Apple Switching to Intel 2950
Steve Jobs announced at the WWDC keynote today that Apple is switching to Intel processors. MacNN has live coverage. The bottom line is that Mac OS X for the last five years has been running on Intel, the switch is expected to be complete in two years, and Rosetta will allow PPC apps to run on Intel-based Macs, transparently. If you're using Xcode, it is small changes and a recompile; otherwise, you might be seeing a lot of work ahead of you. You will be able to order the 10.4.1 preview for Intel today.
Have a taste... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple is adopting Intel, but is not "ditching" IBM.
New G5 towers will still be around for at least another year, and probably at least two. Intel is probably going to start by replacing the G4 CPUs in Powerbooks and minis.
At the Stevenote, he informed devs that they would be supporting both platforms for a long time to come.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Interesting)
You have to wonder if maybe he's hedging his bets. If IBM or one of the PPC licensees comes out of their coma and delivers, he has plenty of opportunities to backstroke. Nothing like having some options.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)
But people don't buy computers for the concept. The x86 world beat out the PPC world when it comes to consumer chips by simply doing a better job of implementation. While IBM was promising 3 GHz performance that they couldn't deliver, Intel was cranking out a new chip which offers more performance per Watt on laptops than the "insanely great" G4.
x86 didn't look like it had a hell of a lot of potential three years ago, but AMD and Intel kept pounding. A good old "three yards and a cloud of dust" attack won the game.
You're right.... dammit! (Score:5, Interesting)
That the chip guys could start spending resources on actual innovation in hardware design, without having to keep one foot in the bucket of x86 binary compatibility.
That PowerPC, or the Cell, or anything with less than thirty years of binary baggage, might get out ahead and stay there long enough to put x86 to rest.
Dammit!
Re:You're right.... dammit! (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people won't give up, though: in the face of enormous evidence they'll still assure themselves that because something is "new" and "clean" it's somehow better.
So if x86, with all it's hacks and kludges, is still faster and more efficient than these so called "clean" designs, what the heck is the point of having a clean design?
Cheers.
Re:You're right.... dammit! (Score:5, Informative)
From an architectural standpoint, PPC is still a lot cleaner than x86. But the immense brainpower and $ that Intel has put behind x86 made it into something that is hard to beat even with a cleaner design.
In the end, it's a matter of priorities: Intel had to go low-power and had the resources to develop this technology while the company line was going in the exact opposite direction (P4). Now they are killing with it. Even AMD is way behind regarding low power chips.
IBM never wanted to commit the resources or people to make the G5 portable. They would have had to spend serious money - chip design is extremely expensive - and hire very very good people. IBM never had this commitment.
Besides, I have this feeling that the G5 was designed with some P4-envy in mind: Huge pipeline, high clock speeds. And using lots of power and generating lots of heat... Intel had the Pentium-M as a 'plan B' for this boneheaded strategy, whereas Apple/IBM did not.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not according to the NYT [nytimes.com].
By contrast, the chips I.B.M. makes for Apple represent less than 2 percent of chip production at its largest factory in East Fishkill, N.Y. And while the microelectronics business as a whole is strategically important for I.B.M., it is a small part of the revenue of a company that increasingly focuses on services and software. A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, estimates that the company's technology group - mostly microelectronics - will account for less than 3 percent of I.B.M.'s revenues and 2 percent of its pretax income this year.
For years, according to industry analysts, the work for Apple has been barely a break-even business for I.B.M. When the two companies were negotiating a new contract recently, Mr. Jobs pushed for price discounts that I.B.M. refused to offer. For I.B.M., "the economics just didn't work," said one industry executive who was briefed on the negotiations. "And Apple is not so important a customer that you would take the financial hit to hold onto the relationship."
I'm more interested in this quote [com.com]:
However, [Apple Senior Vice President Phil] Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."
Too bad. I'd like to run OS X w/out having to pay an Apple hardware premium.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Interesting)
Trusted Computing/DRM? I don't see any other way then through some form of remote attestation. Given their track record with iPod DRM, i wouldn't put it past them, either.
