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MacOS on Intel platform?
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31-08-2005 11:47am#1
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tomMK1 wrote:i didnt realise there was a legal development version of this as i was under the impression that OSX running on Intel was a hack developed due to the idea that apple were moving to intel - even though they have never said they would run the Mac OS on any of the intel chips currently available.
Considering Linux runs on intel I wouldnt be surprised to see it happen eventually, but at the same time why bother?
I suppose if you've just arrived home from a 4 month holiday on Mars you may not have heard of it
Apple are moving to Intel CPU's starting from next year and developers have had OSx86 for several months now.
ZEN0 -
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ZENER wrote:I suppose if you've just arrived home from a 4 month holiday on Mars you may not have heard of it Apple are moving to Intel CPU's starting from next year and developers have had OSx86 for several months now.
ZEN
facts people facts!
Intel make chips, not CPUs. Apple will always be using their own CPU. Secondly, Apple more than likely will use intel to produce apples chips - apple own the intellectual copyright on a lot of the IBM/Motorola technology used in the g series of chips.
yes, people have been hacking OSX for the intel environment but afaik it isnt an official development.
Anyone who thinks apple are moving over to intel as used by windows I think will be in for a surprise - thats what I meant in my last post. the chip intel will produce for apple will bear no resemblemce to the current stable of intel chips and more than likely wont be used by anyone but apple .. they basically just changing chip manufacturers. Besides, who wants to run OSX on the overheated, power absorbing things microsoft software run on? thats going backwards.
and i totally agree I could be completely wrong about this
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Yes, Intel make "chips". Among them happen to be "microprocessors", which when used as the core of a larger computer system, are often called "central processing units" or CPUs. In fact, the first such device, barring some obscure Russian or Eastern European thing, was the 4004, which was designed and manufactured by... you guessed it... Intel, around 1970/71. (Sorry if this sounds smarmy, but if we're going to start slapping peoples wrists on terminology grounds, I reckon the slapper should have his/her facts straight )
Getting back on-topic, I think, what I've read on the subject of why Apple are moving to Intel CPUs suggests the following: firstly, Intel were able to give them a better per-unit price on the CPUs than IBM could on comparable G5s (I'll leave the debate about what "comparable" means for another day, but this article on AnandTech makes for interesting reading).
The other reason is more significant. In the medium term, however, Intel have as much as admitted that the stupidly-named "Netburst" architecture (i.e. the P4 and its derivatives) are as good as dead - future designs are going to be based on the Pentium M, which is itself a heavily modified Pentium II core. The reasons are down to heat, and clock speed/operations-per-cycle, pretty much. (There are other obscure technical reasons, such as excessively long instruction pipelines and relatively high cache miss percentages, but that's a topic for another day, not to mention a hardware design engineer. There are some good articles on Ars Technica that go into this sort of thing in detail)
The big thing that the PowerPC chips had going for them - that I can pin down - was relatively low power consumption (in performance per watt terms); okay, you can argue historically that floating point performance was also relevant, but that's pretty much a moot point since AMD launched the Athlon, which is a while ago now. Casting the glaring eyeball of hindsight at how things have turned out, it seems clear that the PowerPC design partners (primarily Motorola and Intel) ran into a stumbling block with the G4; they were fast, and low-power, but they couldn't ramp them much higher. The G5 (aka 970FX, if I remember correctly) - when it eventually arrived - ramps up quite well in terms of speed, but is a hot beast - this is why Apple developed the first standard-fit watercooling system on a desktop PC for it, and why there are still no G5 laptops
Intel, it seems, have wooed Apple with the promise of high-performance, multi-core, low-cost CPUs (which they should be able to deliver). I'd strongly suspect that Intel have tipped their hand to Apple a bit in terms of how far along that is, and when they'll have these on the market, but chances are the P4 is merely a stopgap until these get introduced. This is probably why (if I remember correctly) it'll be another few years before there's an Intel-based Powerbook (2007/8?).
On another topic, for the record, (to the best of my knowledge) Apple had a semi-official x86 build of OSX before and at it's original launch; this was when Steve Jobs was hedging his bets over whether the hardware side of Apple would survive the following couple of years. As we now know, it did, and that project was shelved for a bit, but it's been resurrected when market economics dictated that it made sense. Anyway, it's based on Mach and BSD, so the base code is pretty good in cross-platform terms anyway, in as little as I can infer from what I've read as I'm no C++ guru
Hope this helps,
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Inspector Gadget wrote:Among them happen to be "microprocessors", which when used as the core of a larger computer system, are often called "central processing units" or CPUs.
i think at times like this its handy to define what a processor actually is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor
which fits what Inspector Gadget said, but in this case I cant find where apple have said they intend to use a ready made Intel CPU or one based on a current one 0 -
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tomMK1 wrote:we'll just have to wait and see. i just wouldnt be waiting for a windows mac
Who's waiting ? I doubt you'll find a Mac user waiting to buy a mac to run windows anytime soon.Macs were being hyped to run on PCs then as well.
That's like saying busses are being hyped to run on bicycles, a Mac is the hardware produced by Apple to run OSX just like a PC is produced by Dell or whoever to run Windows. If what you mean is OSX will run on PCs, don't bet on it. Someone else said here that Apple may make the logic boards hosting the Intel CPU a proprietry item, that is not an off-the-shelf mobo made by Intel or A-Bit or MSI etc. To me that makes sense, why would Apple invest so much and risk so much in yet another major change-over if they were then to open up OS X to the PC, surely that'd be suicide economically speaking. I personally subscribe to the belief that OS X will never appear on PC's in the legal and supported sense, at least not until Apple decide to become a software only producer and totally cease making macs.Intel make chips, not CPUs.
Actually they make integrated circuits, McCains make chips . . .Macs are pcs too you know.
PC was used by IBM as a brand when they made the original IBM XT PC. in that form it refers to DOS or Windows based computers, Macs are personal computers which some people acronimised (is that a word?) to the term PC as a cover all. It's a bit like saying Fords are Toyotas instead of saying PCs are personal computers.
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