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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.
It's crow. Eat up. (I'll have to eat my share too.)
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Late Friday afternoon, C|Net News published an extremely valuable trade secret about Apple and Intel, days before Apple was scheduled to announce it ( Apple to Ditch IBM, Switch to Intel Chips ). So, where's the friggin' lawsuit against C|Net to find out who leaked? Where is the judge who is going to claim that what C|Net published was "stolen property"?
6 /05/apple_intel_wheres_the_lawsuit_against_cnet.ph p
From: http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/2005/0
Man, it is cold in hell today. Brr. :P
- oZ
// i am here.
Are you sure [y/N]?
My prediction of when you'll be able to run Mac OS X on an x86 machine is still: never. Apple isn't a software company. They're a hardware company. Just because they're changing their processor does not mean you're going to be able to run it on your hardware.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I also have been agreeing with the industry analysts who said Apple would be running on Intel chips before long, and I've been vindicated.
Now, if my prediction that Microsoft will have a Linux or other UNIX-like kernel in Windows by 2015 holds up I'll consider myself the Nostradomus of IT.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
The rumors are true: Intel will be inside
Jobs talked about the major transitions in the Mac's life -- starting from the Mac's Motorola 68000-series processor to PowerPC. "The PowerPC set Apple up fro the next decade. It was a good move," he said.
"The second transition was even better -- the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X that we just did," he continued. "This was a brain transplant. And even though these operating systems (9 and x) vary only by one in name, they are very different, and this has set Apple up for the next 20 years."
As the Intel logo lowered on the stage screen, Jobs said, "We are going to make the transition from PowerPC to Intel processors, and we are going to do it for you now, and for our customers next year. Why? Because we want to be making the best computer for our customers looking forward."
"I stood up here two years ago and promised you 3.0 GHz. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook, and we haven't been able to deliver that to you," said Jobs. "But as we look ahead, and though we've got great products now, and great PowerPC products still to come, we can envision great products we want to build, and we can't envision how to build them with the current PowerPC roadmap," said Jobs.
Intel processors provide more performance per watt than PowerPC processors do, said Jobs. "When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PoweRPC gives us 15 units of perfomance per watt, but Intel's roadmap gives us 70. And so this tells us what we have to do," he explained.
Transition to Intel by 2007, and yes, Marklar exists
"Starting next year, we will introduce Macs with Intel processors," said Jobs. "This time next year, we plan to ship Macs with Intel processors. In two years, our plan is that the transition will be mostly complete, and will be complete by end of 2007."
Jobs then confirmed a long-held belief that Apple was working on an Intel-compatible version of Mac OS X that some have termed "Marklar."
Mac OS X has been "leading a secret double life" for the past five years, said Jobs. "So today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for PowerPC and Intel. This has been going on for the last five years."
Jobs demonstrated a version of Mac OS X running on a 3.6GHz Pentium 4-processor equipped system, running a build of Mac OS X v10.4.1. He showed Dashboard widgets, Spotlight, iCal, Apple's Mail, Safari and iPhoto all working on the Intel-based system.
Apple needs developers' help to complete the transition
"We are very far along on this, but we're not done," said Jobs. "Which is why we're going to put it in your hands very soon, so you can help us finish it."
Widget, scripts and Java applications should work in the new environment without any conversion, said Jobs. Cocoa-based applications will require "a few minor tweaks and a recompile." Carbon-based applications require "a few more tweaks," recompiling, and "they'll work," said Jobs. And projects built using Metrowerks' CodeWarrior need to be moved to Xcode.
The future of Mac OS X development is moving to Xcode, said Jobs. Of Apple's top 100 developers, more than half -- 56 percent -- are already using Xcode, and 25 percent are in the process of switching to Xcode. "Less than 20 percent are not on board yet. Now is a good time to get on board," said Jobs.
A new build of Xcode, version 2.1, is being released today. This new release enables developers to specify PowerPC or Intel architectures. "... and you're going to build what's called a universal binary. It contains all the bits for both architectures," said Jobs. "One binary, works on both PowerPC and Intel architecture. So you can ship one CD that supports both processors."
