/ _|
| __________________ '_________________' __|
|
||NOT NOW, MOM! I'M PASTING "FATHER PUDGE"||
|\ >> AND GOATSE.CX TROLLS ON SLASHDOT!> / |
|_\________________ ^__________________
|______ _____ _____\/ __ --- ______________|
|____ / _____| ____ \_
|___
|___/ _______| _______ ) jg gg_ ___________|
|___| _______| ______ & ____/ _____________|
|___\________| _>c>c>c>c>c _\ - ___________|
|______/___\__/U_>c>c>c>c> _ |:| __________|
|deskdeskdeskdes| ____| ____ |:| __________|
|kdeskdeskdeskde|_ __/ _____ |:| __________|
|skdeskdeskdeskd|
Interestingly enough, various scientific studies have been conducted upon wide cross-sections of the male H. Sapiens population to determine the psychological motivations behind irrational, sometimes violent anti-homosexual behavior, also known as fag bashing in common colloquial American English.
A vast majority of these studies have returned an all but irrefutable stream of evidence - that most all fag bashers are in fact harboring latent homosexual urges - and instead of directing the suppression of those urges solely upon themselves, project said suppression upon others.
It's only logical to presume that the evidence that's been returned can be extended to incorporate those who deride Macintosh users as being "Homosexuals" on online forums and billboard systems. Not only are these people likely harboring latent homosexual urges themselves, but a latent desire to use or adopt the Macintosh platform as well.
they still haven't open-sourced quicktime
Sticking with the PPC 970 gives Apple an easy way to maintain backward compatability for its current market of folk unable to break their addiction to legacy, non-native Mac software.
Moving to an AMD or Intel chip gives Apple an easy way to attract the business users looking for cutting edge innovation like 64-bit compatability and a Unix based OS.
My guess is that because they'll have two well defined audiences, that won't overlap it would be right up Apple's alley to do both. Here's our line of computers for the "Classic" mac crowd unable to leave Quark 4 and PixelPaint. But here's our line of cutting-edge, Classic-free boxes that you can order with your choice of AMD or Intel chip inside.
The wilder rumors of a "Classic" like environment on AMD or Intel processors may have a bit of truth, but they're anxious to ditch the Mac legacy crap so if anything it'd be a Classic environment designed to boot your copy of Windows, OS/2, or other legacy 80x86 OS. I still don't believe them, but once you dump the Mac legacy stuff, moving to a different processor is much simpler.
I nearly cracked up when i read this sentence, keeping in mind that the whole rumor-mongering session was started by an assumption that "talking with all first and second tier clients" must have included apple.
The last completely new PC I bought was 4 years ago, and it was built from components. I've since upgraded quite a few of the parts in it (video card, CPU/RAM, motherboard), but quite a bit of it is still original (hard drives, SCSI cards, CD/CD-R, sound card, case, monitor, etc). I'll probably keep buying a new motherboard/CPU/RAM combo for the next 5-6 years or so. My previous PC lasted 9 years, and if I could find modern AT motherboards I'd still be putting new parts in it.
The point is that every two or three years I can throw $300 at my initial $2000 investment and basically get a very workable system (with more horsepower than current Macs, I might add). Until I can do that with Apple hardware, Mac OS X will never be "ready for me" -- not because I don't like it, but because it's just not the best value. Besides, Linux on my desktop works just fine (and it's also free, as is 98% of the software I use, so that's a nice bonus). Sure it ain't perfect, but what is?
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Dear Apple,
I am a homosexual. I bought an Apple computer because of its well earned reputation for being "the" gay computer. Since I have become an Apple owner, I have been exposed to a whole new world of gay friends. It is really a pleasure to meet and compute with other homos such as myself. I plan on using my new Apple computer as a way to entice and recruit young schoolboys into the homosexual lifestyle; it would be so helpful if you could produce more software which would appeal to young boys. Thanks in advance.
with much gayness,
Father Randy "Pudge" O'Day, S.J.
Dear Father O'Day:
Thanks for your letter. Being Catholic myself, I know exactly what you're talking about! It has always been our plan here at Apple Computer Inc to revolutionize personal computing with our high-quality and highly gay products.
I'm happy to answer your letter by letting you know that YES we will be releasing an entire hLife ("homo-life") software line. You'll be able to recognize it in stores by the small stylized logo depicting a large cock entering a tight anus with an Apple logo on it. ("Suddenly it all comes together" indeed!).
Anyway, I hope you and other members of our community will join us on our mission, and purchase the exciting new hLife boxed set. Only the boxed set comes with translucent cock rings!
Sincerely,
Harry Rodman
Vice-president
Homosexual Liaison Services
Apple Computer, Inc.
Frankly I think not porting OSX to x86...
Apple does maintain an x86 port of OSX. In fact portions of it are opensource (tm).
neurostarAll you fucking Mac OS X on x86 people need to pay up for a Mac or shut up. Ask Be, IBM, DR-DOS, etc what happens when you make a commercial operating system that competes with Windows.
You say you'd buy Mac OS X if it were on x86, and maybe you would. You'd play with it for awhile, and go back to Windows...because guys like you don't have the balls to strike out on a new architecture.
You're either cheap, afraid, or both. And that's fine. But don't pretend you're open-minded enough to try Mac OS X.
Have fun on your 30 year old clone of an outdated even at the time architecture. At least you can get higher Quake framerates!
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore?family=G4
The cheapest mac on the apple site is $1499 (without monitor). If you want the high end one with a good display can easily cost over $5000. The low end mac with a 17" display will cost over $2000.
Where are these "cheap" macs? and don't mention emac or imac... I mean real Power Mac G4.
I was thinking if Linux can be successful as a server OS, why not a Darwin Server running on am Apple made PC?
I can think of a hundred arguments against this, but it makes as much sense (to me) as half the stuff I've read so far.
The problem I have with the Mac and the MacOS X is that they are a proprietary platform.
In the Windows case you are locked into a single provider for your operating system, but at least there are multiple vendors for the hardware, and you get to pick from them.
In the MacOS case, you got a single OS provider (just like in the Windows case), but to make things worse, you have a single hardware provider.
If you are willing to be locked in in both aspects, I guess a Mac makes sense.
Let's see, we've got IBM, Windows, Linux, Apple, OSX, and AMD all in one topic. POST that sucker!
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Darwin is Open Source and runs on both PPC and i386. You mean that IF Apple releases Mac OS X for i386, it will not be based on Darwin? Or they will close source for i386 darwin? Or they will build something into AQUA/the proprietory parts of OS X that wont run on standard i386 hardware, while Darwin still will?
I too doubt Apple will produce AMD based systems. But if they do, I doubt they will seriously try to lock people out from it. (The can see how successful MS was trying to stop people from running Linux on XBox, OS X on Dell is probably even more interesting for hackers).
A common claim. Unfortunately it's wrong. Athlon XP doesn't really run any hotter than Pentium 4 does for example. In fact, you coulöd say that XP runs cooler than P4 does.
It is still considerably hotter than PowerPC. Apples didn't have fans until the latest PowerMac G4.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
AMD!= x86 indeed. Outside of the Slashdot world this is fairly well known. Just speculation but I'd guess x86 is their least profitable area. They make tonnes of ICs for various purposes. Their flash memory is probably the most common. Lots of A2Ds, D2As and stuff too.
Random is the New Order.
Yeah, that's a good solution -- but it *does* still require that developers build a version for each chipset.
And you can bet that they'll pass the expense of doing so on to the consumer, probably in the guise of a version update.
