It's true. They're switching to x86

Post #210,052 by altmann 6/6/05 1:55:43 PM Reply	It's true. They're switching to x86 WWDC keynote presentation is running on P4. They've been keeping the x86 build of the OS up to date for the last 5 years. New version of XCode that does fat binaries coming by the end of the day. Developer machines coming "soon". Realtime binary translation ("Rosetta") for apps that haven't been recompiled. -- Chris Altmann
Post #210,061 by rcareaga 6/6/05 2:26:25 PM Reply	Holy sith. The faint hissing sound from these precincts does not represent disapprobation (I reserve this judgment) but rather the deflation of RC's tentative plans to replace Old Paint, his sturdy B&W G3/G4 desktop, with a nice new dual-pump G5 cheesegrater later this year (I have purchased Mac hardware on the cusp of obsolescence before. I do not propose to repeat the experience if I can help it). I hope that Apple has laid the ground for this transition very carefully, or Steve Jobsborne might someday figure only in trivia quizzes. apprehensively, Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
Post #210,067 by pwhysall 6/6/05 2:51:43 PM Reply	Me Too. I shall be watching very carefully. this here box is due for replacement by a Big Shiny in ~18mo time. Peter [link\|http://www.ubuntulinux.org\|Ubuntu Linux] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Home] Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
Post #210,066 by SpiceWare 6/6/05 2:45:32 PM Reply	short term sales will probably drop I was looking to get a Powerbook at the end of the year... Darrell Spice, Jr. [link\|http://spiceware.org/gallery/ArtisticOverpass\|Artistic Overpass]\n[link\|http://www.spiceware.org/\|SpiceWare] - We don't do Windows, it's too much of a chore
Post #210,075 by inthane-chan 6/6/05 3:20:45 PM Reply	Weather report from hell: -6 C, snow flurries
Post #210,076 by inthane-chan 6/6/05 3:22:19 PM Reply	Does this mean... ...I'll now be able to run OSX on my VMWare session? Or better yet, can I run VMWare from OSX, and run Windows under it? :D Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall, aleph-null bottles of beer. You take one down, you pass it around, Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall!
Post #210,080 by pwhysall 6/6/05 4:14:26 PM Reply	Re: Does this mean... Does it, fuck. I'd bet you a pint that if your hardware ain't 100% Apple, OS X is going to give you the finger. Apple's only hope of survival is to remain a hardware company. And, to be honest, I'd prefer that. I have no particular religious affiliation with any CPU. Peter [link\|http://www.ubuntulinux.org\|Ubuntu Linux] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Home] Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
Post #210,089 by tuberculosis 6/6/05 4:53:35 PM 8/21/07 6:08:44 AM Reply	They say no You'll have to have an Apple box to run OS X. OTOH, it may become possible to run Windows on a Mac natively. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 06:08:44 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #210,098 by mmoffitt 6/6/05 5:53:09 PM Reply	Gack! Who'd wanna do that??? bcnu, Mikem Eine Leute. Eine Welt. Ein F\ufffdhrer. God Bless America.
