On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 08:21 +0800, Mark Secker wrote: > ComputerWorld says the new PentiumD chips are shipping with DRM (copy > protection hardware) embedded > http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=580672002 > > > the inquirers says NO > http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23708 > > Why should mac users care...wellllllll... if it isn't this old > chestnut again: (being dragged out by Wired this time) > > http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,67750,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 > > apparently because of this: > http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,67749,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1 > > > is it true ... well maybe Apple have traveled that platform path in > the lab to test it as feasible
IMO they would be crazy not to have been maintaining an in-house PC/x86 port of MacOS/X . Even if they never intended to use it, it'd be important future-proofing, and keeping it in good condition would ensure a much lower-cost transition if they *did* make one. Porting an OS once is hard (even if the OS started out on x86 like MacOS/X); maintaining the port is much easier and cheaper. > Personally I think Apple, for sure, would be wise pursuing low end > home users media "digital hub" on intel bassed platforms. I'll wait for the announcement - I'm not convinced. I'm more inclined to believe theories about new embedded devices and the XScale than a move from PPC to x86. They /could/ do it - MacOS/X should be fairly portable (at least to an x86 board with OpenFirmware) if Apple have even half a brain. Most well written MacOS/X native apps should be a simple recompile for their developers, plus a few days/weeks tweaking for endian issues, writing replacements for PPC asm segments, etc. Less if the app was well written in the first place. Developers could ship fat binaries to hide the arch differences from users, too. They could handle older apps with emulation like QEmu does for Linux - because the OS would have identical and compatible APIs they would only need to "translate" the binary at runtime - not emulate a whole OS. Classic could be emulated, or simply ditched entirely. The downside: users would need to buy new apps to get full performance, as most developers would be unlikely to release upgrades for free. Older apps would always just run slowly. The biggest problem, though, would be drivers. MacOS/X PPC drivers wouldn't work, and neither would Windows PC drivers. That'd be a lot of obsolete hardware and pissed-off users. Additionally, if they do make such a move - and again, I'm not convinced - I'd be stunned if they used off-the-shelf x86 chipsets and motherboards. I'd strongly expect to see Apple hardware with an x86 CPU instead of a PPC CPU. They'd probably bring in OpenFirmware, or maybe adopt EFI, but I'd be very surprised if they used the legacy PC BIOS. That means no dual-booting Windows, and still needing special Apple hardware to run MacOS/X. PearPC / One totally awesome thing that could be done if Apple /did/ switch is that emulation for Windows could be made *massively* faster. It'd also be much more practical to port WINE to MacOS/X so Windows apps could be "translated" like is sometimes done (unreliably) on Linux currently. The biggest thing that makes me skeptical is that they're rumoured to be talking to /Intel/. Now, if they were taking to AMD I'd be much more inclined to believe this - the Opteron is hot stuff. Intel's offerings are rather lacklustre at the moment - the overpriced, failing Itanium that never went anywhere, the power-hungry, not-that-fast Pentium 4 and the 64 bit Xeon that's really no match for the Opteron. Talking to Intel is much more likely to be about embedded products IMO ... though I guess they could be interested in the very cheap P4 Celeron. They could also just be pressuring IBM - but given their recent Cell deals, I'd suspect this to be a really bad time to try that. Anyway ... it's interesting to see what'll happen. There's some big conference on soon, right? -- Craig Ringer