That's the sticking point, not the technical problems involved.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
True, but I was comparing it to Intels CPU's since they are Athlons primary competitors. Right now PowerPC and x86 aren't really competitors. There is a wall between PowerPC (Macs), and x86 (Windows). Well, Linux can run on either, but for mainstrean, the two are separate.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
" So imagine a Photoshop.app that has both PPC and 970 and 64bit and x86 code inside of it."
Unfortunately, Adobe would have to do more than just imagine it - they'd have to rewrite platform specific portions, recompile, test, and debug it.
Unless they've already done this, along with MS (for Office), and a dozen other major application vendors for their Mac products, why would anyone buy a high end workstation Mac, that can't run *any* of their existing software?
I have to comment on this:
"For those of us wanting to get away from Windows, but feel Linux is still not ready for the desktop yet, this might make Apple a more viable alternative."
You have to be kidding me, Linux(and FreeBSD) are ready, and are being used for the desktop! I am irate!
Blasphemer!
The only thing that Linux needs to improve on is games, and that is not important.
GET A FREAKING CONSOLE!
Who writes these posts anyway?
It's always easy to win the argument when you get to pick the rules.
iMacs and eMacs are real G4 machines. You just can't admit it because then you'd have to admit your original post was moronic.
Depends what their market is. If they can make it so that they control the MOBO and BIOS's like they do now for PPC architecture, then it doesn't matter. They could build systems based on the same Intel or AMD chips I can buy off the shelf, but it doesn't get me any closer to having an actual system because I can't get a MOBO except from Apple. And it's not like generics can legally reverse engineer the BIOS's like back in the day (thanks DMCA!). Even if someone did, all they need is a check in the BIOS that checks who made the MOBO and maybe another in the OS that refuses to run on a non-MacOS BIOS. So control of their platform is not a problem.
At that point, the only reason they'd have to even bother mussing around with the chip is to control the upgrade market...but do they care that much? I'm not saying they *should* go Intel/AMD, just that they *could* and it wouldn't matter that much.
Additionally, I'm sure that IBM will use the 970 somewhere in it's own product line instead of just for Macs.
A common claim. Unfortunately it's wrong. Athlon XP doesn't really run any hotter than Pentium 4 does for example. In fact, you coulöd say that XP runs cooler than P4 does.
Well, considering the average P4 makes desktop
fusion a reality, that's not saying much, is it? =)
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
This is not a Troll, geez I was making my comments! That's not fair! I think of Trollers as people what are posting "first post" etc. Or is that "Flame Bait"?
I was honestly upset that some people don't think Linux is mature as a desktop. I think it is. I my have been a little ferial, but geez!/P
I know smaller die fabs allow for cooler chips etc, until you start filling everything in with more transistors etc.
.13micron process could you make a very cool running chip as compared to the P4's?
If you produced a Pentium 1 core or even a 2 using a
Just something I never figured out. Thanks for any replies.
-- taking over the world, we are.
I don't consider them as real... they aren't very upgradeable. Try to upgrade the video card or monitor on an iMac. no... that requires a new one.
from a non-geek perspective. I personally agree with this guy. When i can install linux on my mom's machine, and have her be able to figure out how to use it, then, and only then, will i consider linux ready for the desktop. And i'm pretty sure the guy who posted this story agrees with me. I'll admit, linux is ready for the desktops of geeks, but for the others? Keep trying, red hat. You're almost there. IMHO, until then, OS X is a much better desktop OS.
Has anyone ever read the 970 spec? It snot a CPU for desktop computers people!
The 64 bit cpu from IBM that Apple is looking at is not repeat not 970!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Yeah, whenever I hear someone say the phrase '...ready for the desktop...' I completely tune out now.
It really has become a complete cliche, and I don't think people know what they're talking about anymore. It's turning into 'BSD is dying'. It's very easy to say.
All I know is that Linux is on my desktop, and it sure as hell is not going anywhere fast.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
So far, nothing impressive. if you have any impressive thing about it, would you mind sharing it? -->Why would you even write a three-paragraph post on a subject you have no clue about?
When we talk about things to come, it is easy to do mud-slinging since nothing can be proved. but that is not my style, so i will give you benefit of doubt. may be i am totally clueless.
-->Apple did it before anyone. Ever hear of the Newton?
I am old enough to have used GM refrigerator. That doesn't mean I would tell everyone GM makes refrigerator. Apple Newton is a thing of past. It survived when there wasn't any competition. Once competition sprang, it was dead. i am talking about today. this is one market segment, where style and differentiation still matters, for which apple is famous and they can make some inroad. Apple doesn't sell any PDA today, but I won't be surprised if they come out with one soon.
I have a better reason: AMD can fab those CPUS easily and IBM has better things to do than fab chips for Macs. Apple needs to make sure it doesn't have to stop the assembly line for IBM to fab more CPUs. My guess is that Apple will have AMD produce IBM 970 chips alongside IBM. IBM probably doesn't want to be the first in line for Macintosh CPUs, there's not enough money in it for a multi-faceted operation like IBM. AMD can produce ample chips and they might be able to make a profit doing it
I think you have this backwards. AMD just recently signed up to use IBM's new manufacturing plant to increase production yield on chips and allow for higher process manufacturing (.09 micron.) IBM wouldn't be disrupting anything to "just" manufacture chips for Apple. Since AMD will be booming in the embedded business when/if HyperTransport takes off, they'll need the extra manufacturing space to produce their chipsets.
You're also overlooking a very obvious clue to the PowerPC 970 being the chip of choice for Apple: the fact that IBM has included an AltiVec engine (and by that name, too.) IBM has stated before and stated again that they will not be using AltiVec, that it's simply there for 2nd and 3rd party vendors to take advantage of.
Can you name one practical vendor that utilizes AltiVec other than Apple? I highly doubt IBM is catering to Amiga.
The whole thing about Apple being in talks with AMD is more plausible if it's put in terms of HyperTransport chipsets and software compatability, and not switching their entire platform over to AMD64. As noted before, IBM and Apple are both on the HyperTransport consortium, it's only reasonable that they need to talk to each other now and again regarding HyperTransport issues. If you see on The Register or some other place about Apple being a purchaser for chips from AMD, please keep in mind that it's most likely HyperTransport chipsets and not Opterons.
|Deep_within,______ |______________________|
|Apple_Headquarters_|
|___________________| ___Jobs:_______/ \ __|
| _________________ / Anderson, I want \ _|
| _________________ |you to counter the | _|
| _________________ \ dissidents on
| __________________ '_________________' __|
|
||NOT NOW, I AM USING OUR NEW PROTOTYPE "||
|\ APPLE GOATSE.CX FORCE FEEDBACK DEVICE / |
|_\________________ ^__________________
|______ _____ _____\/ __ --- ______________|
|____ / _____| ____ \_
|___
|___/ _______| _______ ) jg gg_ ___________|
|___| _______|8======> & ____/ ____________|
|___\Crapple_| _>c>c>c>c>c _\ - ___________|
|______/___\__/U_>c>c>c>c> _ |:| __________|
|deskdeskdeskdes| ____| ____ |:| __________|
|kdeskdeskdeskde|_ __/ _____ |:| __________|
|skdeskdeskdeskd|
Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
Now don't get me wrong here, Darwin is a great kernel, it's just that the x86 hardware support is scarce AFAIK, and Linux or *BSD run on more platforms, thus making them a taste more appealing. I really like OS X(posting from Safari build 73), just I would like to be able to use it or an equivalent on cheaper hardware(eg stuff I can pull out of the garbage). Additionally, there is a much bigger installed base of Linux/*BSD on x86, so drivers should mature faster. I see no reason, however, why it couldn't be made kernel-independent, as long as source compatibility is maintained.