Perhaps the Mac crowd will become the ultimate DRM apologists, claiming, with some credibility, that Mac couldn't survive if it didn't have TC/DRM involved.
A unique argument: We're using technology to preserve a monopoly - except that it isn't really a monopoly.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not using openfirmware (Score:5, Interesting)
from cnet today:
http://news.com.com/Apple+throws+the+switch%2C+al
--------------
After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Informative)
I can't wait to see what people are able to do (legitimately or not) with the x86 dev boxes...
Precedent: Silicon Graphics "Visual Workstation" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Funny)
Lawyers?
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is just a really fast Virtual PC (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the more likely scenario is a version of Virtual PC that doesn't suck. Runs the windows code semi-natively...
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, just seemed appropriate.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Funny)
This only caused the I/O of some geeks to choke up due to wrong endianness. But for most Mac users the network flows as calm as ever.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Saddening. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has been slowly transitioning from proprietary hardware for a very long time. 20 years ago the system was all SCSI/68000/3.5" floppies (when PCs were IDE/x86/5.25"). That stuff cost too much money though (economics of scale), so they switched. The only thing left was the CPU, and its been killing them.
As long as the machines are still built by apple exclusively, this'll be more-or-less transparent to the mac user.
Re:Saddening. (Score:5, Interesting)
Either that, or that Jobs has made a mistake in going to Intel.
Mandatory 1984 quote (Score:5, Funny)
At this moment, for example, in 2005 (if it was 2005), Apple was at war with Motorola and in alliance with Intel. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Apple had been at war with Intel and in alliance with Motorola. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Apple was at war with Motorola: therefore Apple had always been at war with Motorola. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
CISC, RISC, and MMX (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No fear! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has obviously got an x86 gcc for Tiger and has already begun the process of porting the frameworks, most of which will probably not require massive porting effort. Frameworks like vecLib will probably require some more work to use SSE instead of Altivec though.
Even the concerns about things like endianness are not really a problem so long as the code was written the right way in the first place.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, they will have negligible margins on Dell in the benchmarks. If they go a sane route and stay with OpenBoot or similar, they will still need video cards that don't depend on ugly PC BIOS, so they are still unlikely to be kings of 3D.
I understand the technical issues, but I would be surprised if IBM wasn't able to clean up their act with all the PPC chips they will be moving for embedded systems (game consoles as well as misc. other)
Color me worried.
I don't think so (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think so. I think they'll be pointing at IBM and saying, yeah, it was a really good platform up till now, but those guys in the suits dropped the ball on us, are too stupid to get the G5 right (a well-publicized problem), and Intel took the lead with the new Pentium portables. Fuck this -- we have always gone with the best chip out there, starting with the 6502, and we always will. Heck, with all of the Intel ads out there, your average consumer probably saw the PowerPC as more of a problem. Like, why aren't these guys using "the Centrino" like everybody else?
In fact, after a bit of quick footwork, this will be a beautiful position for Apple to be in. Look, they can say, this is what you can do with a Pentium -- if you have OS X. Look, kids, same hardware has your Windows box, but not one single virus, no crashes, no maleware...
Having Intel and Apple dovetail their marketing efforts -- scary, actually. But not bad.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)
When Apple does not die as a result of this, I trust that at some point you'll be as open and honest as you are now and admit that in retrospect it was you who were that stupid, and not Apple.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? The Apple fans that buy Macs because they have OMG PPC970 will be chased away, sure. But not the ones that buy Macs because they are Macs. As long as it runs OSX and Photoshop, looks pretty sitting on their desk, and Steve Jobs said "Hey, you know, this is pretty good!" they are sold. The fact that they will most likely cost significantly less will be an added bonus for them, and likely attract even more customers than the switch chased away. People will likely not buy Dells, only to load them with OSX, because people generally use their computer the way it came until it dies. If someone wants OSX, they will buy an Apple, just like they do now.
And nothing has been said yet on if you WOULD be able to load it on any Dell or Gateway system. It could very well need some proprietary Mac hardware to run on. The CPU may be the core of the computer, but there are other things, too, such as the chipset and BIOS that could be Apple-exclusive.