Post #210,100 by rcareaga 6/6/05 6:11:14 PM Reply	All sorts of folks My attorney, for one, who prefers the Mac environment but whose profession is dominated by Windows (oddly enough, quite a number of law offices still cling to WordPerfect, an application hovering just this side of a semi-vegetative state on the PC end of things but positively moribund on the Mac). Sundry users of vertical-market Windows apps unavailable for the Mac. Humble folks like myself who must work on both platforms, and would prefer a less cumbersome integration of environments (although I'd need something like the present OS X user switching protocols to make it worthwhile: if a reboot was required each time, well, I'll stick with sneakernet, thank you). Shit, if Apple can sell its boxes with the native ability to run Windows (this assuming, of course, that the Beast of Redmond wouldn't sabotage this undertaking somehow), wouldn't this make the the customer's prospect of switching from, say, Dell to Apple considerably less daunting? It's the short term that has me worried (although keep in mind that the Google combination of "Steve Jobs" "mogul" and "visionary" yields many more results than the combination "Rand Careaga" "mogul" and "visionary"). cordially, Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
Post #210,102 by admin 6/6/05 6:13:41 PM Reply	Lawyers like WordPerfect... ... because it counts words like the courts want the words to be counted, unlike Word. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #210,127 by folkert 6/6/05 8:49:43 PM Reply	I got a hit. A really good one. It compares this exact thing even. [link\|/forums/render/content/show?contentid=210100\|Number one hit on Gregle] -- [link\|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net\|greg], [link\|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry\|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ *i_wethey* [image\|http://www.danasoft.com/vipersig.jpg\|\|\|\|]
Post #210,179 by Ashton 6/7/05 12:40:12 AM Reply	Umm.. what happens to a nice Plexi-pretty '02 or 3 G-4? OK - I grok enough, the Big-endian and not-enough-registers and.. and ~~ issues re the retrograde switch. (\ufffd-Republicanism?) And I suppose there will be utils to convert quadrillions of sub-routines accordingly + fancy AI-compilers .. for crunching out the resultant new/old binaries (?) But, say ... someone has spent $3K fucking DOLLARS for the sterling-silver spread, before they found this way to use copper-coated zinc pennies instead: what happens when the G-4 ~~sucker~~-owner wants some of the new Insanely Great software-to come? Retro-compiles for WHAT: a few months..? a year..? Is Steve-baby expecting folks to fucking SCRAP their expen$ive good-for-ten-years purchases -- many, by individuals / not Corps! expecting to amortize over many years -- in just another 2 or 3 ?? I hope I'm missing something. W.T.F. is going to buy a new 'Apple' THIS year, while this Damocles sword dangles from a piece of spaghetti al dente? Steve Jobsborne, Indeed - Nice one, Rand :-\ufffd ..They coulda been a contender! Finally !! ..not just another lying, manipulating bait/switch Billyware-South.
Post #210,180 by Meerkat 6/7/05 1:01:00 AM Reply	I was going to order a cheesegrater this week... ...but I held off just in case something else super-duper came along that I had to have. So. Think I'll order a Mac Mini instead, so by the time the MacIntels get their act together I'll be looking to upgrade again. Wonder how/if they'll replace the whole "G..." naming scheme for CPUs? In other news, here's my suitably whacky conspiracy theory: It's all IBM's fault - they deliberately kept the clock speeds of the G5s low, because this practically forced Apple to buy two of them for each machine :-) Two out of three people wonder where the other one is.
Post #210,183 by Steve Lowe 6/7/05 1:25:36 AM Reply	You're missing a lot. First of all, calm down. You need to be aware of three major points: 1. Jobs stated that Apple intends to support the PPC platform for many years to come, and that they have more PPC products in the pipeline. The Intel based Macs will hit the streets next year. 2. Apple's development environment, Xcode, will compile 'universal' apps, trivially. The binaries from the compiler contain the code for both platforms. In one package. That knows what bits to run. Tres cool. 3. There's a translation engine called Rosetta that runs on the Intel Macs that will run all PPC apps, for those that haven't been recompiled into universal apps. Also, very cool. There is no G4 sucker -- Steve
Post #210,202 by Another Scott 6/7/05 6:43:27 AM Reply	I've heard about 3/4 of Jobs' keynote. He's spun things pretty well. He makes a good case for making the move, but doesn't mention some of the problems. E.g. 1) What about 64-bitness? AFAIK, Intel's x86-64 extensions (or whatever they call them in contrast to AMDs nomenclature) aren't really available in the P4 yet. 2) What about the 4 GB limit on Intel's x86 (related to #1)? Presumably 1 and 2 can be worked on in the next 1-2 years. 3) What about device drivers? 4) Does he really think that people are going to buy G4 and G5 machines now? I was expecting better based on his reputation, but he really didn't have much to work with. The Rosetta demonstration was interesting, but the apps seemed slow. Presumably it was running on a very fast PC - I couldn't read the About box that he flashed up (assuming it even had the info). He did say that it wasn't ready yet. I think it's going to make a lot of people look a lot more seriously at Linux distributions on existing PPC boxes. We'll see. Cheers, Scott.