Okay, regardless of whether or not Apple ever designs X86 computers, if they did it wouldn't lower their profits. Why? They can still charge more their computers if the OS only runs on their version of x86 hardware! If it runs faster, the Mac faithful will be pleased. Sure someone is likely to hack it to work on a white box PC, but as far as average end users are concerned, it is not a big issue and any piracy issues would be easily offset by the number of new people buying slightly cheaper Windows compatible Macs. (Heck, I might even consider it.)
I also suspect that OSX (if written properly for a small set of sound/video cards) would be faster than Windows on the same machine. Even if it isn't, people crave the Mac experience. Mac users have never minded paying more. They don't even care that Macs are the slowest on the block right now. It's about the user experience folks. Plain and simple.
if (/.everyUser.post.codePost == (mod.point > 4)){ /.ennerseed.post.mod.point = 5 (nerdable); /.everyUser.post.codePost.stop (redundant);
}else{
}
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
While I doubt iLife makes a lot of money, the professional apps like Final Cut Pro absolutely do. $1000 per boxed copy - with a higher gross margin than most of Apple's computers I'd warrant.
Although with Apple's pricing strategy for Shake ($5K for Mac w/ free network rendering, $10K for Linux, plus ~3K per rendering node), they're definitely trying to sell more Xserves there right now.
My video compression blog
My father bought one of those cards for his 6100. Games comprised the vast majority of his PC software. Now he acomplishes the same thing with VirtualPC.
Its not technical issues that are keeping Apple from releasing a port for x86. If they did that, two issues would bring them down: supporting the wide array of hardware on x86 and piracy of the operating system. Right now I might be pirating a copy of Jaguar to run on my Mac, but I have to have bought a Mac in the first place, so Apple has at least gotten some money out of me. If I take a copy of OS X for x86 and install it on a Dell, Apple sees nothing.
You said: AMD would be a likely partner is such a move since one could imagine the problems with Intel assisting Apple with this.
I believe this is not at all true... Note that
1) Jobs and Andy Grove are old buddies
2) Jobs addressed the Intel Sales Convention this year and got a standing ovation
3) Pixar just bought a ton of Intel Xeon-based servers for rendering (not Apple or IBM or AMD)
Watch for MORE Intel/Apple projects not less... coming from here...
Why? Well maybe because it's easier to program in Cocoa and use Project Builder and Interface Builder than Visual Studio, besides which, they're free. The only thing I miss in switching from Visual C++ 6 to Project Builder is auto-completion.
Karma: Ran over your dogma.
If I want anything that will run OSX, it's going to cost me at least $1000.
If I just want an x86, to run linux, I have to spend about $300.
Not from Dell, Gateway or HP you aren't. Origional poster was comparing OEM machines to OEM machines, not OEM's to something cobbled together from cheap parts with a power supply borrowed from a toaster.
Grab a terminal on OSX, cd into your /Applications directory and then cd inside of an app and look around.
Or, just control-click on an app, and select "Show Package Contents" from the popup menu...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I stand corrected. I think you're right-on about the chipsets, too.
Apple will need someone to glue all the parts together, and AMD can bring HyperTransport to the table (IBM is PCI-X, right?). That makes a lot of sense, they'll be IBM CPUs running on AMD chipsets.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
A blue and white G3 is 400$ off of ebay. I bought one, added a 256mb stick of PC133 ram i had lying around and now it's a kick ass apple workstation.
You don't need $1,000 to get a mac.
I agree that it's MUCH easier to use Project Builder (and IB) than the tools to build Windows apps. I concede that some small shops and solo developers would still use it for that reason, but the ones who are in business to make a company really profitable would go the other route. David
You know, if there is any truth to this Apple / AMD thing, there's no reason why it necessarily means that Apple must be looking to put a current-line AMD processor in their machines. AMD is a processor design company as well as being a fabricator. There's no reason to think that Apple couldn't be in negotiation with AMD to create a new, RISC/PPC compatible processor. Apple owns at least partial rights to the PPC platform since it was created by the AIM coalition (Apple, IBM, and Motorola). Also, if IBM was able to create a vector processing unit compatible with Altivec for the 970 without Motorola screaming about it, there's no reason to think AMD couldn't also create a compatible unit. This would allow Apple to maintain code parity with current systems. Since both Apple and AMD aren't primary players (compared to IBM, Intel, and M$), and both are used to dealing with (relatively) low volume production (again compared to the previous), this could be a valuable partnership for both. Apple gets a new, possibly 64 bit processor from a well known, decently respectable company with production capabilities geared to the same levels Apple is used to using, and AMD gets a new market they can sell to, using an established machine code, a single chipset to support, and the possibility of breaking into the higher end server markets. Just my 2. I have no idea if this is true, but I think it would work.
One link is in the article itself. Another was posted hours ago.
Thank you
Karma Patrol
Will we see Mac OS X running on two different platforms/CPUs?
It sure looks like it. Heck, they did it before with Mac OS 7 and 8, it ran on both Motorola 680x0 and PowerPC architecture. There was a bit of growing pain then, given that PowerPC binaries wouldn't run on 68k machines, and then there were "fat" binaries (which would run on both), but it wasn't terrible and people got through it in one piece in the end. Now, obviously that wasn't the same as a shift from 32-bit to 64-bit computing, but it looks as if there will be similar binary compatability issues again, so it's probably worth looking backwards in time to the introduction of the Power Macs with their new-fangled PowerPC processors.
It wasn't so much competition that killed hte Newton, as poor management at Apple at the time of its release.
Those where the dark days of Apple when Steve was out of the driver's seat and the company was releasing a new desktop or laptop model every week. The company was killing itself from the inside out.
Steve came back and killed the Newton (along with 90% of the product line), because he needed to get the company back to its foundations in order to frow stong agin.
I personally ahve little doubt that had Steve never been ousted, and the Newton released with him at the helm, that it would have been the top dog in the PDA market.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
...Apple and AMD are members of the HyperTransport consortium (not to mention have long been known to have been collaborating on this), and Intel is not.
Is it me, or is this the first time they've said Altivec® when talking about the 970? How'd they get the rights to use that from Moto?
In the early 1990s, Apple decided that the Motorola 680x0 series was not keeping up with the Intel 80x86 series, largely because PCs were Intel's primary market, while Motorola CPUs were used more in embedded systems. RISC designs were simpler and could be improved with less effort, so Apple switched to the PowerPC CPU in 1994 (after prototypes in 1991 using the 88K), but to maintain compatibility, needed to emulate the 680x0. The initial emulator interpreted 68LC040 (without FPU) code, and a later version stored translated blocks of code, and ran faster than Apples previous high end Macintoshes.
This impressed IBM engineers enough that a project was started to emulate the 80386+ architecture on a PowerPC (known as the PowerPC 615), but the project was cancelled (apparently after successful versions were completed - possibly because of performance, problems with efficiency using the PowerPC architecture (the 80x86 much more awkward and complicated than the 680x0), marketing decisions, or strategic/management decisions - I don't know, but the computer industry was very volatile at the time, and the path of the future was not at all clear). However development on the conncept continued with the DAISY project (Dynamically Architected Instruction Set from Yorktown), which translated to a hypothetical VLIW CPU instead of the PowerPC. Both the DAISY system, and a later project called Dynamo from Hewlett-Packard (which ran PA-RISC on PA-RISC), could optimise code as it ran (Dynamo could improve PA-RISC performance by up to 20% over non-emulated code).