I fail to see how this can have a SIGNIFICANT impact to Apple's install-base in the short term, and only see good things in the long term.
Re:Have a taste... (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer Mac + Intel = Mattel.
where's the lawsuit against c|net? (Score:5, Insightful)
From: http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/2005/0
Perhaps they wanted it... (Score:5, Insightful)
A good example of how this can work, if information came out on the shuffle well in advance of release, you'd see lots of reviews picking it apart for it's lack of a display, etc. So, before it ever hit the streets there would be a certain image of the device that could hurt their sales. But when Apple released it, they managed to spin the lack of display as a sort of feature. That the shuffle is about random playing, not picking songs out of a large library.
As far as this change goes, it doesn't really need to be handled in any particular way. They needed to keep it officially secret as a publicly traded company, but practically speaking I don't think they really cared. Ultimately the people most effected by it, ISV's, seem to have had some awareness ahead of time under NDA's (at least the bigger ones).
The end users of macs, for the most part, won't even understand what this means, or care. As long as the next mac they buy runs the software they have now and works as well as what they have now, they won't care.
Apple welcomed this leak (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:where's the lawsuit against c|net? (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy crap. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Holy crap. (Score:5, Informative)
Dispel any remaining doubts; we are now living in the evil mirror universe.
Re:Holy crap. (Score:5, Funny)
I'll believe that when the Red Sox win the World Series!
Re:Holy crap. (Score:5, Funny)
I'll believe that when the Red Sox win the World Series!
Yeah, right -- that's about as likely as finding out who Deep Throat is.
Re:Holy crap. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Holy crap. (Score:5, Funny)
In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)
It makes sense though... (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it. We don't have a G5 Powerbook because we hear about the massive heat issues. Hell, just recently, I am having to take back my recently aquired G4 Powerbook because they are catching on bloody fire.
Secondly, I understand that Adobe is not making Photoshop and their other products for the Mac *first*. They are going to the PC, and then the Mac.
I mean, this quote says it all:
"I stood up here two years ago and promised you 3.0 GHz. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook, and we haven't been able to deliver that to you," said Jobs. "But as we look ahead, and though we've got great products now, and great PowerPC products still to come, we can envision great products we want to build, and we can't envision how to build them with the current PowerPC roadmap,"
So they go Intel. Who cares? Most of us are using Linux on x86, and we couldn't care less. The only thing that alarmed me was that they didn't choose AMD64, but thats just me. Hopefully, this will influence developers to port their stuff over to OS X now (which would benifit Linux indirectly imo). So hopefully we'll get a ton more games (yay!... games are a wasteland on the Mac) and apps because of this switch.
Things are abotu to get interesting now. Its like Jobs saying, "OK, Gates... lets fight in your ring."
++Om
Um (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Um (Score:5, Funny)
So here it is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So here it is (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, you should have read all the keynote transcripts. They did the same thing when the PowerPC came out, developers were given prototype 6100s as part of their developer kit.
Re:So here it is (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So here it is (Score:5, Insightful)
Aww. That must have sucked. I presume both those devices just upped and died the moment they were outdated by superior technology ? That's why I never buy any technology that is in danger of being improved: you should see my mousetrap !
Once my current G5 has outlived it's useful life, I'm unlikely to buy Apple again.
I'm sorry I don't understand: I thought Apple had bilked you by 'dropping [it] from their line.' You say it still has a useful life ?
Not that big of a surprise (Score:5, Funny)
I also have been agreeing with the industry analysts who said Apple would be running on Intel chips before long, and I've been vindicated.
Now, if my prediction that Microsoft will have a Linux or other UNIX-like kernel in Windows by 2015 holds up I'll consider myself the Nostradomus of IT.
Paste from Macworld..read before flaming (Score:4, Informative)
Jobs talked about the major transitions in the Mac's life -- starting from the Mac's Motorola 68000-series processor to PowerPC. "The PowerPC set Apple up fro the next decade. It was a good move," he said.
