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OS X x86?
(old news - 05:27PM Saturday Aug 31 2002)
Saw this on eWeek... "As Apple Computer Inc. draws up its game plan for the CPUs that will power its future generations of Mac hardware, the company is holding an ace in the hole: a feature-complete version of Mac OS X running atop the x86 architecture." here
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Thinkdiff
Premium,MVM
join:2001-08-07
Los Angeles, CA | No... No... not happening | |
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cstrippie$
join:2001-12-19
Ceylon |  Remember history
Craig | |
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Brendan
Warr Guitar is here
join:2000-07-14
Littleton, CO | Re: Remember history No, NeXTStep was originally written for NeXT's hardware, which ran on Motorola chips (68k). Only later did they port it to x86, when NeXT stopped making hardware. | |
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Thinkdiff
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join:2001-08-07
Los Angeles, CA
| uh...no again There has never been a functioning "OS X" x86. There is a functioning Darwin x86, but the Gui and other features that are in OS X and NOT in Darwin are mostly ONLY PPC. It would be extremely hard for them to port all that over. Much easier to just continue with a PPC based processor.
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One year and 1,000 posts later... "That's not what we think, we think different." -Steve Jobs | I Use the Official Memorial Commemorative Special Edition Happy Mac Avatar. Not to be confused with PIC's. | |
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applelover
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join:2002-04-15
Commerce City, CO
| Re: uh...no again True, probably not in the near future. But, wouldn't this be an easy way to increase the number of users of Apple's OS and isn't OS X really just incredible eye candy on top of FreeBSD running the Carnegie-Mellon mach kernel. I for one would love to run OS x on my current machine but, Apple seems to like to control the hardware aspect as much if not more than the software aspect.
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Revised list of the Two Commandments: Thou shalt be honest and faithful to the provider of thy nookie.Thou shalt try real hard not to murder anyone unless they pray to a different invisible man than you do. | |
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Thinkdiff
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join:2001-08-07
Los Angeles, CA
| Re: uh...no again This would be an easy way for apple to loose a shitload of money...people going out, buying the cheapest E-Machine at Best Buy and then buy OS X for 129 dollars...If I was Apple, I would like 1,000+ dollars instead of just 130...
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One year and 1,000 posts later... "That's not what we think, we think different." -Steve Jobs | I Use the Official Memorial Commemorative Special Edition Happy Mac Avatar. Not to be confused with PIC's. | |
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mkcompu
Premium
join:2001-02-23
Piscataway, NJ
clubs: | Re: uh...no again Yes this would mess up apple. gomez posted about how one clever hacker would spend days working and post a patch to use this on PC's and apple would be like OS/2. end of story. apple wont abandon crunch-vec for a long time. | |
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Gomez
The Pool's In But The Patio Ain't Dry
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Pub Games
| Re: Interesting From an engineering standpoint it's probably no big deal to build it for x86. Most of the altivec optimized code likely started as C, and build directives control the target of the build. I'm pretty sure a very senior engineer could demo aqua on X86 or Caruso or pretty much any chipset as gcc is a good cross compiler.
The issue at hand is not an engineering one, it's a business one. DVD encryption was broken in what a day? Name any Windows app with mass appeal that there isn't a crack for. Cracking X86 technology is actually a competition if you know the dark corners of the net to watch it unfold.
Apple is a hardware company. They happen to have an awesome Software offering to sell said product. I stand firm on my opinion that throwing that IP in the shark infested waters of X86 is suicide.
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"There are 10 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary numbers and those that do not." | |
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Interesting
since AMD is still following with the "improve IPC and mhz" principle that should've stayed in place. Not to mention, I think most everyone knows that for most everything, Apple's G4 (clock-for-clock) would cream a Pentium4. hell, clock-for-clock the original Pentium would beat a P4 (at RC5), apparently