Comments on: Apple to Intel Bandwagon.

By: Colin

Colin — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 12:47:30 +0000

Well, from what I have heard, any application that requires a G4, G5, or Altivec to run will not be supported by Rosetta since Rosetta appears to be a G3 emulator of sorts. From what I gather, any application running in the Rosetta environement will be under the impression that it is running on a G3.

By: jcarreiro

jcarreiro — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 19:04:09 +0000

Well, as far as Rosetta, it seemed to work fairly well in the brief (but, still impressive) demonstration given yesterday. Unfortunately, Rosetta will do nothing for apps that use G4, G5, or Atlivec specific instructions.

If by “do nothing”, you mean “emulate those instructions so that the applications continue to run on an Intel-based Mac”, then yes. (^_-)

As you can imagine, this will not be a blazingly fast process.

By: Colin

Colin — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 15:17:34 +0000

And, hopefully said Torrent will actually run on run-of-the-mill PC hardware.

By: rascalking

rascalking — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 14:42:17 +0000

The only thing I think 90% of geeks out there will care about is “when does the osx/i686 install cd hit the torrents?”

By: Colin

Colin — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 13:21:40 +0000

Well, as far as Rosetta, it seemed to work fairly well in the brief (but, still impressive) demonstration given yesterday. Unfortunately, Rosetta will do nothing for apps that use G4, G5, or Atlivec specific instructions. That being said, Quicken, Photoshop CS2, and MS Office PPC seemed to run “ok” on the Mintelac box.

As for the discounts to consumers, true Apple is unlikely to change its pricing scheme. But, the high-end products are sure to become much, much nicer (all the while staying at the same top-end price). So, the top of the line PowerBook may still run you around $2000. But, the top of the line PowerBook will probably have a dual-core Pentium-M boasting even better battery life.

By: jcarreiro

jcarreiro — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 02:56:11 +0000

This is going to be such a huge PITA for OS X developers. *sigh*

“Unified binaries” is a codeword for needing to test and ship two totally different versions of your software, one compiled for PPC, the other for x86. Regardless of how hard Apple works, the two platforms will end up with their own little idiosyncrasies — like, oh, I dunno, endian-ness — that will make maintaining an application on both of them at the same time non-trivial.

As for “Rosetta”, frankly, I’ll believe it when I see it. Emulation of the PPC instruction set on an x86 architecture is also a non-trivial endevour; just ask the nice folks writing PearPC.

The one shining light is the supposed discount Apple will enjoy because of Intel’s manufacturing volumes. Yeeeeeah. I wonder how much of that discount we’ll enjoy when we’re handing over our credit cards to the nice cashier in the Apple store? (^_-)