Welcome to the End of the Cold War? Again?
That's what Apple on Intel feels like to me. It's like the Berlin wall coming down, only, kinda, backwards.
The enemy isn't the enemy anymore.
I don't know what quite to think.
That's what Apple on Intel feels like to me. It's like the Berlin wall coming down, only, kinda, backwards.
The enemy isn't the enemy anymore.
I don't know what quite to think.
Comments:
Well, for now it will be a lot of hat eating by the Mac community.
I loved the fact that OS X ran on the PowerPC - the G3/G4 were always smaller, ran cooler, and had more instructions per cycle than Pentiums. Just this morning, Anandtech posted an article pitting the G5 against the Opteron/Xeon (http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436). Their conclusion was that the G5 is plagued by memory bandwidth limits and consume/dissipate a lot of energy, more than the P4. The G5 is becoming a crappy P4 anyway, due to the enormous pipelining and branch prediction, etc. The only advantage it has is the higher number of registers.
So, it's disappointing to see the PowerPC go. It is encouraging, though, to know that if anything, VirtualPC will run alot faster on a new x86 Mac, and I can start to seriously consider getting one for my work computer (I'm forced to run a lot of Windows-only software).
I don't think OS X will be able to run on just any PC. One guy on /. mentioned that Apple will probably stick with OpenFirmware (yay!) and I'm sure they'll have some check in place to make sure Joe Acer doesn't run OS X on his Wal Mart PC (to avoid support/driver issues, keeping the Mac "Just Works" experience).
Posted by Derek on June 6, 2005 — 2:42 PM
Well, for now it will be a lot of hat eating by the Mac community.
I loved the fact that OS X ran on the PowerPC - the G3/G4 were always smaller, ran cooler, and had more instructions per cycle than Pentiums. Just this morning, Anandtech posted an article pitting the G5 against the Opteron/Xeon (http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436). Their conclusion was that the G5 is plagued by memory bandwidth limits and consume/dissipate a lot of energy, more than the P4. The G5 is becoming a crappy P4 anyway, due to the enormous pipelining and branch prediction, etc. The only advantage it has is the higher number of registers.
So, it's disappointing to see the PowerPC go. It is encouraging, though, to know that if anything, VirtualPC will run alot faster on a new x86 Mac, and I can start to seriously consider getting one for my work computer (I'm forced to run a lot of Windows-only software).
I don't think OS X will be able to run on just any PC. One guy on /. mentioned that Apple will probably stick with OpenFirmware (yay!) and I'm sure they'll have some check in place to make sure Joe Acer doesn't run OS X on his Wal Mart PC (to avoid support/driver issues, keeping the Mac "Just Works" experience).
Posted by Derek on June 6, 2005 — 2:42 PM
One more thing (sorry for the double-post earlier). You do realize that the first x86 will be released on June 6, 2006 - that's 6/6/06. Hmmmmmmm...
Posted by Derek on June 6, 2005 — 3:35 PM
OK, wait, I take that back. x86 Macs will be available "the same time next year" - so it will be around 6/6/06.
i'll stop flooding your comments now ;)
Posted by Derek on June 6, 2005 — 3:37 PM