Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips **Updated 6/7** x86 Mac systems *should* run Windows

[NFS4]

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 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 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.

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2439

iMac Mini running Longhorn?
iBook running Longhorn?

YUMMAY

 

[Czar]

Originally posted by: NFS4

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 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 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.

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2439

iMac Mini running Longhorn?
iBook running Longhorn?

YUMMAY

now the mini is starting to look good, really good

 

[DivideBYZero]

Apple = OSX & Windows
A.N. Other white box MFG. = Windows only.

Nice move.

 

[JoeKing]

Doesn't Microsoft have some money invested in Apple? Or has Apple already bought that interest back?

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: miniMUNCH
A couple other things to consider and be happy about (if you like OS X):

Mac games are going to get a lot better...porting and/or co-development of games for OS X will be much easier. Say goodbye to platform performance penalties like the float to integer conversion snafu.

Graphics cards, sound cards, etc. will hopefully be plentiful for Macs and graphics drivers will be much better.

The WINE project for linux x86 should be become very popular on OS X in the coming months/years...so many windows apps may be usable on Mac with no additional commercial software purchase required. Also, I can imagine MS Virtual PC for OS X turning into more of an official install of MS designed/optimized winXP libraries for OS X. Even if MS doesn't do something like WINE on acid...VMware may decide to do a x86 vmware workstation release for OS X.

Or someone may come up with a means of hacking VMware to trick OS X to installing on VMware...of course, the desktop rendering performance would suck do to lack of 3D acceleration.

Why would porting be easier? You're not coding for the hardware, you're coding for the OS, OSX PPC to x86 ports should be easy, but Windows to OSX x86 probably won't be much easier, other than that now there are even less differences between the hardware.

 

[Skiguy411]

Originally posted by: DivideBYZero
Apple = OSX & Windows
A.N. Other white box MFG. = Windows only.

Nice move.

Indeed. Very interesting if they can pull it off right.

I'd like to see MS's response to this.

 

[miniMUNCH]

Originally posted by: ToeJam13

Originally posted by: miniMUNCH
Mac games are going to get a lot better...porting and/or co-development of games for OS X will be much easier. Say goodbye to platform performance penalties like the float to integer conversion snafu.

Apple developers will also gain another powerful tool. Rather than using GCC, they may be able to use an Intel compiler at some point. Intel has released such a beast for Linux and I have heard of performance gains in the neighborhood of 2-10% over GCC.

Graphics cards, sound cards, etc. will hopefully be plentiful for Macs and graphics drivers will be much better.

This may or may not be true due to differences between the HAL between Windows and BSD.

The WINE project for linux x86 should be become very popular on OS X in the coming months/years...so many windows apps may be usable on Mac with no additional commercial software purchase required. Also, I can imagine MS Virtual PC for OS X turning into more of an official install of MS designed/optimized winXP libraries for OS X. Even if MS doesn't do something like WINE on acid...VMware may decide to do a x86 vmware workstation release for OS X.

Or someone may come up with a means of hacking VMware to trick OS X to installing on VMware...of course, the desktop rendering performance would suck do to lack of 3D acceleration.

It is just a matter of time before VMWare includes basic OpenGL/DirectX functionality. It just needs to be added to the HAL emulation code they use.

Keep in mind that Apple may not use legacy BIOS for boot-strapping into OS-X. They may use a ROM. They may also require entry into the OS-X kernel in a different fashion than traditional x86 kernels (x86-64 mode rather than 16-bit real). Who knows. VMWare may not be able to support such a beast.

That said, Apple hardware has been emulated before. Shapeshifter for AmigaOS could emulate MacOS 7.5 on a MC68020+68551, MC68030 or MC68040 at near full speed using a software only solution. Emplant for AmigaOS did it prior to that using Apple ROMs on a ZorroII peripheral card.

All great points Tam!

Intel, portland group, and pathscale compilers do some fantastic things to code performance. For games, I dunno. But I myslef have seen as much as 3X speed up on large fortran codes using ifort or pgf compliling against intel math kernel library rather than an optimized ATLAS library. If Apple decides to include the intel math kernel and IPP in the default install of x86 OS X then many developers may feel warranted to compile against them.

As for the VMware hack...I think it unlikely to happen but possible. But the idea of WINE on OS X is awesome IMO.

 

[clarkey01]

Originally posted by: JoeKing
Doesn't Microsoft have some money invested in Apple? Or has Apple already bought that interest back?

Yeah Im not sure either, I think I heard something about it a while back

 

[FreshPrince]

I watched Steve blowJob's keynote at WWDC...

OS X 10.4.1 on Intel Pentium 4 3.6GHz rocks! He was launching applications like crazy and it never flinched! Every app seemed to open under 1 second

Also, the dashboard is an awesome feature...does anyone know if there's something similar for xp?