Several engineers (many from Sun, such as David Ditzel, designer for Sun's UltraSparc CPU, and Bob Cmelik who wrote instruction profiling tools for SPARC programs) helped found Transmeta, which created the missing VLIW processor, and created a new dynamic translator (called a "Code Morpher" by Transmeta) to emulate the 80x86. [...]
After loking at this site apple would be crazy not to use the 970.
t ec hdocs/A1387A29AC1C2AE087256C5200611780
http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/
q
Aww sucks to be revealed for what you truly are, duddn't it?
--I'm sure it HAS been asked, just I musta missed it. As long as everyone else is speculating and guessing, I'll give it a shot:
Why again doesn't apple just build their own dang chips? Is it really the simplest explanation, cost? What does it take to build a fab, a billion and a half now? Seems like for the past buncha years, it's always this problem "apple has to negotiate with ibm, moto, no they are going x86 no intel, no amd, no..." I mean REALLY, wouldn't it make more sense for them in the long run to just do it, make their own, and then they could have what they want, a really good chip and OS combo, and not have to always go begging to the various chip guys? Sort of a sun deal, but geared towards desktops and low end servers?
How this relates to their "talks" with IBM and amd I don't know. Perhaps purchasing a fab from one, purchasing a license from another,using some concepts and designs they develop inhouse, running those ideas past the chip guys for a fee, to make their own products? Or maybe someplace somewhere there's a radically NEW design waiting to be released, it just needs to be built? And isn't part of the cost difference with apple always been that they bought more expensive chips? if they made them themselves, well...it would be theirs, right? profit is profit! they'd be paying themselves eventually, could use that to drop prices, become much more attractive, still keep total control, sell more boxes and OS copies and etc.
http://www.envestco2.com/macwhispers/archives/0000 57.php
This is supposedly from a 'reliable source' in the engineering dept of an equipment supplier.
ding ding ding ding! Give this man a prize.
It's amazing how many people don't see this obvious consequence.
It's the same thing with Classic apps. If Apple makes them "too" well integrated, why should developers move forward?
Very few applications adapt with changing APIs. OS Venders need to maintain backwards compatibility so there are products for their new OSes, but write new APIs so there will be new products to replace them.
Putting too much energy into supporting your "old" APIs is a recipe for stagnation.
The reason Apple will make an x86 configuration is simple. It will save Jobs the embarassment of having to stand up at every MacWorld and show the Mac vs. Wintel benchmark comparisons..." and if you squint just right at the bars for the Photoshop Lorentzian Blur you can see the 1.63 GHz G4 just blows away the Intel 9GHz machine". Apple hasn't done it until now not because they fear clones. Their lawyers can shut down x86 cloners just as fast as PPC cloners. Rather, until OS X, Apple had no means of migrating to the x86. The only scenario I can see against this eventuality is if the successors to the 970 just mop the floor with the x86's progeny. I'm not holding my breath. As long as Apple can't measure up in the MHz war they are hamstrung. The mass market just can't see past clockrate.
With Safari, Keynote and quite probably another sectret Apple office application that could kill MS Office on the Mac, fewer and fewer Mac users are going to pay MS $500 for its bloated and buggy software, so Apple has really nothing to worry about upsetting the Beast anymore.
...
Apple is in a very strong position to grow and compete with MS and the Wintel box makers by releasing OS X on X86 and making computers based on both PPC and AMD / Intel.
Apple is the best in industrial design and capable making powerful and stylish computers better than those clueless box makers like Dell.
Amazingly, despite being 60 times smaller than MS, Apple actually produces more and better software than the Redmond bully: WebObject, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, FileMaker, AppleWorks, Safari, Keynote, Darwin Streaming Server, iLife,
IBM will use the PPC 970 in their blade servers, well before Apple. So they have strong incentive to develop the chip.
There are links in the post that should help you out, if you're wondering why it's so impressive. It should basically erase the Intel/Apple speed gap (based on initial estimates) and provide an easy segway into 64-bit desktop systems. Huge memory bandwith, too. It will probably be a little behind the Opteron initially, though. Still, there shouldn't be any significant complaints about speed for awhile after it comes out.
First of all, OSX is a feather in Apple's cap in terms of marketing. It's really increased Apple's mindshare lately: Desktop Unix is a big deal. Why challenge that with Windows emulation? Virtual PC is good for legacy Applications, but I don't think Apple needs any help from the Windows community. There are plenty of awesome applications already, and there will be more on the way, particularly with help from the Open Source community. Why make Safari and Keynote if they wanted to cozy up to Microsoft with a Windows emulator. Even if OSX is ported to x86, they won't emulate for Windows applications. And they won't switch to x86. Intel's too caught up in stuff like Palladium.
Apple paid LSI Logic not to talk to 3rd party developers such as me. I have it right from the top of the organization, only one guy down from the director himself.
So you are correct. Apple does indeed prevent chip suppliers from having any supply relationship with others.
People hear are asking for an open hardware system that functions as well as a Mac. But, that request is problematic because the functionality is directly related to proprietary nature of the platform. Apple hands picks it hardware, it knows how it will behave and thus programs it OS and application around it. It then releases, those spec to third party developer so they can do the same. X86 doesn't have this advantage. You have all these variations out there that it is impossible to guarantee perfect functionality. Windows still has issues, Linux-x86 still has issues. No matter how much faster they are they still won't match the Macintosh on functionality. Thus 970 processor looks to be a better candidate than athlon-64
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Obviously they aren't very upgradeable. That's what happens when you put laptop guts in a small, cute, and ever-so huggable computer. That's why the iMac has a GeForce 2go gpu.
You know it would be much easier to justify spending the cash on new mac hardware if i did not have to listen to " isn't Al Gore on the BoD of that company?!?!... Hahahaha!".
Regardless, have to give IBM credit for producing some cool stuff.
They made a lot of mistakes when designing it, similar to mistakes made when Michael Spindler wanted ultra-cheap 603-based Macs and had his engineers take an LC-class motherboard and graft a PPC chip to it.
The mistakes on the eMac are thus: the 17" monitor was basically grafted onto an unchanged CRT iMac motherboard and power supply. The iMac had a 15" CRT from day one. Anyone who's worked around computer hardware for any time knows that a 17" CRT monitor sucks more juice and gets hotter than a 15". When you consider that the third-gen CRT iMac lost the fan and was cooled by convection alone (Steve HATES fans in computers) any change in heat production would render such a machine unable to exhaust enough heat to sufficiently cool itself. Also add to this the power draw problem, and you have a recipe for a completely unstable machine that breaks down at the drop of a hat.
A friend of mine fixes Macs for a living. He has to deal with dying eMacs practically every day (he has a few contracts with schools) and detests them.
The eMac is going to wind up in the Road Apple category at Low End Mac eventually. Just watch. Also just watch Apple quietly retire the machine and build another all-in-one Mac for scholastic use.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
...use the PPC 970. Because otherwise my slashdot nick won't be so cool!!
A 1.8 GHz Opteron or a 3 GHz P4 consumes about 80 W, compared to 40 W of a 1.8 GHz PPC 970.
More importantly, a 1.2 GHz PPC 970 burns only 19 W, which makes it possible for Apple to design cool and sexy fortables without huge heat sinks or noisy fans.
The low energy consumption is also critical for 24/7 servers, it reduces electricity bills and hardware failures. So I can't really see why Apple or anyone else should be too excited about the hot chip.
