Apple PCs: soon with more Pentium than ever
Apple is going to switch to Intel CPUs for their Mac line-up starting mid 2006
By: Dennis Mongello
Issue date: 6/24/05 Section: Sci-Tech
Originally published: 6/24/05 at 1:48 AM EST
Last update: 6/24/05 at 1:52 AM EST
Originally published: 6/24/05 at 1:48 AM EST
Last update: 6/24/05 at 1:52 AM EST
What does this mean for the existing software? Of course you've heard by now that Apple will be embedding an emulator to run PPC programs and developers are encouraged to develop apps that will run on both PPC and Intel chips, but this leaves Classic apps and programs that take advantage of PPC's AltiVec left behind. While many people still use Classic programs, like Quark, the present PPC G5 and G4 Macs are plenty powerful enough to run them, and there is still a year left to buy a better one. However, AltiVec programs will have a tougher time. AltiVec, for most users, speeds up many of the nice graphical bits of OS X. Photoshop uses it to speed up the application of filters and the popular media player VLC also uses it to speed up video rendering. It even puts its number crunching to task for calculation intensive mathematical and scientific software. x86 processors have a feature similar to AltiVec called SSE, but it is inferior enough that programs will have to be rewritten to be able to run on the new chips. Programs very reliant on AltiVec, like the aforementioned mathematical and scientific ones, may have to be scrapped, though this probably won't affect the typical user all that much.
What about different operating systems? Apple has said it won't try and stop anyone from running Windows on their hardware (currently they don't stop anybody from running Linux), but don't expect it to work right out of the box (or at all, unless you are a talented hacker). It does seem preposterous though to spend a premium for Apple hardware just to run Windows, especially when Microsoft's own Virtual PC will be able to run Windows natively in OS X. But what about the other way around? Should people expect to be able to run OS X on any old PC? Absolutely not. Steve Jobs doesn't like Apple clones, and he isn't about to start licensing his OS now. Besides, Apple is in the hardware business. It would be suicide to let OS X run on anything but Apple hardware. Dell has expressed an interest recently, but Michael Dell knows full well it won't happen and is likely just trying to get a rise out of the public, the media and Microsoft. How will Jobs accomplish this? It is not as hard as it sounds. A computer is much more than just a CPU. Apple has a lot of proprietary hardware in their machines, and OS X takes full advantage of all of that. Plus there is also the hardware level DRM issue that I mentioned before. However, much like there is Virtual PC, a "Virtual Mac" program might pop-up (don't expect it from Microsoft or Apple though). There already exists a program, PearPC that can emulate the PPC and run OS X (to some extent) on x86 CPU's. PearPC is still committed to emulate the PPC though, but that doesn't mean that someone won't try to emulate Apple's architecture just to get OS X running on their inexpensive home-built hardware.
What about different operating systems? Apple has said it won't try and stop anyone from running Windows on their hardware (currently they don't stop anybody from running Linux), but don't expect it to work right out of the box (or at all, unless you are a talented hacker). It does seem preposterous though to spend a premium for Apple hardware just to run Windows, especially when Microsoft's own Virtual PC will be able to run Windows natively in OS X. But what about the other way around? Should people expect to be able to run OS X on any old PC? Absolutely not. Steve Jobs doesn't like Apple clones, and he isn't about to start licensing his OS now. Besides, Apple is in the hardware business. It would be suicide to let OS X run on anything but Apple hardware. Dell has expressed an interest recently, but Michael Dell knows full well it won't happen and is likely just trying to get a rise out of the public, the media and Microsoft. How will Jobs accomplish this? It is not as hard as it sounds. A computer is much more than just a CPU. Apple has a lot of proprietary hardware in their machines, and OS X takes full advantage of all of that. Plus there is also the hardware level DRM issue that I mentioned before. However, much like there is Virtual PC, a "Virtual Mac" program might pop-up (don't expect it from Microsoft or Apple though). There already exists a program, PearPC that can emulate the PPC and run OS X (to some extent) on x86 CPU's. PearPC is still committed to emulate the PPC though, but that doesn't mean that someone won't try to emulate Apple's architecture just to get OS X running on their inexpensive home-built hardware.
Varun Rao
posted 10/05/06 @ 9:49 AM EST
its the most wonderful, unbelievable thing going 2 happen in the future