Post #210,220 by SpiceWare 6/7/05 10:16:56 AM Reply	3.6 GHz P4 Darrell Spice, Jr. [link\|http://spiceware.org/gallery/ArtisticOverpass\|Artistic Overpass]\n[link\|http://www.spiceware.org/\|SpiceWare] - We don't do Windows, it's too much of a chore
Post #210,262 by tuberculosis 6/7/05 1:51:04 PM 8/21/07 6:13:14 AM Reply	It'll live a full and happy life NeXT has been down this road before. Original Cubes and Slabs were based on Moto 68k chips. Eventually NeXT sold hardware division to Canon and ported to generic PC hardware. The Application Wrapper layout is explicitly designed to support "fat binaries". Upon purchase of Apple for negative money - NeXT ported to PPC. The two ports have pretty much guaranteed that the source code is absolutely squeaky clean. To keep it that way, Apple's internal build scripts continue to build the code for all architectures to surface portability problems. This is the 5 year double life that Jobs referred to. How do you make a fat binary? Check a checkbox in the IDE and the build environment will build one. For most apps this is literally just a recompile. Already the dev lists are full of queries from new developers and the old timers are explaining how it worked on the last transition from black to white hardware. The only ones to be screwed are developers of high end "PRO" apps for image and audio processing that use the AltiVec instruction set or hand tune their assembly for performance. It sounds like there is an emulator for these instructions for the short term. The other key issues will be stuff that puts data on the wire - there is a set of API's for dealing with this that have been there forever (although I suspect have been ignored lately since they do nothing on PPC) called NSByteOrdering. They're pretty easy to use and shouldn't take too long to fit into existing code. Certainly it can be done before the first Intel-o-Macs ship. So key takeaway is "this road (and this OS) is very well traveled" and I would expect you to never notice a problem. Purchase with confidence. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 06:13:14 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #210,398 by Ashton 6/8/05 3:37:23 AM Reply	OK.. I don't know enough to be entitled to an opinion re the entrails, and to guess where the e-coli might be hiding. But Jobs is a Master of dog&pony shows, probably as ruthless as Billy - but surely a lot more tech-savvy, CIEIO-CIEIO. (And I actually saw one of Steve-the-younger's Blue Boxes - make a 'free' call to a UK "song of the day" number, from Berkeley. ;-) I doubt that he touched any of those innards; gotta have been Woz. Steve had Woz; Billy ported Basic, stuck a feather in it, called it 'innovation'. What a pair to build an infrastructure around. Guess we'll all have to assume that they will continue to use PSs that don't cost $3 ea by the container, will do the same clean layout of smart-fans, etc. as in the Pretty boxes of today. If a Ford Escort white-box can ever be made to run their stuff, I see seppuku. With a bamboo blade. 'Course too, if this InsanelyGreatIdea does freak out a lot of Appleonians - maybe I can even snag a distressed real G-4 or PBook! instead of a vanilla I-whatever. (Or would this be schadenfreude?) Bizness - you cannot believe what ANY of these fuckers say. Ever again.
