In Short: 10.4.4 and Dharma. Oh, and Woz speaks.

That's hardly enough to convince me and does not even begin to answer the question of "why not", let alone consider Intel future GPU strategy in the context of OSx86 and Apple.

 

Then of course, we should consider this:

 

"... Mark Rein, vice president for Epic Games, the developer of the Unreal graphics engine and game series. 'Before our release of Unreal 2007, we hope that Intel becomes competitive,' Rein said."

 

Sounds like somebody else thinks that Intel is going to be getting serious about GPUs, too.

this quote is taken out of context. Rein was talking about utilizing multicore processors. thats CPU not GPU. read here.

it is foolish to imagine first generation x86 macs will use an intel gpu. Apple will not want inferior hardware in thier product while trying to keep their base happy during a transition.

EDIT: also read this @ tom's hardware http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/15/are_intel/page4.html

That's hardly enough to convince me and does not even begin to answer the question of "why not",

Do you see the table on this page?

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/15/are_intel/page2.html

Why not? Because advanced 3d-accelerated graphic chips are absolutely a niche market, plus competition is extremely hard in it. In the past, there were so many producers of graphics chips with significant shares in the market, Tseng, S3, Weitek, Matrox, NeoMagic, Hercules, Trident, Silicon Motion, 3dfx, Chips&Technology, Cirrus Logic, Real3D, ATI etc., who else? With the exception of Matrox and of course ATI, they either all vanished completely or were bought up by some other big player who continued development, as it happened to Real3D which went to Intel. The only widely successful newcomer in the business was nVidia which came to rise with the RIVA chip in the late nineties. Economically it hardly makes sense for Intel to compete here.

it is foolish to imagine first generation x86 macs will use an intel gpu.

I have never heard anyone say "oo, I want gma9** on my laptop".

O.K., here you go: "oo, I want gma9** on my laptop". This is currently the best choice for me, because I prefer nice small notebooks with a long battery life. But actually I don't really want this specific graphics chip that much. As I never do anything 3D-related, even something much simpler would do the job for me. This is also true for a large number of professional users who in the majority do not need a portable workstation power horse.

it is foolish to imagine first generation x86 macs will use an intel gpu.

Dude, too late they already do. What we are talking about here is the next generation per se. I certainly expect Apple to stick with Intel GPUs for at least the near future, especially if we are just talking about iMacs and iBooks here.

I don't know of course but it is fun to speculate, I didn't mean to incinuate that anyone was a fool. Checkout the ibook "graphics" page: http://www.apple.com/ibook/graphics.html. OK current ibooks have a radeon 9550, which intel integrated GPU is equivelent? because it has to be at least equivelent if not better in the next model and I honestly don't know how the intel chips preform because it is hard to find any benchmarks or comparisons to the radeon mobilities. I guess that has to do with the intel GPU demographic?

the developer kits don't count as "macs".

...I guess that has to do with the intel GPU demographic?

I'd guess so. I'd hazard a guess that the majority of notebooks are in the hands of besuited corporate people. In the business world no-one is going to be wondering how well the Quake engine works or what 3D Bench says about their graphics. As long as email, a browser and those yawn-making corporate apps work then the machines are fine. Same goes for corporate and back-office desktops and I bet a lot of those have Intel graphics.

My gorgeous little Sony VAIO ultralight has Intel 915/910 graphics. As it's provided by my job as a business machine I haven't tried to find out what the graphics are capable of, but I will try that out tonight and see what benchmarks I get. I expect they'll be pretty poor, but no-one would want to play games on a 28cm screen, would they?

Edit - the Intel 915/910 VAIO manages a crummy 781 on 3DMark 03. Bit pointless trying a newer version. The initial demo was surprisingly smooth at 19-24 fps even with sound at 1024x768 but everything else choked at 2-3fps. The graphics RAM is 128 but the machine itself is only 1.2GHz and running lots of background stuff so I can't blame the graphics totally. The machine is nevertheless excellent for all the business stuff I do with it, even Photoshop.

thanks for taking the time to do that metro.

thanks for taking the time to do that metro.

Glad to help. I called my brother and got him to run 3DMark 03 on his work desktop, and he got only 127 off the Intel 82865G graphics even though it's a 3.0 GHz with 1GB RAM. 3DMark 03 could only run one of the four tests claiming the others were not supported. I think we can safely say that no-one will be running anything more demanding than a spreadsheet on that system.

Hi OSx86 community!!!

The x86 tiger is ALREADY UNIBIN!

Try to boot and install your x86 tiger on a REAL MAC. Yeah, it runs!