"The second transition was even better -- the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X that we just did," he continued. "This was a brain transplant. And even though these operating systems (9 and x) vary only by one in name, they are very different, and this has set Apple up for the next 20 years."
As the Intel logo lowered on the stage screen, Jobs said, "We are going to make the transition from PowerPC to Intel processors, and we are going to do it for you now, and for our customers next year. Why? Because we want to be making the best computer for our customers looking forward."
"I stood up here two years ago and promised you 3.0 GHz. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook, and we haven't been able to deliver that to you," said Jobs. "But as we look ahead, and though we've got great products now, and great PowerPC products still to come, we can envision great products we want to build, and we can't envision how to build them with the current PowerPC roadmap," said Jobs.
Intel processors provide more performance per watt than PowerPC processors do, said Jobs. "When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PoweRPC gives us 15 units of perfomance per watt, but Intel's roadmap gives us 70. And so this tells us what we have to do," he explained.
Transition to Intel by 2007, and yes, Marklar exists
"Starting next year, we will introduce Macs with Intel processors," said Jobs. "This time next year, we plan to ship Macs with Intel processors. In two years, our plan is that the transition will be mostly complete, and will be complete by end of 2007."
Jobs then confirmed a long-held belief that Apple was working on an Intel-compatible version of Mac OS X that some have termed "Marklar."
Mac OS X has been "leading a secret double life" for the past five years, said Jobs. "So today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for PowerPC and Intel. This has been going on for the last five years."
Jobs demonstrated a version of Mac OS X running on a 3.6GHz Pentium 4-processor equipped system, running a build of Mac OS X v10.4.1. He showed Dashboard widgets, Spotlight, iCal, Apple's Mail, Safari and iPhoto all working on the Intel-based system.
Apple needs developers' help to complete the transition
"We are very far along on this, but we're not done," said Jobs. "Which is why we're going to put it in your hands very soon, so you can help us finish it."
Widget, scripts and Java applications should work in the new environment without any conversion, said Jobs. Cocoa-based applications will require "a few minor tweaks and a recompile." Carbon-based applications require "a few more tweaks," recompiling, and "they'll work," said Jobs. And projects built using Metrowerks' CodeWarrior need to be moved to Xcode.
The future of Mac OS X development is moving to Xcode, said Jobs. Of Apple's top 100 developers, more than half -- 56 percent -- are already using Xcode, and 25 percent are in the process of switching to Xcode. "Less than 20 percent are not on board yet. Now is a good time to get on board," said Jobs.
A new build of Xcode, version 2.1, is being released today. This new release enables developers to specify PowerPC or Intel architectures. "... and you're going to build what's called a universal binary. It contains all the bits for both architectures," said Jobs. "One binary, works on both PowerPC and Intel architecture. So you can ship one CD that supports both processors."
"This is nothing like Carbonizing"
Many developers reading this news may be thinking that they'll have to go through the same woes they had to in order to get their Mac OS 9 applications "Carbonized" to run on
Re:Paste from Macworld..read before flaming (Score:5, Informative)
Rosetta keeps old apps running
Jobs also discussed a new technology called Rosetta, that he described as "a dynamic binary translator." It runs existing PowerPC applications on the Intel platform, he said. Jobs described Rosetta as "lightweight," and said "it's nothing like Classic."
Jobs demonstrated Rosetta by running Microsoft Office applications, Quicken and Photoshop CS 2 -- all unmodified PowerPC-binary versions, unlike Mathematica -- on the new Intel-based hardware.
"So that is Rosetta, Jobs concluded. "These PowerPC apps just run. And that's what we're going to have for our users, because every app isn't going to be there for our users on day one."
Microsoft's Roz Ho and Adobe's Bruce Chizen both took the stage to reaffirm their commitment to the Macintosh platform. Ho said that Microsoft has been "working with Apple for some time" to create future versions of Office using Apple's Xcode tools, and will create universal binaries accordingly." Chizen called Apple's decision to move to Intel "great," and gently chided Steve Jobs: "What took you so long?"
IBM Screwjob (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, the question is... what will the new platform be called? Certainly not PowerMac...
