Month: June 2005

Well, it’s official

Apple’s OS X will run on some unnamed (at least I can’t find it) Intel chip.

I had to re-read this post and comment thread from almost three years ago. So it’s running on x86, as many of us have assumed, and we’ll see where the roadmap takes us.

Bottomline? Who cares what it runs on? Even the so-called tech press is making this into something more than it really is: Apple has never sold the PowerPC architecture as the main draw. The user experience is the selling point, and this is a bid to improve that.

<update> It was Pentium 4 in the onstage demo, apparently. I’m trying to get my mind around the supposedly aging x86 family being considered a replacement for the future-proof Power CPU family.


[composed and posted with ecto]

the switch, continued

A friend writes:

I don’t by the iTanic theory. Itanium is an answer to
a question no one was asking. If it’s about power,
Apple would stick with POWER. [Goofy] way to put it, but
IBM has the fastest processor architecture bar none.

My third best guess is Apple/Jobs had a falling out
with IBM. (Possible) Jobs, like most of the princess
CEO’s, must have his way. He didn’t get it with fab
issues and performance targets.

My second best guess is Apple saw the writing on the
wall vis-a-vis cost per unit. That’s cost in terms of
power, cost as a development target, and cost to
build.

POWER and derivatives run hot. A G5 based portable
system would be a battery hog with a capital H.
Celeron and Pentium-M run pretty cool, relatively
speaking. The technical justification is reasonable
but should be solvable in other ways.

RISC architectures yield better performance at the
expense of substantially more complex compilers and
code. Intel is a relatively easy platform for which
to develop and optimize code. I’m not sure I buy this
as a motivator. When is the last time you wrote code
that used low-level chip functions? Assembly
programming is a dying art outside of the S/390 space.

Cost to build – this I buy. There are a hell of a lot
more Intel chips, fabs, and sources. Apple has got to
increase volume somehow, and people are just more
comfortable with Windoze. Perhaps Apple has plans for
an ultra-cheap Mac Mini that will break the $350 mark.
This is an especially pertinent mark to break given
the transition of many home PC functions into the game
console market.

My prediction: Apple will not survive this change if
it is all about cost. They barely survived the 68000
to PowerPC shift.

Here’s a shadow conspiracy theory, and my best guess:
The CPU will become irrelevant in favor of
programmable coprocessors, particularly Cell. This
could mean that IBM will still have a significant role
in Apple hardware. It could also mean that Apple is
scared $hitless of the smart console market,
especially with IBM cozying up to Sony.

I have to admit that I didn’t see this one coming.
The industry rags have mentioned an Apple/Intel
announcement for years, and I always thought it was
nonsense.

What’s your theory?

I dunno. the only reason I thought of Itanium was that it was 64 bit and I couldn’t see Apple going back to 32 bit, even with the extensions (to get around memory address limits).

[composed and posted with ecto]

Gruber on ‘The Switch’

I’ll See You Intel:

Speculation on the explosive reports that Apple is going to switch the Mac to Intel processors.

As usual, he offers a good, if pungent, analysis.

I have to wonder if the move isn’t to x86 but Itanium (would it have to be recast as iTanium?). It’s 64 bit, where x86 is not, and there is considerable work being done on the FreeBSD community for it. If Apple’s software engineers can make gcc 4 available for a mainstream architecture before anyone else (as far as I know), who knows what they can do with Itanium by mid summer of next year?

[composed and posted with ecto]

Continue reading “Gruber on ‘The Switch’”

as good a reason as any

Backup Brain:

I use Macs for a simple reason: even though I’m very technical and *can* generally convince any computer to shut up and do what I want, I feel life is too short, and I’d rather work on the task at hand instead of beating on a computer ot get it to let me work on the task. Macs are very good at just getting out of my way and not causing problems. And one could only wonder how much more productive other geeks would be if they got away from the “I like hacking my windows box” mentality and actually put that time into finishing things. But that’s their choice, and they’re welcome to it. Me, I have higher aims in life than having my obituary read “he finally got his Registry” cleaned out”, you know?

One gets the feeling the fanboys are more in love with the computer as a fetish object than as a tool.

[composed and posted with ecto]

Intel inside

Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips | CNET News.com:

Apple has used IBM’s PowerPC processors since 1994, but will begin a phased transition to Intel’s chips, sources familiar with the situation said. Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said.

The announcement is expected Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, at which Chief Executive Steve Jobs is giving the keynote speech. The conference would be an appropriate venue: Changing the chips would require programmers to rewrite their software to take full advantage of the new processor.

Interesting.

Of course, changing chips actually wouldn’t require developers to rewrite anything: the compiler (gcc 4 comes standard with OS X) needs to know what it’s generating object code for, as with the rest of the toolchain, but in this day and age, programmers don’t need to sweat those details.

Gee, I hope they got some of the more important facts right. Not that this story hasn’t come up before . . . .

Now playing: Sweet Soul Dream by World Party from the album “Goodbye Jumbo” | Get it

[composed and posted with ecto]


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the new book club

Book Club: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace:

Freedom to Tinker is hosting an online book club discussion of Lawrence Lessig’s book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig has created a wiki (an online collaborative space) with the text of the book, and he is encouraging everyone to edit the wiki to help create a new edition of the book.

You can buy a paper version of the book from Amazon or read it online for free.

We’ll read one or two chapters each week, and we’ll discuss what we read on the main Freedom to Tinker blog.

A discussion worth following.
Now Playing: Back On The Street from the album “Beckology (Disc 3)” by Jeff Beck | Get it

[composed and posted with ecto]