Post #210,492 by JayMehaffey 6/8/05 2:47:46 PM Reply	Apple will have to fight for that From what I have read, the Intel based Macs are supposed to be able to run Windows, which means that they don't have too much customized hardware under the hood. That implies that getting OS X to run on Intel machines is going to be mostly one of getting your hands on the right drivers and on the OS itself. I expect this to turn into a fight for Apple as they work to block independently developed device drivers. And given that Darwin is open source, it is going to be hard for them to stop. Apple will have to watch the selling of OS X closely also, something they can do much easier. But if it becomes popular, Apple is sure to have grey and black market problems with that also. Apple faces a basic catch-22 here in that part of their popularity is built on their control of the hardware. The more popular they become the harder it is for them to control the hardware. Thus becoming more widespread is going to interfere with one of the things that makes them popular to begin with. Jay
Post #210,493 by pwhysall 6/8/05 2:55:46 PM Reply	On the other hand... ...I'd still buy an Apple MacIntel over anything else. People who buy Apple computers do so because They Just Work (amongst other reasons), and this won't change just because the CPU is no longer made by IBM. Sure, I could perhaps one day hack OS X to run on a Packard Bell, but at the end of the day, it's still a Packard Bell. It'd be like fitting M3 mirrors, a Veilside bodykit and 20" alloys to a Fiat Punto. Sure, it gets you from place to place most of the time, but it looks stupid and breaks down periodically. Peter [link\|http://www.ubuntulinux.org\|Ubuntu Linux] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Home] Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
Post #210,495 by Another Scott 6/8/05 3:03:39 PM Reply	Where? Just curious: Where have you read that the Mac-x86 hardware will be able to run Windows? And even if that's true (and it might be), that doesn't mean that a non-Apple x86 PC will be able to run MacOS X. A boatload of the stuff that makes a Mac a Mac is in the ROM chips on the motherboard. Without the ROMs, a PC won't be able to run the software. (Recall that the Mac 68k emulators that ran on PCs, like [link\|http://www.emulators.com/softmac.htm\|SoftMac], needed a ROM image to do their magic. AFAIK, there isn't a similar PPC ROM image available for x86 - at least not one that is outside of Apple.) There are certainly ways of getting the ROM image out of a PowerMac and into a form that can be used on an x86 machine. However, it's not clear that such work is easy - if it were there would have probably been Mac PPC emulators out there by now. So, I doubt that Apple will stand for non-Apple hardware running MacOS-x86 any time soon. Steve really doesn't like clones. Remember Franklin? Remember that one of the first things he did when he went back to Apple was to kill off the clones. My $0.02. Cheers, Scott.
Post #210,538 by JayMehaffey 6/8/05 6:17:15 PM Reply	Re: Where? [link\|http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2439\|Anandtech] Apple has confirmed that their Intel based Macs should be able to run Windows, but you will not be able to run the x86 version of OS X on any hardware platform that you choose. Obviously with the switch to Intel's architecture, it is going to be much more difficult for Apple to prevent users from circumventing any protection that they may have implemented to run the x86 OS on their own hardware. Even if Apple's protection is cracked, you can expect driver support to be extremely limited for configurations outside of what Apple will be shipping. My personal expectation is that Apple will be able to control the market as long as they remain a nitch player. But if they begin to take a significant percent of the desktop, they won't be able to keep the hardware under their control. People will begin writing drivers for PCI cards that Apple doesn't support, and it will spiral out from there. Jay
Post #210,587 by tuberculosis 6/9/05 4:06:29 AM 8/21/07 6:24:35 AM Reply	ROM's gone long time now Macs no longer have a big chunk of core capability burned into roms. It was making virtual memory management a pain so they simplified and chucked them. OTOH, there's quite likely to be some built-in hardware dongly thing that the OS looks for or dies. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 06:24:35 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #210,594 by Another Scott 6/9/05 7:31:17 AM Reply	Thanks.
Post #210,524 by ubernostrum 6/8/05 5:00:12 PM Reply	Stupid ROM tricks All it takes is some ROM image that Windows will ignore but OS X won't boot without, and you've got a situation where you can install Windows on the Mac but not OS X on any other PC. At least not without more work than most people are willing to do... which is probably what Apple's betting on. --\r\nYou cooin' with my bird? \r\n[link\|http://www.shtuff.us/\|shtuff]
Post #210,374 by drewk 6/7/05 10:54:42 PM Reply	Here's why (according to InfoWorld) [link\|http://weblog.infoworld.com/article/05/06/07/HNappleibm_1.html\|Apple wants a Pentium M, IBM wants an Xbox] First Apple systems based on Intel processors will run on Pentium M, while IBM claims its Power chip intentions are set on gaming consoles and high-end servers ... But Apple accounted for just around 2 percent of IBM's chip wafer production in East Fishkill, according to industry sources, and IBM is moving away from making chips for the PC market in favor of gaming consoles and high-end servers. ... "IBM is aggressively moving the Power Architecture beyond the PC, as shown by our recent successes with the next-generation gaming systems announced by Sony (Profile, Products, Articles), Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) and Nintendo. ... IBM is focused on the highest value opportunities in each marketplace, and our direction with the Power Architecture is consistent with that strategy," the company said in a written statement. === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]

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