"This is nothing like Carbonizing"
Many developers reading this news may be thinking that they'll have to go through the same woes they had to in order to get their Mac OS 9 applications "Carbonized" to run on
Somebody send this guy some Worcestershire sauce. I hear it goes well with felt.
The powerbooks weren't cutting it and there was NO WAY to get a G5 in there.
Maybe I can get back to a 4-5hr runtime like the first generation Tibook had..
..don't panic
Possibly not - the new version of XCode builds universal binaries for both Intel and PPC. So, what's the problem again?
Keep in mind. Mac OS X is a unix OS, with lots of unixy underpinnings.
You loose *some* compatability with existing Mac apps.
More likely than not, all Linux apps will be recompilable for Mac. No sweat.
This means OpenOffice.org 2.0 will work *now*.
This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.
Virtual PC will run *much* faster. No more cpu emulation is needed.
Vmware will run on a mac.
Plus, all the big name apps will run just as fast. Adobe, Macromedia (same company now). Not to mention the Apple Pro apps, Video stuff, etc. That stuff will be perfect.
WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Sticking with the Mac would be annoying and difficult because of compatibility headaches, so you're switching to Linux?
Never. Apple will simply use a custom chipset in their hardware, and OS X will only run on that chipset. The chipset will be incompatible with Windows. Absolutely nothing will change with regards to compatibility between Macs and Wintels. Of course, something COULD change at any moment, and that's what's so beautiful about this plan. After Apple has successfully migrated the OS X developer community to MacIntels, it would be an easy step to open the floodgates and unleash OS X for ALL Wintel systems. My guess is that Apple isn't doing this until Microsoft is less of a threat (perhaps with a democratic administration in to pursue unfair business practices by Microsoft), but it's basically an "in case of unbridled euphoria, break glass" option.
"Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms." - Fyodor Dostoevsky -Chines
Now that Apple has announced that it is moved to Intel, who is going to buy a G5 now? I am sure as hell not. Apple just killed the sales of its hardware for the rest of the year. Also does this mean I will be able to buy a Dell PowerEdge 2850 running Mac OSX Server?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
...did he say anything about a two-button mouse?
All of this would assume that they wanted the information kept secret. I have little doubt that if news.com was publishing this information, Apple didn't have that big of an interest in keeping it secret. With individual product releases, they are quite a bit more protective because they want to control how the products are treated in the media.
A good example of how this can work, if information came out on the shuffle well in advance of release, you'd see lots of reviews picking it apart for it's lack of a display, etc. So, before it ever hit the streets there would be a certain image of the device that could hurt their sales. But when Apple released it, they managed to spin the lack of display as a sort of feature. That the shuffle is about random playing, not picking songs out of a large library.
As far as this change goes, it doesn't really need to be handled in any particular way. They needed to keep it officially secret as a publicly traded company, but practically speaking I don't think they really cared. Ultimately the people most effected by it, ISV's, seem to have had some awareness ahead of time under NDA's (at least the bigger ones).
The end users of macs, for the most part, won't even understand what this means, or care. As long as the next mac they buy runs the software they have now and works as well as what they have now, they won't care.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
It'll be available about 30 seconds after DVD-Jon releases a patch to install Mac OS X on any Dell, and it will be withdrawn about 30 seconds later after Apple mobilizes all Mac OS X 10.4 machines into a botnet to DDOS the living crap out of any server which serves a copy of said patch.
For more information, click here.
And this transition is different. There isn't a viable benefit to the customers.
No, this is bullshit. There's an extremely viable benefit to consumers: Apple will still be relevant in three years.
Why do you think Apple is doing this? It's not for shits and giggles. Those mobile G5s everyone's been waiting for, the one's that were going to save Apple's portable line from irrelevancy? It should be pretty obvious at this point that IBM has told Apple they aren't coming. Freescale dropped the ball, the G4 line is miles behind the times and Freescale lacks the ability to bring it up to date.
"Consumers don't benefit"? Bullshit. Consumers benefit because this is the only way Apple can keep their portables competitive. Laptops are the fastest growing segment of the market place, and Apple finally hitting 2Ghz with a G4 and its you've-got-to-be-shitting-me slow bus sometime next year wasn't going to cut it. Laptop sales fall, software makers lose interest, Apple fails, Apple's customers lose.