Also, at the end of the presentation, he showed that you can get a developers kit for $999, which includes the same MAC G5 case with the intel 3.6GHz + 2GB RAM + osX 10.4.1 + developers software :shocked: where do I sign up?!

 

[miniMUNCH]

Originally posted by: Fox5

Originally posted by: miniMUNCH
A couple other things to consider and be happy about (if you like OS X):

Mac games are going to get a lot better...porting and/or co-development of games for OS X will be much easier. Say goodbye to platform performance penalties like the float to integer conversion snafu.

Graphics cards, sound cards, etc. will hopefully be plentiful for Macs and graphics drivers will be much better.

The WINE project for linux x86 should be become very popular on OS X in the coming months/years...so many windows apps may be usable on Mac with no additional commercial software purchase required. Also, I can imagine MS Virtual PC for OS X turning into more of an official install of MS designed/optimized winXP libraries for OS X. Even if MS doesn't do something like WINE on acid...VMware may decide to do a x86 vmware workstation release for OS X.

Or someone may come up with a means of hacking VMware to trick OS X to installing on VMware...of course, the desktop rendering performance would suck do to lack of 3D acceleration.

Why would porting be easier? You're not coding for the hardware, you're coding for the OS, OSX PPC to x86 ports should be easy, but Windows to OSX x86 probably won't be much easier, other than that now there are even less differences between the hardware.

Video game engines are finely tuned to the architechure on which they run.

So when, for instance, ID was coding the doom3 engine they were thinking "need for speed" on x86 so they things to speed up performance, like round the answers of floating point calc's to integer values so they would take up less space in critical memmory (stuff more info in CPU registers, cache, video memmory, etc.) and improve actual info bandwidth between CPU and memmory/GPU. The float --> int conversion has little performance hit on x86 chips but a like a 4X performance hit on PPC chips (just an architectural quirk, I suppose).

So someone has to go through the 800,000 lines of code or however long the doom3 code is and find all the float to int coversion and remove them and then trace where the int data used to go and change function definitions, etc.

There are a few other architecture performance issues just like this that makes designed for PC games run piss poor on PPC.

A lot of work to fix them for the sale of 10,000 copies of a video game...so typically it just isn't done.

With the move to x86...these architechure hang ups are gone.

 

[notfred]

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
Also, at the end of the presentation, he showed that you can get a developers kit for $999, which includes the same MAC G5 case with the intel 3.6GHz + 2GB RAM + osX 10.4.1 + developers software :shocked: where do I sign up?!

You can sign up at developer.apple.com. Membership is $500/year.

 

[miniMUNCH]

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
I watched Steve blowJob's keynote at WWDC...

OS X 10.4.1 on Intel Pentium 4 3.6GHz rocks! He was launching applications like crazy and it never flinched! Every app seemed to open under 1 second

Also, the dashboard is an awesome feature...does anyone know if there's something similar for xp?

Also, at the end of the presentation, he showed that you can get a developers kit for $999, which includes the same MAC G5 case with the intel 3.6GHz + 2GB RAM + osX 10.4.1 + developers software :shocked: where do I sign up?!

Dashboard --> check out Konfabulator (just google it).

 

[vailr]

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
at the end of the presentation, he showed that you can get a developers kit for $999, which includes the same MAC G5 case with the intel 3.6GHz + 2GB RAM + osX 10.4.1 + developers software :shocked: where do I sign up?!

He also said that all of these $999 P4 machines must later be returned to Apple. He didn't exactly say
whether the $999 would then be refunded, or not.

 

[gsaldivar]

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
I watched Steve blowJob's keynote at WWDC...

OS X 10.4.1 on Intel Pentium 4 3.6GHz rocks! He was launching applications like crazy and it never flinched! Every app seemed to open under 1 second

Were those applications or Java applets/widgets? I heard Photoshop took quite some time to launch...

Also, at the end of the presentation, he showed that you can get a developers kit for $999, which includes the same MAC G5 case with the intel 3.6GHz + 2GB RAM + osX 10.4.1 + developers software :shocked: where do I sign up?!

You have to purchase ADC membership ($500-3500/year) to be eligible to order that kit. And you dont get to keep the Intel G5 - it must be returned to Apple.

 

[777php]

Originally posted by: miniMUNCH

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
I watched Steve blowJob's keynote at WWDC...

OS X 10.4.1 on Intel Pentium 4 3.6GHz rocks! He was launching applications like crazy and it never flinched! Every app seemed to open under 1 second

Also, the dashboard is an awesome feature...does anyone know if there's something similar for xp?

Also, at the end of the presentation, he showed that you can get a developers kit for $999, which includes the same MAC G5 case with the intel 3.6GHz + 2GB RAM + osX 10.4.1 + developers software :shocked: where do I sign up?!