CowboyNeal has Apple shares. :-P
Your comment about fans is untrue.
My Sawtooth PowerMac G4 which I purchased in March of 2000 has one large case fan in the middle, which blows air over the CPU heat sink and cools the entire box inside.
I owned 2 generations of those add on cards (NuBus) for my C610 back in the day (yes, I hacked up the second generation one to work--it was meant for the 6100 if I recall).
I think people may be missing the change here. Apple no longer uses a proprietary bus. PCI. Not NuBus. All those card manufacturers that uses Geode (and possibily C3s) on PCI cards could work, and work well with a "compatibility" mode. Right now, those cards hover around $500, if I recall. You can get a PC for cheaper, heck you can get a PC that goes into a drive bay, but if Apple offered the, there would be zero cost for manufacturer or design.
And there is a chance card prices would come down as demand went up. They'd be slow though.
Sorry I got that wrong - I'll concede the entire emulator point for the time being.
Take it easy.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Fun. So now they realize after they create the chip that they want 20 years of backwards compatibility. The PowerPC knew they wanted this, according to this slashdot article.
Mirrors:
story 1
story 2
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Or something like that... =)
-dave-
Get BearShare! for your p2p needs!
The pig browse. With Google. Sigh is to the chicken. Chicken is fool. Giggle. The DailyWTF giggle.
Sounds like a defensive reaction to the release of the Opteron. If AMD is offering a 64-bit chip with support for full-speed 32-bit x86 software, then Intel has to have a competitive answer *before* industry adopts the AMD64 over IA-64 for future migration.
Peace and love, y'all
How is this new information? Wasn't it known all along that the Itanium would get a IA-32 Execution Layer?
Is it really emulation or does it convert x86 assembly so it can run on the Itanium? If you can get 1.5ghz worth of performance out of EMULATION on the Itanium, then I need a new processor.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Here's a more detailed C|Net story.
(Yes, it's linked from the posted C|Net story).
The Itanium had a lot of good ideas, but no matter how much you want to drop an old architecture and start over from scratch like the goal of that project was, you've got to provide a transition period. Athlon's doing this with the Opteron, Apple is doing this with OS X using the Carbon Toolkit, etc etc. The *key* to getting a user base to switch from an older architecture to a newer one has to be a compatability layer.
Perhaps that is what doomed Itanium 1 to failure form the start. (Well that combined with the horrible heat output and power consuption of the Itanium 1).
- tristan
Code in
Itanium seems to be a nitch chip in which it can do certain things like scientific apps which can be compilied in parrallel really fast but it sucks at anything else.
http://saveie6.com/
Also, it's worth noting that Itanium has always supported running x86 software without emulation. It just turns out their hardware implementation is slower than emulating the same thing in 64-bit IA-64 mode.
Peace and love, y'all
This is great and all, but it's still EMULATION. x86 support in the Itanium seems very 'tacked on', unlike AMD's idea of simply extending the regular x86 instruction set to the realm of 64 bit. The way I see it, AMD chips will always be faster than Intel at x86 stuff. And when everyone is changing over, that's CRITICAL.
I am a filthy pirate.
Wow, I mean WOW.
NOOOOW I can watch my old dos demos from Unreal and The Humble Crew in less time than my brain can percieve them. Just what topped last years christmas list.
pm
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
And I thought it was just going to be a space heater.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
Good work, I say.
As an aside, I find it quite curious how many coders and compsci types who have only EVER worked on one platform, x86. From 386 up to pentium IVs, they've never branched out to the side. Never taken a class in 8bit microprocessing, done nothing with PPC, ARM, IBMs Power, 68k, coldfire, whatever. That kind of inbred thinking by definition is pretty fucked. Understandable, but still limiting.
The more people in industry who have a clue that something ELSE may exist, the more they can make sensible decisions about what to *choose* instead of just going with the next product from the same line they've always used.
Ultimately, all an emulator does is convert instructions from one architecture to another. It's almost always more efficient to translate instructions in blocks
To come up with a really primitive, simple example, imagine a simple instruction set with a load, add, and branch if zero-set.
Code might look like this:
lda avar
add bvar
bre label
Now imagine we were translating to an instruction set that had mostly the same instructions, but needed a compare instruction to set our conditional flag
Instruction-by-instruction conversion might turn out like this:
lda avar tstz
add bvar
tstz
bre label
Now if the conversion was done on the entire block, we might end up with this:
lda avar
add bvar
tstz
bre label
Granted, this is a pretty simple example, but I hope it makes my point. Block conversions allow a great deal more optimization than instruction conversions.
This optimization might sound like a lot of work for the host processor, but if the block in question is a tight loop you more than make that up.
This actually reminds me of when Apple's emulation strategy back when they migrated from the old 680x0 series to PowerPC. It was well orchestrated and was actually something of a triumph for them. I hope that bodes well for Intel's attempt.
For Intel to have a long term future without the embarassment of junking the whole architecture, they need Itanium x to run IA32 credibly. Advances in x86 performance keep coming at such increasing development costs that I think they would have to be able to migrate the market to IA64 within 5-10 years from now.
I would like for both the IA64 and the Hammer architectures to flourish, but Intel's taken an extremely bold step with EPIC, and I don't want to see them get punished in the market for that alone. I like the spirit of aiming higher.
-- John Truong
Actually, there is no reason that a hacker from the Free Software Foundation could not write a simply IA-32 emulator for the IBM PPC 970. Are there any takers?
Sun, however, will not be able to do the same because the implementation of the UltraSPARC III is rather poor. Its IA-32 emulation performance would be worse than a 80486.
Anybody got the technical details on this "emulation" versus the x86 compatibility in Opteron?
JIT compilation or instruction for instruction?
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Software emulation, I wonder where they dug up that idea...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'd wager that this is FX32! (allowed you to do the same on Alpha) reworked for the Itanium. Considering Intel purchased all Alpha related technology I would n't be surprised. This is not really that bad a thing since FX32 was quite good at what it did (within its limits).
Wow did you just make up a lot of shit.
EPIC instuctions Emulator on Opteron.
Every time Intel is threatened by a competitor, it moves, and quickly, to copy the competition's specs. Good for them. It was only a matter of time.
To run existing applications on the 970, an IBM emulator would have to have a bit more to it than just emulation for the IA32 instruction set. Applications depend on an operating system and an actual API (as opposed to a "documented" API). If we want to run Windows applications to run on PPC, IA32 emulation is only a small part of it and most of the rest is already under development by other projects such as WINE.
It would help PPC for IBM to produce a software emulator for IA32, but it would also need to put some resources into helping Open Source projects fill in the gaps with the rest of the platform. I think Intel's IA32-on-IA64 emulation has a bit of an advantage here because the IA64 chips are supported by Windows, which hides the rest of the hardware platform from the applications.
-- John Truong
Having been the right school-age to had dealt with the first "PowerPC" Macintoshes, running System 7.5, this is a going to be a huge fiasco. The biggest problem that 7.5 had was that it was not running natively, the OS itself was being emulated. It sucked for performance. Yes, Apple did eventually get an all-PowerPC version out, with 8.0 or so, but at that point, it was geared toward the hardware of the time, which weren't 601's. School districts are still dealing with the effects of this screwup, and if they had simply built the OS in time to the hardware, this could have been averted.
And if you think that the commercial OS providers, all one of them that are mainstream, are going to have a version of their OS available to the general public for this machine, you're on something. They didn't even have support for more than 512 MB RAM in Windows Millennium, with a processor that can address 4GB.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You can easily recompile your apps to run at full speed, while all the nasty propietery stuff gets bogged. Now where did my gentoo for intanium install disc go?