I'd rather they bet it all on a transition to keep the company relevant, rather than keep Freescale's incompetency and IBM's disinterest in laptop-suitable engineering as an anchor to hold them back in the market place until sheer inevitability kills the platform.
Macs run on Intel and Microsoft uses PowerPC! What a country!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Just for the OS? I'm wondering.
Yes.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Oh this is so exciting.
...
Over the years, I've made a ton of bets with Mac fans who swore up and down that Apple would never, ever switch to Intel processors.
I am now owed several kegs of beer and some free fancy dinners. A couple people owe me a million bucks.
Business strategy:
1. Make wagers with Apple people.
2.
3. Profit! Steve Jobs will make the announcement for you.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Farewell?
(official "apple is dead" #94,549,238,192,204,223)
Apple has shown time and time again their resiliency to major hardware and software migrations. Once people get over the shock and awe of this announcement, people will start to realize it was a natural progression. We will be moving from a "niche" OS using a "niche" CPU to a "niche" OS using the "industry standard" CPU.
If next year, IBM sold off their PPC manufacturing, Apple would/could be dead in the water. Now that they are with Intel, they can just glide along with the industry.
Little endian makes Baby Jesus cry.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
And WINE/VirtualPC running so well may be the biggest disaster for MacOS -- why should Microsoft continue to support MSOffice/Mac when you can just run the Windows version in WINE? Why should Adobe build Acrobat for MacOS, when the Windows version (runs just as fast in WINE!) has more features and costs less??
Good Windows emulation is probably what killed OS/2, it can kill OS X too...
Think about it. We don't have a G5 Powerbook because we hear about the massive heat issues. Hell, just recently, I am having to take back my recently aquired G4 Powerbook because they are catching on bloody fire.
Secondly, I understand that Adobe is not making Photoshop and their other products for the Mac *first*. They are going to the PC, and then the Mac.
I mean, this quote says it all:
"I stood up here two years ago and promised you 3.0 GHz. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook, and we haven't been able to deliver that to you," said Jobs. "But as we look ahead, and though we've got great products now, and great PowerPC products still to come, we can envision great products we want to build, and we can't envision how to build them with the current PowerPC roadmap,"
So they go Intel. Who cares? Most of us are using Linux on x86, and we couldn't care less. The only thing that alarmed me was that they didn't choose AMD64, but thats just me. Hopefully, this will influence developers to port their stuff over to OS X now (which would benifit Linux indirectly imo). So hopefully we'll get a ton more games (yay!... games are a wasteland on the Mac) and apps because of this switch.
Things are abotu to get interesting now. Its like Jobs saying, "OK, Gates... lets fight in your ring."
++Om
The transition was so difficult for the audio and video industry, that for many people it STILL hasn't happened. You can find workhorse macs running OS9 in nearly every recording studio and post production house in LA.
1. If Rosetta works as well as demonstrated (Jobs showed unmodified PPC versions of Photoshop+filters and MS Office running happily and fast on the Intel Mac box) then this will be less painful than you think.
2. The way the Intel and PowerPC raodmaps are going I think in three uears time there will be a HUGE difference in capability. Jobs was demoing a Pentium 3.6GHz quad for God's sake!
Folks, you can argue the technical pros and cons back and forth until you're sick in the face, but one thing lept out at me from Steve Jobs' presentation :
"Mac OS X has been "leading a secret double life" for the past five years, said Jobs. "So today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for PowerPC and Intel. This has been going on for the last five years."
Damn. This is forward looking, hedge all your bets corporate Management. World class Management.
I don't know if this thing will succeed or fail, but just parsing that statement above shows me that Jobs and Apple Computer will continue to evaluate all possible options at all possible times.
This is one well run company.
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The preview includes the computer itself. A 3.6GHz P4. "Read the keynote"
-JD-
Dude, do you even know what "recompiling" means? Your entire post is nonsense.
