no more PowerPc?

[Jan Opseth]

http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+I...?tag=nefd.lede

??

[samsc]

yes.

time to think different.

[samsc]

i was kindof sceptical at first.

but having seen one of the developmental osx machines with a single pentium 4 3.6Ghz inside it running OSX.
Im almost convinced.


The pentium machine seems faster than even the dual 2.7Ghz G5, it seemed to run seemlesly and smoothly, running movies in the foreground and background.
Everything seemed to actually work including audio.

All the applications had been compiled for x86, all the system components, and it also ran opengl apps, and powerPC applications.

If developers have been writing portable or cross platform code, the changes to compile for x86 are minimal.
Its a much smaller than the change from OS9 to OSX - that was a big change.

I watched some developers boot the developmental pentium OSX machine from a windows cd and from fedora linux cd - in native x86 builds, and you kindof start to get the picture.....

[peppe]

yes.

time to think different.

I always think different, as long as my OS is mac.
Cant´t really thinking of wake up and see myself using XP or any another
system that kills my creativity in 0,02 sec.

But as long mac user I had never needed to concern about the processor,
as long it´s fast and are inside a mac, I go fore anything.

[Jan Opseth]

How about Catalyst, is it much recompling for you to do?

i was kindof sceptical at first.

but having seen one of the developmental osx machines with a single pentium 4 3.6Ghz inside it running OSX.
Im almost convinced.


The pentium machine seems faster than even the dual 2.7Ghz G5, it seemed to run seemlesly and smoothly, running movies in the foreground and background.
Everything seemed to actually work including audio.

All the applications had been compiled for x86, all the system components, and it also ran opengl apps, and powerPC applications.

If developers have been writing portable or cross platform code, the changes to compile for x86 are minimal.
Its a much smaller than the change from OS9 to OSX - that was a big change.

I watched some developers boot the developmental pentium OSX machine from a windows cd and from fedora linux cd - in native x86 builds, and you kindof start to get the picture.....

[samsc]

reprogramming?

No. Not much.

QA issues and stability are more important and take longer than any reprogamming.

its a much easier transition than from 68k -> power pc or os9 -> osX

[samsc]

i also think that there is every possibility that we might see intel macs sooner than the middle of next year-

because once developers have got some basic glitches sorted out, the transition could be done a lot sooner.

os 10.4 basically already works on intel....apple's app's already seem to have been recompiled and they largely work.

i didnt see a single crash on the intel machines all week.

[samsc]

what they might of course discover is that there are just as many issues on intel platform as on powerpc, and that its a much longer haul to get any real performance gain.

my intel mac turned up. i presume im allowed to say i have one. but ia probably cant say anything else.

[Jan Opseth]

Anyway, you can say if the performance is better on the intel box rather than shipping 10.4.2 on Power Pc? Or is it to early to say?




regards,

Jan Opseth

[samsc]

way too early to say anything.

it does work though.

its a fully functioning version of OS X.

everything works. and almost everything is compiled for x86.