Dave Thorup, eat your hat! (Score:5, Funny)
Switching ends? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Switching ends? (Score:4, Funny)
if(CPU_TYPE == INTEL) {
transparently_handle_endian_issues(filehandle);
} else {
use_old_endian_issues(filehandle);
}
Please do not... (Score:4, Funny)
Have to wonder if Apple couldn't get PPC chips. (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple getting out of hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple getting out of hardware? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, I'm posting this from a G3, so what would I know.
Yeah, nice, but ... (Score:5, Funny)
Better be on Mach-O, folks (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't good news for many developers using Codewarrior. Either build for a second-class processor, or switch over to a new IDE (whose quality is why many keep to CW). There's a third option there, but it's not very pretty.
Well, there was a hint already (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM forcing this? (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM might have said that they weren't going to spend any R&D on the G5/970 for the laptop for instance.
And Apple was forced to take the plunge.
And now they are desperately trying to make this sound as if it will be an advantage to the end user and that it is a great thing.
But behind the scenes Steve Jobs is cursing IBM.
Re:IBM forcing this? (Score:5, Funny)
Collect on all that debt, baby! (Score:5, Funny)
Over the years, I've made a ton of bets with Mac fans who swore up and down that Apple would never, ever switch to Intel processors.
I am now owed several kegs of beer and some free fancy dinners. A couple people owe me a million bucks.
Business strategy:
1. Make wagers with Apple people.
2.
3. Profit! Steve Jobs will make the announcement for you.
Intel branding (Score:4, Interesting)
This seems familiar to NeXT owners (Score:4, Insightful)
NeXT eventually threw in the towel on shipping 68000-based hardware. The transition from "black" NeXT hardware to "beige" PC x86 hardware pissed off a lot of early adopters.
One of the pissed-off users remixed the original audio welcome mail into this [nyud.net]. They posted it to usenet with the readme:
I'm sure the mindless Apple fanboys are now going to find some new magic word besides "Altivec" to justify their purchases. Me, I'm just happy with this mini.
Apple Computer - WORLD CLASS MANAGEMENT (Score:5, Interesting)
"Mac OS X has been "leading a secret double life" for the past five years, said Jobs. "So today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for PowerPC and Intel. This has been going on for the last five years."
Damn. This is forward looking, hedge all your bets corporate Management. World class Management.
I don't know if this thing will succeed or fail, but just parsing that statement above shows me that Jobs and Apple Computer will continue to evaluate all possible options at all possible times.
This is one well run company.
This is good, here's why. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is good, here's why. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure we have lived with in-order cores before (out-of-order was introduced to the PC with the Pentium Pro), but it is troublesome, we are back to the compiler having to do the heavy lifting trying to put together the ideal instruction stream. It is actually a lot worse than it seems when I compare it with the original pentium, with its shallow pipeline and the relativly speaking lower memory latency of those days you could get away with a lot more without trashing performance.
Even if Apple through some magic manages to generate decent code for the in-order primary core (and it is not unlikely that they'd have to dump GCC since lots of hard-to-merge work would have to be done, and then they would lose the advantage of having a freely redistributable compiler) they will still be stumped on the vector units. Sure some of the heavier apps manage to make good use of Altivec, but that is a lot easier than trying to keep 8-16 vector units filled at the same time. Basicly only scientific and various extremely expensive pro applications would ever manage to invest the effort needed to actually manage to tap much of the power of the vector units (part because vectorization is hard, but also importantly because there are so many units to fill).
This all adds up to the Cell (and IBM's new in-order cores without the vector units) being quite unsuitable for any market where the applications are not written very specifically targeting the chip. It works for consoles since development is hardware-specific there, but putting out a computer with the Cell and expecting it to work out on peoples desktops is not in any way a good idea.
Apple posts Intel docs; No OpenFirmware on x86 (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, except now you can have a fast mobile (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I can get back to a 4-5hr runtime like the first generation Tibook had..
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
You loose *some* compatability with existing Mac apps.
More likely than not, all Linux apps will be recompilable for Mac. No sweat.
This means OpenOffice.org 2.0 will work *now*.
This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.