Dashboard --> check out Konfabulator (just google it).

Konfabulator isn't free

 

[FreshPrince]

Originally posted by: 777php

Originally posted by: miniMUNCH

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
I watched Steve blowJob's keynote at WWDC...

OS X 10.4.1 on Intel Pentium 4 3.6GHz rocks! He was launching applications like crazy and it never flinched! Every app seemed to open under 1 second

Also, the dashboard is an awesome feature...does anyone know if there's something similar for xp?

Also, at the end of the presentation, he showed that you can get a developers kit for $999, which includes the same MAC G5 case with the intel 3.6GHz + 2GB RAM + osX 10.4.1 + developers software :shocked: where do I sign up?!

Dashboard --> check out Konfabulator (just google it).

Konfabulator isn't free

question is...does it come with spyware?

if not, I'll give it a try

 

[ironcrotch]

There is no way that Mac systems 'should' run windows. Windows uses a BIOS to load while macs use Open Firmware (i might be wrong)

 

[Falloutboy]

hehe i give is a few weeks before were seing versions of OS x 10.4 for x86 floating around on the newsgroups

 

[ironcrotch]

Originally posted by: Falloutboy
hehe i give is a few weeks before were seing versions of OS x 10.4 for x86 floating around on the newsgroups

GL with that one

 

[gsaldivar]

Originally posted by: ironcrotch
There is no way that Mac systems 'should' run windows. Windows uses a BIOS to load while macs use Open Firmware (i might be wrong)

*Eagerly awaits an ingenious PCI Mac firmware card from Taiwan* :thumbsup:

 

[eelw]

Originally posted by: Falloutboy
hehe i give is a few weeks before were seing versions of OS x 10.4 for x86 floating around on the newsgroups

Woohoo, dual boot If this actually does happen, I will most definitely be trying out Final Cut Pro.

 

[miniMUNCH]

Originally posted by: FreshPrince

Originally posted by: 777php

Originally posted by: miniMUNCH

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
I watched Steve blowJob's keynote at WWDC...

OS X 10.4.1 on Intel Pentium 4 3.6GHz rocks! He was launching applications like crazy and it never flinched! Every app seemed to open under 1 second

Also, the dashboard is an awesome feature...does anyone know if there's something similar for xp?

Also, at the end of the presentation, he showed that you can get a developers kit for $999, which includes the same MAC G5 case with the intel 3.6GHz + 2GB RAM + osX 10.4.1 + developers software :shocked: where do I sign up?!

Dashboard --> check out Konfabulator (just google it).

Konfabulator isn't free

question is...does it come with spyware?

if not, I'll give it a try

I dunno for sure but the developer seems to be pretty straight...quite a few folks use this app on windows and I haven't heard anything negative about Konfab. Either way..spybot would probably catch it by now.

Also, I never said it was free...he just asked if there was something like Dashboard for windows.

 

[ironcrotch]

Originally posted by: eelw

Originally posted by: Falloutboy
hehe i give is a few weeks before were seing versions of OS x 10.4 for x86 floating around on the newsgroups

Woohoo, dual boot If this actually does happen, I will most definitely be trying out Final Cut Pro.

 

[trinketsummoner]

Originally posted by: Pennstate
If you look at the moves that Apple has made in the past few years, it's pretty obvious that Apple wants to become a direct competitor to Microsoft. The whole iTUnes and iPod for window was to get PC users familiar with the Software superiority of Apple. THe OpenBSD that OSX was based on attracts many developers and high-end users. The recent release of Bonjour was also a hint at this move.

OS X + iWork suite + iLife suite + Quicktime will be a formidable alternative to Microsoft's Windows + Office package.

It will be cheaper too.

XP pro is ~ $250, Office Pro is ~$200

WHile OS X is ~$100 (free if you buy a mac), iWork is ~ $80. Microsoft is in BIG BIG trouble.

OSX isnt free if you buy a mac, you just pay for it along with the hardware. You can say the same about windows - buy a ~$250 Dell PC with XP Home for "free". You can also get MS works 9 from Dell for $29 which includes all the apps most home users would need.

The other interesting thing is if Apple does open up its OS to all x86 hardware, software bugs/flaws will most likely be the same as if it were running on windows. Apple has a huge advantage currently with controlling the hardware their software runs on, now they will be coding for the millions of combos of x86 hardware and problems will arise. I think because of this they will lock OSX to apple specific x86 hardware.

 

[Falloutboy]

Originally posted by: ironcrotch

Originally posted by: Falloutboy
hehe i give is a few weeks before were seing versions of OS x 10.4 for x86 floating around on the newsgroups

GL with that one

I don't see why not the dev boxes they are shipping seem to be nothing more than an intel OEM motherboard with standard off the shelf components put into a g5 case