Just figured I'd chime in. Darwin is basically the kernel and some of the unix side utils. It's available for powerpc (and as previously noted) Intel.
Keep in mind that OSX is basically an ancestor of the old nextstep which ran on Motoroll and Intel (and I think maybe 1-2 others). As far as I can tell the G5 is dead, motorolla called it quits on the desktop when apple killed all the apple clones, motorolla wanted to go after the embedded market for cpu's for cars, cell phones and the like. In any case this was publically announced. Kinda sad, Motorolla has played a large part in keeping Apple behind the price/perf curve. At one point Motorola couldn't break 500 Mhz and IBM could, alas Motorola wouldn't allow IBM to make faster chips and IBM couldn't because they required the altivec license. Thankfully motorola has given up, and no longer restricts IBM. Now that IBM has free reign they have just added Altivec to the Power 4 which has been shipping in high end servers for some time now. Excellent memory performance, full 64 bit registers/pointers, and other fun stuff. It even has vertical threading, but I think thats a bit to complex for discussion here. So basically IBM has a killer 64 bit chip, killer memory bus (which has long been a serious problem with Apple), and altivec (required for some specialized software), it's expected to show up in apple's sometime in the next year. On the other hand a very similar but x86 compatible chip is expected from AMD (the hammer/x86-64) in the next month or so, it uses a interconnect called Hypertransport. It's used as fast cheap high speed interface on quite a few pieces of hardware today. Some x86 motherboards, the xbox, some athlon motherboards (nforce/nforce2), some embedded MIPS cpus etc. Quite a bit of industry support seems to be building for Hypertransport, among the licenses are Cisco, Nvidia, ATI, Sun, and Apple. So you combine apple offering the OSX kernel and related stuff (darwin) for Intel, Apple licensing HT, and apple needing a serious memory/cpu upgrade to stay competitive and you come to the conclusion that apple is at least considering OSX for intel. Not to mention Apple would love to run a Switch campaign against microsoft/intel saying what, you still use a "32 bit" OS/Apps/Hardware? How 90's ;-) On the flipside the powerpc970 (which IMO apple would be dead without), apple can stay competitive, and I'm sure the developers would rather support 1 architecture than 2. Even is OSX has the fatbinary support from nextstep. -- Bill Broadley Mathematics UC Davis _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