Virtual PC will run *much* faster. No more cpu emulation is needed.
Vmware will run on a mac.
Plus, all the big name apps will run just as fast. Adobe, Macromedia (same company now). Not to mention the Apple Pro apps, Video stuff, etc. That stuff will be perfect.
WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
And WINE/VirtualPC running so well may be the biggest disaster for MacOS -- why should Microsoft continue to support MSOffice/Mac when you can just run the Windows version in WINE? Why should Adobe build Acrobat for MacOS, when the Windows version (runs just as fast in WINE!) has more features and costs less??
Good Windows emulation is probably what killed OS/2, it can kill OS X too...
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux apps are ALREADY recompilable and compatible for mac. All of them, just about. There were only problems when OS X beta first hit, and that was mostly because people had been writing their Makefiles poorly.
Modern computer software is almost never CPU-tied. The only problem is you have to recompile to run on different CPUs, which means you have to have source code. Linux apps, conveniently, you usually do, meaning transitioning between CPU archs as a linux user is effortless in a way it will not be for OS X users. The only problem with linux
This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.
I assure you, no. The reasons inkscape is broken on my mac have nothing whatsoever to do with processors. I don't know what the holdup on openoffice 2.0 is, but I think it's less to do with chips and more to do with APIs. If there's some incompatibility between OO2 and Apple X11 I'm sure it would be fixed by now if someone felt like using a word processor inside the X11 battlemech were worth it.
What you're saying is kind of like "no more second-class windows versions of popular OS apps" because Cygwin exists there.
WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.
That does have interesting implications. But it's going to require a LOT of work to make that work, above and beyond what Wine's already doing. Wine will have to be practically rewritten for cocoa. Otherwise we'll be running the partially-incompatible wine translation layer inside the compatible-but-awkward X11 translation layer. Eww. I don't really expect wine for os x to get to the point your average person can run it for a long time, and I don't expect it to really work ever unless Apple themselves decide to put some work into it.
And Wine doesn't mean much to me personally. Again, great for Apple, great for switchers, not so much for anyone who's already invested in the mac. Windows apps are half the reason windows isn't worth using. The only thing it's really got worth keeping are games, and well, not only are those what Wine is worst at, that's what that little multicolored box plugged into my TV is for.
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
NeoOffice/J hasn't even started working on OO.org 2.0.
I understand the problems associated with an aqua port. Even without aqua, there are quite a few apps which make poor assumptions about the architecture they are running on, and quite a few libraries which use code that won't compile on a mac. I'm talking about just running stuff normalish linux apps on X11 on your Mac.
Not everything is a portable as you make it out to be. Plenty of programmers make poor assumptions when writing their software, including the sun guys who wrote the original star office codebase.
Oh, and Fullscreen opengl works great on the Mac's X11 implementation right now. I doubt that we'll see that go away on Mac OS X x86.
Why *shouldn't* wine work? We don't know the specifics of the OS yet, but Wine works on Freebsd. Transgaming believes that Cedega can be shoehorned onto Freebsd.
And cedega, if you haven't tried it, is fantastic for running Windows Games on Linux. Not 100%, mind you, but it handles a lot of games extremely well. In some cases, with better-than-windows performance.
Freebsd->Darwin isn't really that big of a jump, if you are talking about x86. Running Half-Life 2, even under X11, even under Cedega, could be quite a big selling point.
Wrong...will actually make native OOo wait longer (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I am an OpenOffice.org Mac OS X devleoper and a founder of the NeoOffice [neooffice.org] project
Quote: This means OpenOffice.org 2.0 will work *now*. This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.
This statement couldn't actually be farther from the truth. In fact, it will actually make the push for OpenOffice.org, at least, more difficult. If you dig into the details it means there's much more work ahead:
Changing processors does nothing to help OpenOffice.org development on Mac OS X except slow it down yet again. Chances are you'll probably see it running in an emulator for a long time before it's running on Mactel hardware.
ed
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, this is bullshit. There's an extremely viable benefit to consumers: Apple will still be relevant in three years.