/unix software on OS X is that GUI apps don't share quite the same API, which means they have to be run in an X server app, which is sort of kind of like wine, only 100% compatible and 100% ugly.
Linux apps are ALREADY recompilable and compatible for mac. All of them, just about. There were only problems when OS X beta first hit, and that was mostly because people had been writing their Makefiles poorly.
Modern computer software is almost never CPU-tied. The only problem is you have to recompile to run on different CPUs, which means you have to have source code. Linux apps, conveniently, you usually do, meaning transitioning between CPU archs as a linux user is effortless in a way it will not be for OS X users. The only problem with linux
This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.
I assure you, no. The reasons inkscape is broken on my mac have nothing whatsoever to do with processors. I don't know what the holdup on openoffice 2.0 is, but I think it's less to do with chips and more to do with APIs. If there's some incompatibility between OO2 and Apple X11 I'm sure it would be fixed by now if someone felt like using a word processor inside the X11 battlemech were worth it.
What you're saying is kind of like "no more second-class windows versions of popular OS apps" because Cygwin exists there.
WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.
That does have interesting implications. But it's going to require a LOT of work to make that work, above and beyond what Wine's already doing. Wine will have to be practically rewritten for cocoa. Otherwise we'll be running the partially-incompatible wine translation layer inside the compatible-but-awkward X11 translation layer. Eww. I don't really expect wine for os x to get to the point your average person can run it for a long time, and I don't expect it to really work ever unless Apple themselves decide to put some work into it.
And Wine doesn't mean much to me personally. Again, great for Apple, great for switchers, not so much for anyone who's already invested in the mac. Windows apps are half the reason windows isn't worth using. The only thing it's really got worth keeping are games, and well, not only are those what Wine is worst at, that's what that little multicolored box plugged into my TV is for.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Do you have any evidence to back this assertion? Generally speaking, Altivec in the G5 has the same function and performance as SSE2 in the Pentium 4. I use floating point functions that I have developed and coded in assembly language myself, and I don't see any difference between Altivec and SSE2 at the fundamental level.
Most of the derogatory comments by Apple users about the supposed shortcomings of SSE2 are ill informed, they seem to confuse SSE2 with MMX. Optimization for either the Altivec or SSE2 is a complex subject. First, one has to find an algorithm that works well for vector operations, which means making sure that add and multiply operations will overlap correctly. Then one has to adapt that algorithm for the cache size, CPU clock, and memory bus cycle times. The main problem here is to avoid starving the cache. One has to balance how many operations are done by the CPU for each byte that comes from/to RAM and make sure that the timing is right. All these factors vary a lot between different CPU, mobo, and RAM models. To state that Altivec is either better or worse than SSE2 is simplistic, they are functionally identical and the relative performance between them will be determined by secondary factors.
The biggest problem in SSE2 is that the only compiler that optimizes it well is Intel's, gcc sucks when generating code for the P4, but with hand-optimized code this is irrelevant. If the Intel architecture that Apple will adopt has SSE2, this could be very good news for developers. Let's hope Apple implements efficient optimization for SSE2.
Actually, I found that the 68K to PPC transition went pretty smoothly. Virtually everything still ran. On the first generation of PowerPC's, 68K applications ran perceptibly slower, but not by much--about like having a 68030 instead of a 68040. By the second generation, even the 68K applications were faster than on 68040.
And it is likely that this transition will probably go even more smoothly: Early versions of the PPC MacOS still were running a lot of 68K OS code in emulation; it is a safe bet that the Intel OS X will be 100% native code. And there is less hand-tweaked assembly code running around, so it will be easier for developers to simply recompile. Most major applications are already cross-platform, so developers already know what to tweak to enhance Intel processor performance.
My guess is that the transition will be smoother than the PPC transition, and much smoother than the OS X transition.
Financially, this is going to be a big bump for Apple. I'm certainly not going to order any more new Macs until the Intel systems are available. This may be one reason why they chose to do it now, when the success of the iPod will carry them through.
It may be the best decision for Apple, but I still think that it would have been better if they'd been able to reach a deal with IBM to develop the PPC further. I would much rather have seen multicore PPC's.
