I really don't see that running on an Intel platform will help all that
much, if any at all.
Consider that you have to not just port the OS (current state of Marklar
not-withstanding) but you also have to port the apps as well (and no
just re-compiling does not always work, some things have to done from
scratch -- this will not make commercial and third party developers at
all happy. Furthermore, if you were a developer, why in the world would
you want to port a project to run in OS-X on Intel chips when you could
port it to run under Windows XP on Intel chips and get to a bigger
market faster -- bigger market share being part of the point of the
article. (As and aside isn't it better to be profitable with your market
than to just have a bigger market share?)
If Apple were going only for the faster Mhz speed, then going with the
new Power4 chip from IBM makes a lot more sense (out of the box it runs
way faster than any Pentium currently out there and it semi-supports
Alti-Vec instruction codes.) The reason that this is important is that
the Alti-Vec instruction set is what makes the G4 so much faster than
the G3 - at the same Mhz rating. This is easily seen if you take a
program like the UNIX version of seti at home and run it on a 500 Mhz iBook
and on a 500 Mhz G4 -- both computers running the same version of OS-X.
Guess which computer will complete a work unit faster? They will tie.
This is because the G4 is a G3 with a turbo charger under the hood, so
to speak, not all programs turn the turbo charger on. Use the new Power4
chip from IBM to replace the G3 and wow, it'll run rings around any
Pentium out there (or planned to be out there in the near future --
according to Intel and AMD pr releases) on all programs, and the
programs that use the pseudo Alti-Vec instructions should really fly.
Porting apps over to run on Intel chips will actually cause some of them
to slow down, because they will lose the Alti-Vec advantage they
currently enjoy, and running them on 4 Ghz Intel machines won't make up
for it either. All of that Alti-Vec code has to be replaced with some
code that is AMD or Pentium compliant.
With Apple making tremendous strides to fix problems such as latency
(the time between sampling a sound and playing it through the speakers),
we can expect to see some down-right fantastic audio programs being
released for the Mac on G4 chips, these will have to be thrown on the
back-burner again. I for one don't want to see this happen. There are
many other areas where there are similar fixes going on that will be
set-back if not temporarily abandoned again until Apple could coax the
developers to move forward on the projects.
And what would Apple do with teh G5 chips it is reported to have? (it is
supposed to be faster than the Power4 chip -- ahh, gotta love those
rumors).
With Windows apps being tossed aside by some major corporations (due to
the stupid way M$ has decided to license them) it would be foolish for
Apple to ignore that (meaning if they put some major polish to things
like Appleworks, then Office might have some serious competition).
While the article does raise some interesting points, it really sounds
like another "analyst" that has seen OS-X in action and wants it to run
on their machine, but is afraid to be seen at CompUSA buying a new Mac
to run it.
Jerry
On Monday, September 16, 2002, at 09:03 PM, Anne Cartwright wrote:
> Very interesting, thanks Tom.
>
> Anne Cartwright
>
>
> On Monday, September 16, 2002, at 09:33 AM,
> Thomas_J._Guenthner at HUD.GOV wrote:
>
>>
>> http://www.jlconline.com/cgi-
>> bin/jlconline.storefront/3d85cecb001b30f9271a401e1d290640/Catalog/1131?read=
>> 7566
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be September
>> 24
>> For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of
>> activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
>>
>>
>
>
> The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be September 24
> For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of
> activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
>
>
The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be September 24
For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of
activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