Why do you think Apple is doing this? It's not for shits and giggles. Those mobile G5s everyone's been waiting for, the one's that were going to save Apple's portable line from irrelevancy? It should be pretty obvious at this point that IBM has told Apple they aren't coming. Freescale dropped the ball, the G4 line is miles behind the times and Freescale lacks the ability to bring it up to date.
"Consumers don't benefit"? Bullshit. Consumers benefit because this is the only way Apple can keep their portables competitive. Laptops are the fastest growing segment of the market place, and Apple finally hitting 2Ghz with a G4 and its you've-got-to-be-shitting-me slow bus sometime next year wasn't going to cut it. Laptop sales fall, software makers lose interest, Apple fails, Apple's customers lose.
I'd rather they bet it all on a transition to keep the company relevant, rather than keep Freescale's incompetency and IBM's disinterest in laptop-suitable engineering as an anchor to hold them back in the market place until sheer inevitability kills the platform.
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)
2. The way the Intel and PowerPC raodmaps are going I think in three uears time there will be a HUGE difference in capability. Jobs was demoing a Pentium 3.6GHz quad for God's sake!
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)
Do you have any evidence to back this assertion? Generally speaking, Altivec in the G5 has the same function and performance as SSE2 in the Pentium 4. I use floating point functions that I have developed and coded in assembly language myself, and I don't see any difference between Altivec and SSE2 at the fundamental level.
Most of the derogatory comments by Apple users about the supposed shortcomings of SSE2 are ill informed, they seem to confuse SSE2 with MMX. Optimization for either the Altivec or SSE2 is a complex subject. First, one has to find an algorithm that works well for vector operations, which means making sure that add and multiply operations will overlap correctly. Then one has to adapt that algorithm for the cache size, CPU clock, and memory bus cycle times. The main problem here is to avoid starving the cache. One has to balance how many operations are done by the CPU for each byte that comes from/to RAM and make sure that the timing is right. All these factors vary a lot between different CPU, mobo, and RAM models. To state that Altivec is either better or worse than SSE2 is simplistic, they are functionally identical and the relative performance between them will be determined by secondary factors.
The biggest problem in SSE2 is that the only compiler that optimizes it well is Intel's, gcc sucks when generating code for the P4, but with hand-optimized code this is irrelevant. If the Intel architecture that Apple will adopt has SSE2, this could be very good news for developers. Let's hope Apple implements efficient optimization for SSE2.
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Like, me. I wrote the AltiVec emulation in PearPC. Thus, I have quite a bit of authority on the differences between the two.
AltiVec has a more fleshed out assortment of instructions. SSE2, and SSE both are missing a number of instructions. Most of these don't get used often, so you're not losing much in the way of speed, but AltiVec has a more complete implementation.
EXAMPLE:
PAVGB
PAVGH
but no PAVGW
PMINUB and PMINSW, but no PMINSB, PMINUH, PMINSH, PMAXUW
PSLLW and PSLLD, but no PSLLH, or PSSLB (same for all packed shifts)
Then, I'll point out a number of points upon the design straight from the Pentium 4 optimization guide.
Don't use SSE when 64-bits is all you're working on. This makes obvious sense for floating point code (denormals take a long time to calculate and can stall results for the stuff you want), but this is saying use MMX when only using 64-bits of data. Because, and I kid you not. They say that the 128-bit SSE is wider, and thus performs slower. (Why should it when it's PARALLEL execution.)
Also, SSE3 is breaking parallel operations by providing horizontal instructions. Why even vectorize these, they're going to run as slow as scalar operations. Ok, so you get out of passing it back out to memory, but come on, the idea of a vectorization unit is to perform parallel vector math. But I understand the strong desire to make things work fast rather than proper, and avoiding those few clock-cycles means that they're willing to stall a vector unit on a scalar operation.
Um... what do we have left. AH yes. The problem of XORPS vs PXOR. They both do the same thing right? They XOR the value of one 128-bit register against another 128-bit register. But there's a fundamental point here. If you use XORPS on an XMM register, which is integer, then you're going to get slow down. If you use PXOR on an XMM register, which is floating point, then you're going to get slow down. Now this really isn't a problem when you can track this information and such. But really. Shouldn't these both be equated to the same microcode, and handled by say, a logic vector unit that handles permutes (sorry, shuffles) and logic? WOULDN'T THAT MAKE SENSE. Not apparently to the SSE designers.
