<snip>
Does anyone have an insight on how Altivec will be replaced?
Obviously Intel could release something in the future that we
don't know about, but if we look at what we have today, can it be
replaced?
The rumour is that Apple still has the rights to Altivec and is
getting Intel to build it into the Pentium 5. I would take it with
a grain of salt, but the same thing happened with the G5 and IBM.
Also remember that a LOT of the things that Altivec was good for is
now being replaced via the CoreVideo and CoreImage frameworks.
In the end, only time will tell.
So essentially it comes down to shear grunt and a decent gpu on the
graphics card. I guess that was Apple's plan all the way back to the
retail launch of 10.3. Start replacing the altivec stuff now (with
10.4), so the OS is transportable to virtually any cpu. Smart
thinking, in my book. Nothing worse than for a company's fortunes to
be tied so closely to another. Motorola seems to spring to mind.... :-)
As it has been said before, this is going to be a very interesting year!
Seeya
Rod!