Does this mean they can now take the ia32 hardware implementation out? I never liked that idea in the first place.
.doc format you used, or that built-on-contract accounting system you didn't obtain the source for, these days it's usually by your choice that you are in this predicament.</preachy>
And, really, can't plenty of us just roll our eyes and go back to compiling our systems from source? I mean, once there's a linux kernel + glibc + gcc port, thousands of applications are instantly available to you.
<preachy>Every time you find yourself strapped to a single architecture, ask yourself why you have all this proprietary baggage holding you back. Whether it's that Word
WTF are you talking about? The Itanium2 blows away the 970 or pretty much anything else for that matter.
Typo
This is so clearly the right way to go, that one has to really wonder what Intel was thinking when they only released a unreasonably slow hardware emulator. I suppose the integration with the operating systems is a bit of a mess, and a moving target at that, but there would have to have been a number of engineers at Intel and HP that would have seen the tremendous performance difference from the beginning. It's not as if software emulation had never been done before.
This, tragically, does hurt AMD quite a bit. I had read multiple rumors about Intel having something up their bunny-suited sleeves, but most of these rumors had Intel supporting x86-64 -- that is -- copying AMD for the first time. This announcement takes away one of the unique advantages of the Opteron/Athlon64 without following AMD's lead.
There are a number of other advantages to the x86-64 architecture and implementations, and I do hope that AMD has a winner here, but it's not going to be the slam-dunk it looked like yesterday. The AMD prices, the Hypertransport links between the processors, the NUMA memory systems, the on-chip memory controller, the human-readable assembly language -- these are all good things. We'll see if they are enough.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
the implementation of the UltraSPARC III is rather poor
Could you explain this a little more? Really, I am not pretending to be a CPU expert here, but I was under the impression that the Ultrasparc-IIIi is a valid opponent to the intel CPU's because of its considerable throughtput.Ok maybe it does not have the horsepower of a 3 GHz pentium but in terms of overall performance (I/O AND computations) they are comparable. I do not see why a 10 year old mature 64 bit CPU architecture can be that worse compared to the IA64 which seems to be a it's very beggining. I would argue that surely an UltraSparc cannot emulate a Pentium very well (because it lacks the MHz's) but that does not constitute a proof that the implementation is poor.
The Itanium2 is fricking fast. I mean, like, whoa kinda fast.
;-)
The Power5 might compete fovarably against the Itanium2, but not PPC 970.
PPC 970 is a consumer class chip tho, while Itanium2/Power5 are, well, not anything you'll find in a consumer's living room.
Will Intel concede to the AMD x86-64 architecture, or will they try to branch out on their own idea? (HINT: 2nd one is a bad idea... just look at the first "64 bit" itanium)
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Most of the MIPS crowd is just suffering from envy. Remember ACE? It is short for "Advanced Computing Environment"; its backer was the Stanford professor who invented the architecture called MIPS. He predicted over and over that the MIPS chips would bowl over the x86 chips because MIPS was better, cleaner. That was then. 1990.
In 1991, ACE imploded. Compaq stayed with Intel.
This is now. 2003. Much of the RISC stuff was marketing hype. Crack open the processor-architecture textbook. What do you see? Nothing profound. The only bit of quantitive science that appears in such a textbook is the claim that you should speed up the events that occur frequently. Again, nothing profound.
Most computer architectures are good enough. The PowerPC, though it is advertised as RISC, is not clean at all. The PowerPC has all sorts of complicated instructions. Yet, it crushes MIPS in performance.
Think about that. Think about how marketing created RISC. Marketing also created EPIC. Don't be fooled.
Please read "Inside the IBM PowerPC 970" by "ARS Technica". The PowerPC 970 clocks at 1.8 gigahertz.
Wow- almost had a well done troll there- too bad you had to ruin it with that pitiful jab at Sun.
Go back to demonizing the Chinese, shnook...
IBM already offer this functionality for their iSeries, though not with a software emulator but with a hardware expansion. Windows, Linux, Unix and OS/400 can run in different subsystems on one machine at the same time.
The desktop market is not really a priority for IBM, so don't expect IBM to put immense amounts of effort into a piece of software that would almost certainly cost you more than buying an actual additional x86 PC to run your 32 bit apps on.
You have a phone call from the real world. Come quickly, because it's extremely long distance.
Since it's software emulation, this means that it's OS dependent. So if you want run x86 apps on an OS that Intel hasn't written their emulator for, you're out of luck unless somebody else writes one. Imho, AMD's Opteron native hardware x86 support is much better, and I think the AMD chips will be much cheaper, much like the Athlon XP is much less $$ than the Pentium 4.
Back before Bill Gates and IBM's Entry System Division thrust Intel microprocessors into every other home on the planet, electronic systems designers were actively courted by Intel by their claim to developing products that won't invalidate all existing design work in one swell foop. And, for the most part, they held up on their end of that promise, which is why the Pentium 4 still has a little bit of the 8080 in it.
Now, when the i432 came out, it was a completely different beast -- and the i432 died a justified death. The i860 didn't fare that well, either. The i960 has seen quite a number of design-ins, because the solution base the i960 was geared to was sufficiently different from the 80x86 that designers didn't try to replace 80x86 chips with the RISC-based i960.
Intel, that was a clue.
What Intel didn't foresee, but should have, is the great technological bust of 1999 put a number of companies under. Source code has flown to the four winds, in some cases the foreclosures also nailed every single backup. In short, the migration path via recompilation was no longer an option. (Not to mention that there were no dollars to make even the most trivial changes to the source to deal with 64-bit processors.)
So this announcement is surprising only in that it comes so late in the product development cycle, as Intel is coming out with its second generation of IA64 chips.
Competition. It's a good thing.
As far as I can tell, there is no reason to switch to Itanium right now--it seems to be expensive, slow, and hard to compile for. This "compatibility layer" won't change that. When the Itanium is competitive in both performance and cost, then it's worth looking at again.
If the IA-64 instruction set is similar to the IA-32 one, then it shouldn't be hard to wrote a program that converts binaries from one processor to another before running the code?
By murphy's law, dynamic linking or primitive datatype sizes will keep this from being practicle.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The first Itanium was basically designed by Intel. Itanium 2 was HP's attempt to fix it (much better). Intel has lost it. They have great manufacturing and competent marketing, but they let all the best engineers leave (to AMD, IBM, Transmeta, etc.). And now they're starting to behave like Microsoft (threatening OEMs to try to stop them from using competing products). But their grip on the chip market isn't half as strong as Microsoft's on the OS market, so there's a serious risk of backfiring.
If you add AMD's engineering (Dirk "Alpha" Meyer & co.) to IBM's manufacturing (fabs nearly as good as Intel's and a lot more R&D), you have a pretty respectable force. Now all they need is decent marketing. And I suspect they'll get that from Microsoft (from Microsoft's point of view, anything that keeps Intel from growing too large is a good thing).
The fact that AMD is now insisting that "x86-64" be renamed "AMD64" might mean they know Intel is working on a "x86-64" CPU, and want to force them to use the new name. Wouldn't it be funny, an Intel CPU marked "AMD64 compatible"...? Now, does Intel care more about its money or it's honor? As Sir Francis Drake said, "you should fight for the one you have less of"...
Is this modded as +4 100% interesting???
Why why why?
Pity there is no -1 100% wrong choice huh?
and windows 95+ runs dos programs so well. I don't need a seperate box to play TIE Fighter or anything.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
So now Intel's Itanium is the exact same as Transmeta's Crusoe processors when running x86. Except Intel exposes the VLIW part of the chip.
