On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 12:02 +0800, James Devenish wrote: > On Tuesday, Jun 7, 2005, at 11:11 Australia/Perth, Stewart Woods wrote: > > Why shouldn't I buy a new mac until next year? > > Because your bank doesn't like you making withdrawals? ;) > > I presume that Steve Jobs' intention was not to halt all Mac sales for > the indefinite future, disgruntle all recent switchers, spook anyone who > was considering switching or upgrading in the near future [...]
I'd be surprised if he managed that. The initial response has been way more negative than I would've expected. Surely people will realize that these will still be "Macs" despite the different CPU, and that developers will maintain compatibility for a fair while yet (there being a big PPC installed base and all)? The main piss-off will be having to buy upgrades to all your software to get it to run at full performance on the Intel-based machines. Oh, and drivers. That *will* cause some fury. Hmmm... maybe you're right :S > [...] and putting a knife through developers' prospects. I imagine he's done a good job of doing exactly that, though. Really? Porting doesn't seem that hard. I've read the porting document, and most of it deals with the two areas I expected - endian issues, and vector instructions. In a well written application the vector code will already be in well-separated platform-specific parts of the code, preferably with a portable equivalent already done. That just shouldn't be too bad even if they do need to write some new SSE-based vector ASM for x86. If the AltiVec code is scattered through their codebase then someone needs to show them what software engineering is. Endian issues will be more of a pain for Mac developers who don't also support any little-endian platforms already, but shouldn't be *that* big a deal. They didn't cause too much trouble when porting Scribus over to MacOS/X for PPC (not finished, but hardly anybody has time to work on it right now). > Will be interesting to see the Intel > equivalents of the AltiVec and Xserve products, esp. given the > inevitable Mac-vs-Windows-vs-Linux performance comparisons (eg. Adobe > Photoshop for workstations, Apache for servers, etc.). My bet: Opteron . That'd provide SSE 3 and 3DNow pro. Admittedly not really the same as AltiVec, but not too bad either. > I wonder how Rosetta will perform, too. I'd expect a pretty serious performance hit. Reading between the lines, he keynote suggests that it'll be fine for apps which are often bottlenecked at the disk, or that are usually waiting for user input, but not so hot for apps that are CPU heavy. If it's less than an order of magnitude I'll be fairly impressed. > Presumably Apple will try to do a better job > than Sun has done with its years of messing around with x86 vs SPARC. One can only hope. -- Craig Ringer
