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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=879
Skunkworks: OS X on x86 Deep in the Bowels of Apple
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
September 2nd 2002
X on x86 may be Jobs'' "fall-back" plan.
In an article at
The Register,/A> Andrew Orlowski cites Nick de Plume and Matthew Rothenberg, who state
they have confirmed that Apple not only has a working Jaguar prototype running on x86,
but it also has around 12 engineers.
Writing in eWeek, Rothenberg and de Plume state that the x86 version of Jaguar is
code-named ''Maklar'', and is keeping step with the PPC upgrades to OS X. According to
the eWeek article, the x86 version is feature-complete.
Depite thid, Rothenberg and de Plume argue that their sources say that a jump to x86
is not likely to occur, due to serious changes that wold need to be made to Apple''s
hardware architecture. No Carbon and no Classic would be available to an x86 box.
The article says that Apple is much more likely to go with Power4 from IBM if Motorola
fails to deliver highly-clocked CPUs.
But other sources say that OS X on x86 is Jobs'' Plan B, according to Rothenberg and
de Plume, in case PowerPC never delivers the multi-gigahertz speeds that Apple needs
to maintain parity with Intel and AMD.
Analysis: x86 may well be Jobs'' low-resourced Plan B, but we may be missing the
obvious: a Mac capable of running a variety of OSes. While x86 PCI add-in cards are
prohibitively expensive these days, they were popular in the 6100 and other Macs, for
users who wanted dual-boot capability. Mac users mostly use VPC when necessary, but a
Mac that could run OS X, Windows and Linux if you wanted would have some tremendous
appeal if it could be done at Apple''s current price levels. We know Apple is killing
Classic and would like it dead as soon as possible. This would, perhaps, make it
feasible to wean developers away from Carbon and get them to build Cocoa apps.
Post your comments at:
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=879
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