Nicholas Leippe wrote:
On Monday 06 June 2005 12:28 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Put it this way though - finally, one OS to rule them all that's not
Microsoft. Apple, who does it right, and sells PCs, not just the OS,
will finally use the Intel architecture the way it is supposed to be
used! I, for one am excited for this. Intel processors have advanced
much further,under much less power than PPC, so I can see huge leaps and
bounds by apple in the near future.
Hrm, debateable.
However, it seems that Apple may be shooting themselves again considering that
the cell processor is Power based--you'd think they'd want to take advantage
of being closer to taking advantage of the new, extraordinary performance
potential than any other architecture... but then we are talking Steve Jobs
here.
(I do realize there's no immediate benefit to the cell w/regards to a general
purpose os, but having your entire platform already on the same base
architecture could make porting speed-critical plugins (photoshop, games,
etc) that much simpler.)
from my reading, its doubtful they would have used the cell anyway.
(atleast not as the main processor in a future powerpc) altho it is
possible to still use it as a graphics render/coprocessor as Jobs had in
his NeXT days. My understanding of the Cell, while based on PPC, is
still different enough that its not just a simple recompile. Apple's to
dependant on the AltiVec[1] and the Cell's relatively weak in that
deparment.
1. AltiVec is a floating point SIMD instruction set designed and owned
by Apple Computer, IBM and Motorola (the AIM alliance), and implemented
on versions of the PowerPC including Motorola's G4 and IBM's G5
processors. AltiVec is a tradename owned solely by Motorola, so the
system is also referred to as Velocity Engine by Apple and VMX by IBM.
Mitch
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