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Jun 06, 05
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Apple switching to Intel chips
Looks like they couldn't get the right features and performance from the current IBM Power PC chip so they're switching to Intel.
Biggest reason is probably they could not get a really powerful chip like the G5 into a notebook because of cooling problems. But Intel has powerful cool-running chips that can do the job. http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050606/sfm142.html?.v=9 
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Jun 06, 05
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http://www.macrumorslive.com/
good thing i watched for announcments i was going to go out and get a G5 today. dodged that bullet. So mac OSX will be ported onto Intel based machines by 2007. People are scrambling to sell there mac shit on ebay right now hehe.
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Jun 06, 05
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This story is most likely completely unrelated..
..but last week my mum's apple lap top pulled something super freaky: The date reverted back to 1969 and the screen went blank. Then smoke started pouring out the back of it. No joke. She's in France right now and took it to a local shop..needless to say, everything is pretty much fucked.
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Jun 06, 05
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thats crazy...
last week our g5 imac started fucking up... like u kno when ur screen adjusts on a PC and shakes around? well it started doing that and didn't stop... we JUST got thsi freaking computer... g5 = sham
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Jun 06, 05
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Jun 06, 05
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sure is, thats why i wanted a mac. But to go out now and buy one would be kinda silly, being that i might be able too make my own mac in half a year. As steve Jobs said tho the core of apple is the operating system and thats not changing anytime soon. IBM PPC architecture is great but they could not break the 90nm barrier as intel and amd have so this opens up the market and in the end i think we will get super fast dual core pentium or amds instead of G5 processors. Apple went 2.0 2.3 2.7 by overclocking there original processors to get an extra speed bump and introduced a somewhat risky cooling system (water cooling) to keep m cool. With the new pentiums and amd well above 3 right now i think apple is latching onto intel to keep up for the future.
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Jun 06, 05
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running on intel based processors oh yes its going to happen, just a matter of time. No matter how good the architecture is Steve just went and announced the end of the PPC line. Plus IBM was not able to get out the G5 chips fast enough to meet demand anyways. There will be continued support for people with G5s which is awsome and the only reason i may go out and still get one.
http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?t=7319 Last edited by Royal_Phunk; Jun 06, 05 at 12:53 PM.
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Jun 06, 05
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yeh for sure, this kinda sux tho i thought they would be like bam new 3.0 dual G5 and all this but everytime they switch like this they lose so many sales and customers as all the software is re written.
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Jun 06, 05
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the software already runs on x86, xcode 2.1 will make fat binaries
they had the ceo of mathmatica on there saying the x86'ized the program in 2 hours that shit has code from the mid 80s there will also be a translation layer, they showed off running adobe cs2 and office in it it looked pretty smooth
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Jun 06, 05
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Jun 06, 05
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cheers for that. I'll tell her.
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Jun 06, 05
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No doubt, the reason macs run so well is because of the hardware / software integration that apple does. Hell might have partially frozen over today but there is probably very slim chance that OS X will run off one of your standard PC motherboards. Apple is a Hardware company despite what they say about the OS.
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Jun 06, 05
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you could be waiting a while for the intel based macs depending on the model you go for.
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Jun 06, 05
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the core of os X is freebsd running on top of a mach kernel. both runs on intel. apple hardware is not that proprietary nowadays. most of their graphics stuff is common pc chipset.
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Jun 06, 05
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just because it runs on an intel chip doesn't mean it will run on a standard motherboard. All it takes is different firmware and other minor differences. As I said before Apple makes its bread and butter off of hardware, so they will make it difficult for the average user to build a mac. Those graphics chipsets have special mac firmware, they aren't off the shelf PC cards.
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Jun 06, 05
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Just because Intel will be making chips for Apple doesn't mean in any way, shape, or form that they will be porting osx to x86. Why would you be scrambling to sell your mac shit on ebay? You have two whole years before we see anything like this... it's not like there was a mad grab at the G4s when they moved from Motorola to IBM to take care of the G5. Intel is a fucking processor company, and they make plenty more architectures than x86. Apple would be insanely stupid to port. You can compile darwin (which is a kernel, not an OS) on an x86 processor now, but good luck getting any of Mac's programs to work on there.
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Jun 06, 05
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Jun 06, 05
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osx entirely runs on x86 and has for the last 3 versions, not just darwin
these chips will be x86 based, though not nessicarily just an off the shelf pentium program porting will be using fat binaries xcode aparently will make this pretty simple any programs not compiled for x86 will work through and abstraction layer, it was demonstrated during the keynote using photoshop cs2 and office the early devel platforms are pentium4s <speculation> the shelved consumer level 64 bit architecture that intel developed before going with AMDs was really power-pcish and could be a good fit </speculation>
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Jun 06, 05
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Running it through an abstraction layer will make it run like ass.
x86 just doesn't have the registers PPC has. Which means they need to load that stuff into memory, which will significantly decrease speed. I still don't see this next level of chips being at all x86. All I've seen surrounding that has been speculation. Again, Apple needs something that will justify you paying $2500 for a $1500 computer.
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Jun 06, 05
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Apparently there is a new chip emulator sceheme called Rosetta that can very efficiently run the old Mac PPC code on an Intel (and other processor combinations), almost no slowdown, and Apple said they are using that to do the conversion. If so, essentially no application software conversion required and maybe little or no OSX conversion work. It's not clear yet if Rosetta is an Apple technology or if they are using something from another company.
In any case, the applications program writers are almost all using high level languages like C++ and making calls to the Mac OS to do the low-level work and not using assembler (which is different for each chip) so they shouldn't need to convert anything, or relatively minor work. These guys make a version of Rosetta (which is just a general descriptive word for this emulation I think). Their implementation is called QuickTransit: http://www.transitive.com They have a version for PPC to x86 available called QuickTransit for x86: http://www.transitive.com/products.htm According to what I read, it is very efficient. Last edited by tvmann; Jun 06, 05 at 04:08 PM.
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