And they call it EPIC instead of VLIW. This emulation can be pretty good. Transmeta was able to beat all native x86 chips when it first came out, and their manfacturing plants presumably weren't as nicely tuned as Intel and AMD's.
This should make it "trivial" for Itanium to also support x86-64/AMD64 if they wanted to "show how much more effecient Intel64 is".
Does this have anything *directly* in common with FX!32 I wonder?
Whatever happens, even if the Opteron was 100% full backwards compatible and 2x faster than Itanium, nobody in the server segment or even the high end workstation segment will buy an Opteron because they think that AMD makes unstable cheap processors targetted at the nerdy overclocking enthusiast.
I personnally don't agree, but my opinion isn't worth jack inside the corporation and I already know the system's administrator has a "Intel Inside" sticker on his forehead, even if the chips cost 2x as much. They say they pay for "quality". Psssh, what a load of bull.
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
From what I've seen, I would argue that their motive is the latter. Intel has show on several occasions that, these days, they simply don't give a damn about the end user. They care about market share, profits, and their precious stock price. Let's not forget the fact that "Pentium" was coined because Intel wasn't allowed to trademark the number 586.
Remember when they released an overclocked Pentium III to the public, and Tom's Hardware had that nice little article exposing it for the failure it was? It choked on GCC, among other things, while Intel steadfastly denied the problem. Then they actually recalled the processors. Competition at the expense of the end user... wonderful!
It is clear AMD is still going to come out on top in performance on this one, unless "software emulation" doesn't mean what I think it means. It is also clear to me that Intel has to do a lot more than throw some software emulation at an issue before I ever buy another Intel processor.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
The point of the Opteron isn't the fact that it can do 32bit fast, but that it can do 64bits in a way that everyone understands and has been hammered out for decades.
The Itanium is a marvelous piece of work however, how's going to adopt something so unknown, vs something so familiar? That is the point Intel missed, 32bit is dead, 64 bit is here, which one will be chosen?
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
I wonder if the emulation technique they'll be using will be similar to Transmeta's 'code-morphing'. I always wondered why intel didn't license that idea & use it on their Itanium. 'Code-morphing' achieved middle-of-the-road x86 performance on a VLIW (sound like a familiar goal?), but it was still far better than what Itanium gets with its current x86 support.
I own an Alpha machine, I did not receive "FX32!" on the driver CDROM; where can I download the "FX32!" from? I am aware it is for Microsoft Windows NT, etc.
I can't find it. I looked for digital.com, but it was claimed by compaq.com and thus no longer exists. I've been looking for a long time now. I have em32 on Linux, if I remember the name correctly. Thanks.
An interesting thought is that the instruction format and register set of AMD's x86-64 is just an extention of x86, so if Intel has a good emulator for x86 running on IA64, then it should be (from a technical standpoint, not a licensing standpoint) fairly trivial to emulate x86-64 at speeds similar to the x86 emulation. THAT doesn't bode well for AMD.
And as for licensing, a clean room implementation should be very easy considering it is simply an extention of x86.
Thanks for the pr0n link.
Shame on whoever modded this up.
In this 1996 Byte article, Selinda Chiquoine wrote that executing code written for one CPU on another "has always been like the talking dog" ? that is, the fact the dog could talk is a miracle in itself, even if all it could say was "sausages".
Itanium and the IA-64 instruction set depends very very very heavily on a good compiler to draw parallelism out of the code.
The reality is we may never get compilers that are that good, and we may never have many applications where much parallelism can be drawn out anyway... at least not enough to make it worthwhile.
EPIC is a huge gamble... one that may not pay off in the long run. I'm no fan of x86 per-se, but it seems that AMD has tried to bring it up to speed with x86-64... more registers (always the biggest complaint), dropping some of the cruft. I just have to wonder... with the major increase in die size and cost over the Opteron, the Itanium 2 sure doesn't bring that big of a performance lead to the table, and the Opteron still has lots of room to grow.
I think this latest effort is just Intel finally admitting that their x86 emulation strategy was a total failure (partial hardware emulation), so they are abandoning it and starting over with a software emulation layer. You cay pay through the nose for an IT2 system and get 1.5 Xeon MP performance. Well whoopity-do.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
A0 was an address register... did you mean D0, or did they actually do math in an address register?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I guess they had to do this to make it easy for Windows 2003 to work on the CPU.
Itanium has always had x86 emulation, just before it was done in hardware, and very very slowly. (The Itanium 1, at 800Mhz, ran x86 software at the speed of a 150Mhz pentium or so.)
A story at The Register, here explains that this new software will translate some of the x86 assembly to IA-64 assembly at runtime. (See picture)
This is the same way that HP's Aries works -- which translates HP-PA instructions into IA-64.
That works pretty well actually, delivering about 80% of the nominal speed most of the time. (We've used it a lot during development of HP-UX on Itanium, and actually ran a lot of the system binaries (ls, grep, etc.) on it until they were ported. Worked pretty well!).
What they still haven't done is implement something like this in hardware, but efficiently, like Transmeta does -- they translate x86 to a RISC core in hardware, and get really good performance. :)
But hey, this is Intel we're talking about
Someone else would have. Remeber NT 4.0 (and I think earlier versions) had an emulation layer for RISC processors to be able to run 386 binaries. I'm sure it wouldn't have taken long for MS or the open source people to come up with something similar. At least if Intel does it, they have the inside knowledge to be able to tune it for best performance.
paaarrallleelle?
Ok, not reading artiles before posting is common, and I guess by now I can deal with it - but not even reading a *comment* before moderating it!? People - you just modded up to +3 a link to www.teenmaidensonline.com! Good lord!! .NET is just a sure way to get modded up...
I guess bashing
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
Can't really understand why he was modded down -unless the rater was peeved that he hadn't heard the information himself?
I think it's an astute obsvervation that Slashdot sometimes reacts to online-press stories generated by official press releases about technology that everyone (or anybody who really cared) already knew about. If the reaction and discussion was to do with a company going public about old news, that would be fine, but folks that post about ancient history shouldn't delude themselves into thinking if it's on Slashdot, something technical just happened.
But they say this emulator will run faster then using the built-in x86 decoder.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The last program I had trouble of that sort was KDE 2.0-beta3 (may have been fixed anywhere from beta3-beta5) (and that may have been something else, as it was a wierd bug, because all the people I knew who had the problem (very limited set) all had alphas, and I didn't check or know anyone who checked on other archs)
Would all of you that make that arguement either 1-tell people their programming sucks, to the specific project, or more politely file a bug report. 2-stop with this linux/gcc/oss-in-general isn't 64-bit ready.
And if you want a time from when linux was 64-bit ready, look up a 533MHz Alpha's release date, and add about a year.(likely less, to determine how long I have been using a 64-bit ready linux)
Now, endianness may be a problem, or a cruddy instruction set, but don't confuse IA-64 or x86-64 as being the first 64-bit chips, and if you are going to argue that pointer arithmatic is problematic, then cite an example!
end rant on that subject
I fell for it even after seeing the link came from a teenmaidensonline domain. But I'm actually relieved it's just two lesbians getting it on, and not another horrible, horrible Goatse link.
what subject says
I know nothing about systems design, but why couldn't they have a slave ia32 cpu just running in the sidelines, somehow tied into the architecture ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I recall the DEC Alpha had this feature, where a live page in a foreign instruction set would be translated on the fly into DEC alpha instructions as a form of page fault. In fact, when NT was provided for the Alpha, they made use of this code morphing, and it really did work. The Alpha, of course, was also a 64 bit chip that actually worked, and worked very well, before the misers at Compaq lost the vision of what they had purchased, may the former and current CEO's of they and HP rot you know where...