Now, SSE2 yes had double-percision floating point in 128-bit vector registers, which gets you a whole incredible 2 elements per vector. Wow, that's definitely worth the overhead of using vector registers, and insuring alignment, etc. Plus, the G5 can issue two identical FPU instructions at one time, and since all PowerPC math is done in double-precision (or better internally to an instruction) you get two double-precision operations per cycle. Wow, I can see a true benefit for hacking in double precision support into AltiVec.
Now, if you want to debate any of these points, I'll gladly point you to the proper resource to prove my point, as I use them constantly in my work on emulating AltiVec with SSE.
(BTW: emulating SSE with AltiVec would be almost painfully simple compared to AltiVec in SSE. It's almost entirely a proper superset of SSE.)
Oh, last, let's not forget about those wonderful instructions that Apple must have told someone to put in there, because they're used for Anti-aliasing fonts, and icons, and are just used all over the place in OSX: vmhraddshs, etc. Which will likely never have a single instruction equivalent in SSE.
68K to PPC transition wasn't so bad (Score:5, Interesting)
And it is likely that this transition will probably go even more smoothly: Early versions of the PPC MacOS still were running a lot of 68K OS code in emulation; it is a safe bet that the Intel OS X will be 100% native code. And there is less hand-tweaked assembly code running around, so it will be easier for developers to simply recompile. Most major applications are already cross-platform, so developers already know what to tweak to enhance Intel processor performance.
My guess is that the transition will be smoother than the PPC transition, and much smoother than the OS X transition.
Financially, this is going to be a big bump for Apple. I'm certainly not going to order any more new Macs until the Intel systems are available. This may be one reason why they chose to do it now, when the success of the iPod will carry them through.
It may be the best decision for Apple, but I still think that it would have been better if they'd been able to reach a deal with IBM to develop the PPC further. I would much rather have seen multicore PPC's.
The question of whether the Intel OS X will run on generic Intel hardware seems to still be open. I'd guess not, but then I didn't believe that they'd switch to Intel in the first place.
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um... NO... (Score:5, Insightful)
I love my Mac for the usability of its user interface (both CLI and GUI) and for the fact that it looks so damn good. It depresses me when I have to fire up my ugly old PC when I actually want my code to finish in a reasonable time.
Re:You know what this means, Power PC Apple Users? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You know what this means, Power PC Apple Users? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is when some "smart" developer decides to save space on his binary by simply not compiling in PowerPC support because "his userbase doesn't have that significant of a percentage of PowerPC users anymore". That's fine and dandy to the majority of x86 Mac users, but what about those left with a perfectly good aging PowerPC system?
They're suddenly unsupported and that's a horrible worthless feeling with nobody to blame it on except Apple for making, at worst, an arbitrary platform shift. At best, it's a failure of engineering which isn't terribly reassuring either.
Re:So when can I get a copy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So when can I get a copy? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Why buy a mac then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just for the OS? I'm wondering.
Yes.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Re:Farewell Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
(official "apple is dead" #94,549,238,192,204,223)
Apple has shown time and time again their resiliency to major hardware and software migrations. Once people get over the shock and awe of this announcement, people will start to realize it was a natural progression. We will be moving from a "niche" OS using a "niche" CPU to a "niche" OS using the "industry standard" CPU.
If next year, IBM sold off their PPC manufacturing, Apple would/could be dead in the water. Now that they are with Intel, they can just glide along with the industry.
Re:-5 WRONG! READ THE KEYNOTE! (Score:5, Funny)
-JD-
Overreacting surely? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad news for GCC (Score:5, Interesting)
What hypocracy! When Apple wanted to "prove" that Intel was slower, they used GCC. Now that they need to use Intel, they're using the manufacturer's recommended compiler and getting better results.
Re:Bad news for GCC (Score:5, Insightful)