The question of whether the Intel OS X will run on generic Intel hardware seems to still be open. I'd guess not, but then I didn't believe that they'd switch to Intel in the first place.
You so need to sit down and take a chill-pill. Being x86 will not make it easier to make viruses. That whole aspect will depend on the OS, and it is still OSX. And your friends computer is suddenly not going to stop working. The transition is not happening for a wee while yet, and so Apple will still support his system. They're even going to allow the production of dual platform binaries. You're just getting worked up over nothing. I just think you and your friend are zealots - mac on x86 may be good. They might even have the rights to licence altivec over to intel processors. Just chill...
C|Net's article created fantastic media buzz for Apple. I'm betting that ten times as many people followed today's keynote address than otherwise would have. This allowed Steve to explain the transition in the best possible light, to a huge audience. And I do think he did a great job of putting a positive spin on this, with the CEO of Intel and the cofounder of Wolfram Research as eloquent guest speakers.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Possibly not - the new version of XCode builds universal binaries for both Intel and PPC. So, what's the problem again?
The problem is when some "smart" developer decides to save space on his binary by simply not compiling in PowerPC support because "his userbase doesn't have that significant of a percentage of PowerPC users anymore". That's fine and dandy to the majority of x86 Mac users, but what about those left with a perfectly good aging PowerPC system?
They're suddenly unsupported and that's a horrible worthless feeling with nobody to blame it on except Apple for making, at worst, an arbitrary platform shift. At best, it's a failure of engineering which isn't terribly reassuring either.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
I've figured it out. You may be wondering what the hell Apple's reasoning is when IBM has some very promising things in the pipeline. Well I know. The MHz myth is now dead. Even if Macs could be X% faster than PCs by using IBM chips, it's a gamble. If Apple is ahead, eventually they'll be behind, and the cycle will repeat itself. The whole argument is now a moot point. Macs will always be THE SAME SPEED as PCs (give or take a small bit at any given time) from now on. If IBM pulls out ahead in the speed race, it won't matter, because Windows PCs don't use IBM chips, and they never will. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. A guaranteed tie is better than gambling on a possible loss or a very, very minor win at best. There's also a secondary benefit: If the hardware business becomes unprofitable, Apple can always become a software company at a moment's notice. And it looks like Apple's going to make this easy enough for both end users and developers. I see all of this as good news and welcome our new Intel overlords.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
Regarding OO.org, theres plenty of architecture specific code in OO.org that had to be re-written for OS X. That's why the 1.0 port took so long. I'm not talking about NeoOffice/J, by the way, I'm talking about the X11 port. That's why the Mac X11 OO.org port alpha is 6 months overdue *so far*.While running under X11 is less than ideal, it'll still work nicely.
NeoOffice/J hasn't even started working on OO.org 2.0.
I understand the problems associated with an aqua port. Even without aqua, there are quite a few apps which make poor assumptions about the architecture they are running on, and quite a few libraries which use code that won't compile on a mac. I'm talking about just running stuff normalish linux apps on X11 on your Mac.
Not everything is a portable as you make it out to be. Plenty of programmers make poor assumptions when writing their software, including the sun guys who wrote the original star office codebase.
Oh, and Fullscreen opengl works great on the Mac's X11 implementation right now. I doubt that we'll see that go away on Mac OS X x86.
Why *shouldn't* wine work? We don't know the specifics of the OS yet, but Wine works on Freebsd. Transgaming believes that Cedega can be shoehorned onto Freebsd.
And cedega, if you haven't tried it, is fantastic for running Windows Games on Linux. Not 100%, mind you, but it handles a lot of games extremely well. In some cases, with better-than-windows performance.
Freebsd->Darwin isn't really that big of a jump, if you are talking about x86. Running Half-Life 2, even under X11, even under Cedega, could be quite a big selling point.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I don't think so. I think they'll be pointing at IBM and saying, yeah, it was a really good platform up till now, but those guys in the suits dropped the ball on us, are too stupid to get the G5 right (a well-publicized problem), and Intel took the lead with the new Pentium portables. Fuck this -- we have always gone with the best chip out there, starting with the 6502, and we always will. Heck, with all of the Intel ads out there, your average consumer probably saw the PowerPC as more of a problem. Like, why aren't these guys using "the Centrino" like everybody else?
