Hi guys,



Just wish to know your opinion about OSx86's future if Apple again changes from intel to some IBM chips as the latest supercomputer was powered with PS3 chips it seems Apple may be interested to move there in the future. So is the OSx86 project is just limited to the intel architecture? If so thats very narrow and thats very bad. I think it should go on even if Apple changes the chips in the future. What do you think about it? If Apple changes the intel platform would OSx86 cease to exist? And would you like it to cease to exist? What do you think about that kindly inform without telling in response that this can not happen and Apple would always remain with intel.

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Moved

The cell does not work like a a multiple core system like a dual core G5. Apple would never move back, reasons being...

1.They get their chipset, cpu, onboard gpu, and other tiny things from Intel, which is cheap to get your hardware from one source.
2.The Cell would be great for say medical, and science uses, but for home uses and some server uses, it wouldn't serve at all.
3.The Cell also isn't cheap, as well as it really doesn't have real multiple cores.

OSx86 should be alright for awhile, well pretty much I don't see it going under soon. Now, it is easier with Intel, that's true, but as long as it works on AMD, there you go.

QFE. Apple's going to stick with Intel.

For right now, Apple is with Intel. Of course, I think there is always a way out if PowerPC chip makers get off their collective butts and actually make a screaming good chip (which will then stagnate and we'll be right where we started when Apple announced the switch).

Unless Windows decides to run on future PPC chips (which I doubt), Apple doesn't really have enough reasons to switch back.

Trying to make in roads in the business section, having x86 capabilities for dual booting is a important selling point for customers transitioning to OS X.
Even if IBM/Motorola produced a faster/better/cheaper chip than the current Intel products, Apple can't get into another hardware battle and be on the losing side. (In the long term)

Plus economies of scale seem to make it clear that it would be hard to be cost competitive with Intel and the sheer quantity they sell.

But why you guys dont say that "even if Apple changes to some other chip or reverts back to PPC ones which seems highly unlikely this project would always be there. There are a lot of technically very skilled people in our community who would keep the project alive anyhow and make the operating system run on intel platform even if Apple changes to some other platform. In such a scenario we may consider changing the name of this project to something like "Project Insanely Mac" etc. instead of Project osx86 but there would be no going back as this is the result of a lot of hardwork on the behalf of our community and it would not be going away." According to commonsense I think this is the most suitable reply if something like this happens but none of you have mentioned that. Is that not a possibility?

We'll cross that bridge in the unlikely event that happens, when it happens.

Why worry about it now?

It's far too late to switch back to PowerPC. Apple has spent loads of time and money shoving developers away from PPC and going full-bore to x86. Killing off Carbon is the icing on the cake. PPC in the personal computer is dead, stop trying to cling to it.

Meh.. i like how Microsoft transitioned to PPC from x86 with the Xbox...

the original Xbox had like a Pentium 3 or something in it, whereas the 360 has a PowerPC (970 i believe?). Also, other game manufacturers are sticking with PPC and putting in better PPC chips, such as Sony switching to the Cell. If all the highend console manufacturers are switching to PPC, they can't be that bad performance wise.. but i'm just rambling now.

XBOX360 has IBM Xenon which is a Power basec processor but far away from 970. The CPU in itself is not much, it is the VMX units that makes it scream. It is more like the Cell, except that the Power base in Cell is more like a hub to a wide range of coprocessors.

Not really PS3 chips, but definitely Power (PC) chips.

The present record is 131,072 processor cores in one massively paralleled computational engine (cluster).

The intention is to employ about three times as many cores, composed of these newly designed chips, in another massively paralleled computational engine (also a cluster).

Most probably slightly more than three times as many cores, to allow for some redundancy.

(Nuclear and thermonuclear) bomb simulation, human genome projects, and other defense and general-purpose applications are anticipated.

Apple recently purchased a small, "fab-less" designer of PPC chips, and one might think it was acquired for its PPC expertise. Yet, there are some which claim that the acquisition was solely for its power-management expertise, and that the PPC expertise thereby acquired won't be used.

That there is plenty of life left in the PPC (the Power architecture, specifically) is amply demonstrated by IBM's most recent announcement.

The original Xbox and Xbox 360 have nothing in common. Games on the Xbox that are played on the Xbox360 are emulated, which is why you need "patches" to play Xbox games on Xbox360. PS2 to PS3, the 20 and 60 gb first generation PS3s have the emotions engine inside the PS3, which is hardware emulated, then the 40 gb has no ps2 compatibility, but the 80gb will have software emulation. For things like games, cpus like PowerPC cpus are fine, but for home computing, nope. But I would move to an Intel or AMD platform, because it would be cheaper seeing how cheap dual core and quad core solutions are. But then considering IBM and AMD are joining together, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw some AMD solutions besides a gpu in a console sooner or later.

I think Apple will stick with Intel, It would be really expensive to change architectures from one year to another, also there is no reason as everything works very well.

You're a real comedian. The cell is terrible for Operating Systems.