When Linux first booted on Alpha, almost no OSS was 64-bit clean -- it took many years of effort to get (most, not all) stuff working. The only reason it stays working is because of an active community of Alpha users -- not because the i386 guys give a rats ass.
after seeing the performance of their competitors chips on existing x86 code. they've been talking about doing this for at least the last 6 months or so. presumably a user-mode code translator leaving the half-assed x86 thorn in the itanic's 120watt ass to handle any system level code (there shouldn't be much given the OS will need to be 64 bit).
this is all hot air. The opteron + hammer rock.
The Itanic always had full 32 bit x86 compatibility and a significant percentage of its die real estate is spent on it. It just sucks so much that it's outperformed by software emulation. Needless to say, if you use the software emulation layer you would *still* be paying for the hardware emulation.
No they're trying to spin this story as if it's actually something good and not a patch for a white elephant.
See this story on The Register
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The problems with AMD CPUs are that they don't run windows well. I never had any stability/performance problems on Athlons running Linux. None. And I have had lots of troubles with windows on same box. So if you intend to run windows, Intel might be a better choice. For Linux- AMD all the way.
Btw, I never had any thermal problems with CPU. I don't imagine a case where cooler would just fall off.
--Coder
As far as I can see, he wasn't moderated down. He hasn't been moderated at all. He just got a 0 start score because he posted as AC. As I'm doing.
Actually, the fork is between Intel and Intel - at least until we see how good the emulation really is. With IA64 Intel has forked with its own X86 past. AMD hasn't forked.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It looks like Intel is a bit concerned about Opteron after all; if they weren't, the probably wouldn't be putting in the x86 features into the Itanium shortly after the release of the Opteron. Either way, I think it shows that lately Intel is lacking some innovation, which is fine by me since I'm an avid AMD fan :)
I'm not a huge fan of x86, but being able to easily migrate to 64-bit, or even just being able to have 8 more GPR and SSE registers is a nice idea that Intel should have done LONG ago.
Years back I tried an x86 Sinclair Spectrum emulator on SoftPC on a Tadpole Sparcbook: it was only running something like a 40-50MHz Sparc chip from what I remember, but the Spectrum games still managed to run pretty much at full speed. The main benefit of the Sparcbook for emulation, AFAIR, was that it had a real VGA chip so SoftPC didn't have to emulate that as well as the CPU and other components.
"And, really, can't plenty of us just roll our eyes and go back to compiling our systems from source?"
What do you do with OS-dependent code that's no longer supported and was written for an OS a couple of versions behind the one you're running on? Untar, make... oops, three bazillion build errors. Or even, say, what would have been perfectly portable Xview code in these days of Gnome and the like.
Sure, you have the source, you may be able to understand it, and you could put in days, weeks or longer to fix it to build on the new OS. But on a number of occasions in the past I've avoided doing so by running an old a.out binary on Linux while migrating to new software which did the same job and was still supported. There are very good reasons for wanting to be able to run older code without recompilation.
Roll up your sleeves, pull them down, bend over and lookout here it comes 64 bit/with 32 bit emu home computing. So all you need is software emu, the national bird of New Zealand, that does not fly too well. Will hardware manufacturers be in any hurry to rewite their 32 drivers for the Win/Intel emu world, not if they can sell suckers new stuff. Get real you guys do you really think all the driver issues that are going to come out of the wood work will be that easy to address? The pci card issues alone will make your hair stand on end, so you will have to make sure you buy only Intel certified hardware. At higher prices, naturally. Forget your raid array buddy it will crap big ones. SCSI where are you? Will the emu do a good enough job of rerouting the instructions? Will the I64/32 be now portable or even possible, (given Microshaft software patents) in Linux? Hey they are talking about core Win32 code in the emu here, not just the stuff that Wine emulates. How easily one forgets Windows 3.0 and the first release of Windows 95, Win 98, not to mention the biggest piece of software crap ever unloaded on the public Windows ME/2000. We all had to rush out and buy new hardware, and hope that there were no driver and software issues.
Well its happenning all over again, the hardware manufacturers, (so called MS hardware partners) are getting hungy and they are about to feast on the beast. Intel and Microshaft have got more crap up their sleeves, and it is aimed directly at your wallet. Save money buy the Hammer! Or an Apple if you have lots of cash. Save yourself future head aches, learn to use real computers, with real software.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Most Modern Processors (non-intel) use x86 emulation anyway look for instance at the amd k5, k6, k7, these are basically risc86 cpus' that have a decode unit to translate code to and from
x86, in fact i believe they have their roots in
amd 29k chips which were very good chips for their day. In fact in some ways the x86 wraparound is much faster at the same things than if the chips executed native x86.
(As above)
There's a question that's been on my mind lately: How can Guspaz poor fat sexless live at home loser child molester palliate and excuse the atrocities of his rank-and-file followers and then turn around and shed tears for those who got hurt as a result? I mean, he is known for publishing what is easily identifiable as opinion under the guise of fact. I begin with critical semantic clarifications. First, when I'm through with him, he'll think twice before attempting to throw away our freedom, our honor, and our future. I guess that my take on this is that we can divide his contrivances into three categories: wrongheaded, feeble-minded, and heinous.
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Because Guspaz poor fat sexless live at home loser child molester's di
Ummm, no.
First off, you missed an extremely important technical detail of the PPC 970: they removed little-endian mode. Sure, you can still use instructions that store and fetch in little-endian mode, but you are forced to use indexed addressing mode when doing so. The upshot, for an emulator such as Virtual PC, is that a PUSH instruction on the x86 now takes 3 PPC 970 instructions instead of 1 G3/G4 instruction. Also there is no way on the 970 to load or store floating-point numbers in little-endian, so all those instructions take five or ten times longer.
Second off, emulators are NOT easy to write. Can't imagine where you got that. For one thing, you end up having to emulate hardware in addition to software, and the 20 years of IBM PC evolution is not pretty or elegant in any way. For another, x86 CPUs do automatic code flushing, which you have to emulate, meaning that every store instruction potentially is a code-modifying instruction that you have to beware of.
Finally, perhaps the biggest problem is still code size. 1K of x86 code still translates into 3-4K of PowerPC translation. Meaning a PowerPC would need 4 megs of instruction cache to do as well as an x86 with 1 meg of instruction cache. Lack of little-endian mode means it's even worse.
None of these problems get easier with the 970. Now, true, the 970 is a nice fast chip, and well-written PPC code will fly on it. But many of the ways in which the 970 is fast don't help emulation at all. And the lack of little-endian mode just blows chunks.
jbx (former VPC engineer)
(sig) The last bug isn't fixed until the last user is dead. (/sig)
Not.
Even granny knows better by now.
She told me that for the price of the In-time-e-yum, it makes more sense to build an 8-way Opteron system, and get vastly greater memory bandwidth (even with slower memory), far better latency (especially since there's no emulation tacked on), more execution units, and almost equivalent space heating capability :)
No need to build Yamhill, marketing is a perfect substitute for technology. Just rename it. How about: Intankium (hook it up to that toilet tank water cooler), In-trainium (someone is still learning how to build it).
I've read it. What does the gigahertz have to do with any of it? Obviously _you_ need to do some more reading. ;-)
You mean you're still whining and using excuses, you swine? How totally pathetic.