In fact, after a bit of quick footwork, this will be a beautiful position for Apple to be in. Look, they can say, this is what you can do with a Pentium -- if you have OS X. Look, kids, same hardware has your Windows box, but not one single virus, no crashes, no maleware...
Having Intel and Apple dovetail their marketing efforts -- scary, actually. But not bad.
It also about supply, IBM was bad enough making enough processors for Apple. AMD is a lot smaller than either Intel or IBM... They would be betting their future on a company on the ability for AMD to fill their demand. I don't think it was a risk they were willing to take.
Disclaimer: I am an OpenOffice.org Mac OS X devleoper and a founder of the NeoOffice project
Quote: This means OpenOffice.org 2.0 will work *now*. This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.
This statement couldn't actually be farther from the truth. In fact, it will actually make the push for OpenOffice.org, at least, more difficult. If you dig into the details it means there's much more work ahead:
Changing processors does nothing to help OpenOffice.org development on Mac OS X except slow it down yet again. Chances are you'll probably see it running in an emulator for a long time before it's running on Mactel hardware.
ed
My apologies to Mr. Orwell, but it must be done:
At this moment, for example, in 2005 (if it was 2005), Apple was at war with Motorola and in alliance with Intel. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Apple had been at war with Intel and in alliance with Motorola. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Apple was at war with Motorola: therefore Apple had always been at war with Motorola. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
Even worse, as long as we're admitting stuff, the boxes weren't all that shiny!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
nah, you'll buy a mac for the same price, and it'll look the same and work the same (only faster). I don't see how a switch from powerpc to x86 is an ideological shift or anything.
Apple has been slowly transitioning from proprietary hardware for a very long time. 20 years ago the system was all SCSI/68000/3.5" floppies (when PCs were IDE/x86/5.25"). That stuff cost too much money though (economics of scale), so they switched. The only thing left was the CPU, and its been killing them.
As long as the machines are still built by apple exclusively, this'll be more-or-less transparent to the mac user.
Jeremy
Apple posted Intel Universal Binary documentation to their website. It's interesting, and everyone should read it. Notable is a caveat that OpenFirmware is going away. That seems to point towards more standard hardwware.
Your G4 processor was obsolete when you bought it.
It's not like your PPC is going to stop working next year. It's not like Apple is going to abandon PPC users. I'm sure that eventually, like the 68000 series, the PPCs will stop getting updates. I'm sure that date is a lot farther in the future than the usable lifetime of a G4 mini.
Personally, I'm still going get a G4 mini. I'm sure they will be faster, maybe cheaper in the future. Such is all technology.
I had so hoped, though, that we were finally going to get beyond the x86 architecture - that their strategy of piling kluge on top of kluge on top of kluge in the name of backwards-compatibility was finally going to come crashing down.
That the chip guys could start spending resources on actual innovation in hardware design, without having to keep one foot in the bucket of x86 binary compatibility.
That PowerPC, or the Cell, or anything with less than thirty years of binary baggage, might get out ahead and stay there long enough to put x86 to rest.
Dammit!
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Quite simply, Intel no longer uses CISC. Sure the instruction set is CISC, but it's all microcode reduced to RISC instructions underneath the hood (which was done WAAAY back with the Pentium II and may have partially been implemented on the original Pentium). MMX has been dead for a while, replaced by SIMD and SIMD2, which can actually run in parallel to the floating point unit and no longer requires a context switch. Seriously, though, outside of the math world, you probably don't need either unless you're doing software rendering of graphics - the original reason for MMX was to speed up processing of games and video effects in software and this work is now pretty much entirely handled by the GPU.
What hypocracy! When Apple wanted to "prove" that Intel was slower, they used GCC. Now that they need to use Intel, they're using the manufacturer's recommended compiler and getting better results.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
I don't think dual booting will happen. Too much work, and makes Mac users reboot (and we love doing that!)
I think the more likely scenario is a version of Virtual PC that doesn't suck. Runs the windows code semi-natively...
