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Apple Switching to Intel
Steve Jobs announced at the WWDC keynote today that Apple is switching to Intel processors. MacNN has live coverage. The bottom line is that Mac OS X for the last five years has been running on Intel, the switch is expected to be complete in two years, and Rosetta will allow PPC apps to run on Intel-based Macs, transparently. If you're using Xcode, it is small changes and a recompile; otherwise, you might be seeing a lot of work ahead of you. You will be able to order the 10.4.1 preview for Intel today.
This was one of those rumors that seemed too implausible to ever happen, but look at that -- it did!
Hopefully they do it right and produce a BIOS-less really sweet piece of hardware. The SGI Visual Workstation was an example of an X86 machine done right; so at least it can be done.
Will be interesting to see their PPC emulation layer -- that's goign to be a monumental challenge... Maybe Intel will taylor them an X86 with some more registers or something to make it easier.
it was nice knowing ya :-(
All you guys that want OSX on your x86-
1) It still WON'T happen. At least not with Apple's blessing. Be assured that they'll do everything they can to make it so you can't run it on commodity hardware. Don't underestimate them, either- they know how smart you are.
2) SHUT THE FUCK UP AND JUST BUY AN APPLE. ANY Apple. The cost differences aren't that much, and you can have a machine that's sure to work as designed, everything, every time. Buy It From Apple or Don't Buy It From Apple. There is no middle ground here.
do() || do_not();
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!1111ONE
(Hello mister lameness filter. Have you ever tried braiding the hair on your balls? Well, I haven't, and yet I still feel like using caps to actually mean that I'm YELLING IN PAIN!)
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if a billion Mac zealots cried out at once, and were silenced..." /Ob_Obiwan
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Now the cool thing with a PPC chip in it will only be the XBOX.
Probably, the same way they stop people from running it on commodity PowerPC hardware.
All the facts to date point to the Intel chips that will be used in Macs to be stock Pentium chips. No-one on stage mentioned Intel and Apple developing custom silicon. I hope to hell they ARE developing custom screens though, otherwise I don't know where this gets us"
1. PPC to Pentium we loose the "Velocity Engine". Intel's SSE sucks and the Altivec cores in the G4 and G5 processors are what made them scream for multimedia.
2. PPC to Pentium does nothing to lower the cost of the system. Apple won't make more margin and consumer's won't pay less.
3. PPC to Pentium does nothing to lower the heat output of the system.
4. Pentium CPUs are incapable of SMP (at least the stock ones). That means no more dual processor systems, and I know from experience that dual procs are the shit for high load tasks.
5. Pentium 64 is a brand new and unproven technology. Intel's history with creating and producing 64bit chips is dismal (Itanium anyone?)
6. 10 vs 70 "performance units per watt". What the hell is a "performance unit"?? The amount of heat generated per watt of input power?
It's VERY telling to me that during the keynote we saw a demo of Mathmatica running on Intel based Macs but we DIDN'T see a head-to-head comparison of that same code base between the Intel and PPC based systems.
I'm hoping that the P4 3.6 developer systems are simply testbeds for people to get their code ported and tested while the real silicon for the Apple systems is produced.
If the chip is not going to be custom, then why spend the $$ for Macintosh over Windows? Apple will have zero speed advantage, zero cost advantage, and if Microsoft gets things even close to right this time, zero virus/security advantage. I'm all for style, but not when it lacks substance.
People say that moving to x86 gives Apple the ability to leverage Intel against AMD. Big deal, that didn't help at all when Apple had Motorola and IBM to battle leverage against each other. We just wound up with both of them being laggards.
I just don't see how this is is a positive step in any way. Sure IBM made Steve look like a shmuck by not delivering on the 3Ghz promise. NOTHING said in the keynote today made any sense to me, whatsoever.
My next Mac will be whatever the last PPC based PoweMac will be. I think it will be a LONG time after that before I purchase another Mac.
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