[opendtv] Its a standard intel platform was: Re: Re: Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips

  • From: Kon Wilms <kon@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 08:51:40 -0700

On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 08:06 -0400, Craig Birkmaier wrote:
> And I hate to throw cold water on your plans John, but you can forget 
> about Active-X controls on Macs running on Intel hardware. These 
> machines will still be Macs, just running on Intel processors. OS-X 
> will not run on generic PCs, and Apple is not going to bring a bunch 
> of Microsoft dirty laundry to the party. What we will have is a world 
> class OS running on Intel hardware.

It won't? The development stations ship in the configuration of... a
standard PC -- Phoenix BIOS, onboard Intel GFX, etc.

Its going to be really hard for Apple to justify high prices based on
appearance. Hopefully their customers are not as stupid this time
around.

In addition (from xlr8yourmac.com -- ignore the cell processor comments,
this guy is a moron in that respect): 

" I'm going to keep this brief, so please write me with the questions
you have and any tests you want run on one of the dev kits. I will have
one of my own next week as well. 
First, the thing is fast. Native apps readily beat a single 2.7 G5, and
sometimes beat duals. Really. 
(I asked about real-world apps - if any were already available in native
code-Mike) 
All the iLife apps other than iTunes, plus all the other apps that come
with the OS are already universal binaries.... 

They are using a Pentium 4 660. This is a 3.6 GHz chip. It supports 64
bit extensions, but Apple does not support that *yet*. The 660 is a
single core processor. However, the engineers said that this chip would
not be used in a shipping product and that we need to look at Intel's
roadmap for that time to see what Apple will ship. 

It uses DDR-2 RAM at 533 MHz. SATA-2. It is using Intel GMA 900
integrated graphics and it supports Quartz Extreme. The Intel 900
doesn't compare favorably to any shipping card from ATi or nVidia. The
Apple engineers says they dev kit will work with regular PC graphics
cards, but that you need a driver. Apple does not write ANY graphics
drivers. They just submit bug reports to ATi/nVidia. So, when we asked
where to get drivers for better cards the engineers said "The ATI guys
are here." He's right, they've been in the compatibility lab several
times. 

It has FireWire 400, but not 800. USB 2 as well. USB 2 booting is
supported, FireWire booting is not. NetBoot works. 

The machines do not have Open Firmware. They use a Phoenix BIOS. That;s
right, a Mac with a BIOS. 
(I asked if the Bios had any tweaks like Memory Timing which is common
for many PC motherboards, although Intel OEM motherboards don't usually
have any end user tweaks like that.-Mike) 
They won't tell us how to get in the BIOS. I'm sure we can figure it out
when out dev kits arrive. 

They run Windows fine. All the chipset is standard Intel stuff, so you
can download drivers and run XP on the box. 

Rosetta is amazing. (see earlier post on limitations of the Rosetta
emulator - it's a G3 emulator basically - will not run Altivec code,
etc. and performance isn't going to be as good as native code, but most
Mac apps will run on a G3.-Mike) The tests I've run, both app tests and
benchmarks, peg it at between a dual 800 MHz G4 and and a dual 2 G5
depending on what you are doing. 
(I mentioned to him the limitations of Rosetta (posted below)-Mike) 
It's true Rosetta does not support Altivec, but most apps run on a G3,
right? Rosetta tells PPC apps that it is a G3. Apps should fall back to
their G3 code tree. Everyone I tested did. 

The UI tests in Xbench exceed a dual 2.7 by a large margin. (other
specific tests are much lower than a G5 per Xbench site results.-Mike) 

I've been talking to and watching a lot of devs. There are a lot of apps
from big names running in the Compatibility lab already. Some people
face more pain, sure, but Jobs wasn't kidding when he said that this
transition would be less painful than OS 9 to OS X or 68K to PPC. 

Game devs seem optimistic. They see porting Windows/x86 to Mac/x86 as
much easier. They look forward to the day they don't have to support
PPC. 
I was talking to a (game Developer) that said about 1/3 of the process
is handling endian issues, the rest is Win32/DirectX. For the next 3-5
years, their job will be harder since they have to port to two processor
architectures and most bugs *are* endian related and that they will have
a hard time making the PPC versions run as well as the x86 versions. 

This transition is not about current P4 vs G5. It is about the future
directions of the processor families. Intel is committed to
desktop/notebook and server in a big way. Freescale/IBM are chasing the
embedded market and console market. Apple would have been in a lurch in
2 years. 

Also, all the cell people and the AMD people need to be quiet. Apple
evaluated both. AMD has the same, if not worse, supply problems as IBM.
Their roadmap is fine, but the production capacity is not. 

The tested Cell as well. That processor is NOT intended for PC
applications. (it was designed for game systems, not as a general use
CPU) The lack of out of order execution and ILP control logic creates
very poor performance with existing software. Having developers rewrite
for cell would have been MUCH more work than reworking for Intel. And
that's what this is, you rework your codebase in ALL cases, not rewrite
it. "

Cheers
Kon


 
 
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