... according to the developers docs on the apple home-page, Intel-based macs will not use openfirmware, also:
i gns+with+Intel+-+page+2/2100-7341_3-5733756-2.html ?tag=st.next
from cnet today:
http://news.com.com/Apple+throws+the+switch%2C+al
--------------
After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
Physicists get Hadrons!
It's an ideological shift because for years the Mac Zealots have pulled the Apple line about why the PPC is superior to x86. Now they are forced to admit that PPC was a mistake.
Either that, or that Jobs has made a mistake in going to Intel.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
I love my Mac for the usability of its user interface (both CLI and GUI) and for the fact that it looks so damn good. It depresses me when I have to fire up my ugly old PC when I actually want my code to finish in a reasonable time.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Apple's gcc supports universal (fat) binaries. XCode uses gcc for compilation, but it's just a wrapper. Gcc still works fine without it.
The SGI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstatio n>Visual Workstation shows just how easy it is to produce an x86 based computer that is not really a PC. The biggest difference is that there was no BIOS, but ARCS firmware.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Let's ask someone who understands deeply the full and total differences between AltiVec and SSE2.
Like, me. I wrote the AltiVec emulation in PearPC. Thus, I have quite a bit of authority on the differences between the two.
AltiVec has a more fleshed out assortment of instructions. SSE2, and SSE both are missing a number of instructions. Most of these don't get used often, so you're not losing much in the way of speed, but AltiVec has a more complete implementation.
EXAMPLE:
PAVGB
PAVGH
but no PAVGW
PMINUB and PMINSW, but no PMINSB, PMINUH, PMINSH, PMAXUW
PSLLW and PSLLD, but no PSLLH, or PSSLB (same for all packed shifts)
Then, I'll point out a number of points upon the design straight from the Pentium 4 optimization guide.
Don't use SSE when 64-bits is all you're working on. This makes obvious sense for floating point code (denormals take a long time to calculate and can stall results for the stuff you want), but this is saying use MMX when only using 64-bits of data. Because, and I kid you not. They say that the 128-bit SSE is wider, and thus performs slower. (Why should it when it's PARALLEL execution.)
Also, SSE3 is breaking parallel operations by providing horizontal instructions. Why even vectorize these, they're going to run as slow as scalar operations. Ok, so you get out of passing it back out to memory, but come on, the idea of a vectorization unit is to perform parallel vector math. But I understand the strong desire to make things work fast rather than proper, and avoiding those few clock-cycles means that they're willing to stall a vector unit on a scalar operation.
Um... what do we have left. AH yes. The problem of XORPS vs PXOR. They both do the same thing right? They XOR the value of one 128-bit register against another 128-bit register. But there's a fundamental point here. If you use XORPS on an XMM register, which is integer, then you're going to get slow down. If you use PXOR on an XMM register, which is floating point, then you're going to get slow down. Now this really isn't a problem when you can track this information and such. But really. Shouldn't these both be equated to the same microcode, and handled by say, a logic vector unit that handles permutes (sorry, shuffles) and logic? WOULDN'T THAT MAKE SENSE. Not apparently to the SSE designers.
Now, SSE2 yes had double-percision floating point in 128-bit vector registers, which gets you a whole incredible 2 elements per vector. Wow, that's definitely worth the overhead of using vector registers, and insuring alignment, etc. Plus, the G5 can issue two identical FPU instructions at one time, and since all PowerPC math is done in double-precision (or better internally to an instruction) you get two double-precision operations per cycle. Wow, I can see a true benefit for hacking in double precision support into AltiVec.
Now, if you want to debate any of these points, I'll gladly point you to the proper resource to prove my point, as I use them constantly in my work on emulating AltiVec with SSE.
(BTW: emulating SSE with AltiVec would be almost painfully simple compared to AltiVec in SSE. It's almost entirely a proper superset of SSE.)
Oh, last, let's not forget about those wonderful instructions that Apple must have told someone to put in there, because they're used for Anti-aliasing fonts, and icons, and are just used all over the place in OSX: vmhraddshs, etc. Which will likely never have a single instruction equivalent in SSE.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!