Good point, rodrigocunha.

I suppose that it won't be too hard for Apple to release a universal installation disc either for the upcoming release or Leopard when it comes out.

OS X will just ship with a single version at some point. I really doubt they'll keep two different builds. They didn't for 68k --> ppc did they?

As for Intel graphics, they do suck for the most part. Now, GMA950 is -tolerable- for something like a mini or an ibook, though. I can run HL2 with it and it doesn't look as pretty as a GF7800 or anything, but it does still run. And, QE and CI work fine for normal OS things and Photoshop, etc. I still hope they go discrete, but GMA950 is [unfortunately] good enough for most.

OS X will just ship with a single version at some point. I really doubt they'll keep two different builds. They didn't for 68k --> ppc did they?

Here is what the Wikipedia has to say:

Apple, who also lacked a PowerPC based OS, took a different route. They rewrote the essential pieces of their Mac OS operating system for the PowerPC architecture, and further wrote a 680x0 emulator which could run the remaining parts of the unrewritten OS and 68K based applications.

The second generation was "pure" and included the "low end" 603 and "high end" 604. The 603 is notable due to its very low cost and power consumption. This was a deliberate design goal on Motorola's part, who used the 603 project to build the basic core for all future generations of PPC chips. Apple tried to use the 603 in a new laptop design but was unable to due to the small 8KB level 1 cache. The 68000 emulator in the Mac OS could not fit in 8KB and thus slowed the computer drastically. The 603e solved this problem by having a 16KB L1 cache which allowed the emulator to run efficiently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC

Here is what Ars has to say:

The 603 was designed with low power in mind, because Apple needed a chip for its PowerBook line. As a result, the processor had a very good performance-per-Watt ratio on native PowerPC code, and in fact was able to match the 601 clock-for-clock though it had about half the number of transistors as the older processor. But the 603's smaller 16K split L1 cache meant that it stunk at emulating the legacy 68K code that formed a large part of Apple's OS and application base.

Thus the 603 was relegated to the very lowest end of Apple's product line (the Performas, beginning with the 6200; and the all-in-ones designed for the .edu market, beginning with the 5200), until a tweaked version (the 603e) with an enlarged, 32K split cache was released. The 603e performed better on emulated 68K code, so it saw widespread use in the PowerBook line.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/ppc-1.ars/4

As for Intel graphics, they do suck for the most part. Now, GMA950 is -tolerable- for something like a mini or an ibook, though. I can run HL2 with it and it doesn't look as pretty as a GF7800 or anything, but it does still run. And, QE and CI work fine for normal OS things and Photoshop, etc. I still hope they go discrete, but GMA950 is [unfortunately] good enough for most.

Is the GMA950 so much worse than say the NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 graphics card (with 64MB DDR memory used in the PowerBook 12") that it would stop PowerBook sales from being undercut by a "faster" x86 iBook?

bofors... what did that have to do with two different builds of OS X? I meant it isn't like they shipped System 7.6.1/68k and a separate 7.6.1/ppc did they? Things are a bit different w/x86 and ppc though compared to that time. I had computers around that initial transition, and this one isn't seeming any worse so far at least, although some things are more common now like vector apps and 3D ones.

Here is a 6200TC vs. GMA950 bench:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1821812,00.asp

And, I looked at 3DMark's ORB and it showed Intel getting higher 3Dmarks than a 5200go. I'd rather a new nvidia or ATi part, but there is a high chance of a GMA950 in the 1st models, simply because it sort of comes almost 'free', and has good QE and CI support...

Is the GMA950 so much worse than say the NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 graphics card (with 64MB DDR memory used in the PowerBook 12") that it would stop PowerBook sales from being undercut by a "faster" x86 iBook?

it's prolly on par or a bit faster than a GeForce FX Go5200

bofors... what did that have to do with two different builds of OS X? I meant it isn't like they shipped System 7.6.1/68k and a separate 7.6.1/ppc did they? Things are a bit different w/x86 and ppc though compared to that time. I had computers around that initial transition, and this one isn't seeming any worse so far at least, although some things are more common now like vector apps and 3D ones.

Yeah, I know that those quotes did not answer your question about whether Apple maintained two different builds during the 68k->PPC transition. I don't know the answer either, but I agree that this transition to x86 is much different. That was my original point but then I kind of got distracted by the technical details of 68k emulation by PPC. It is kind of interesting to see how much simplier the problem of emulating was back then.

I mean, if I remember correctly (and I should), that the PPC 601's ran emulated code faster than 68040's. The 68k->PPC transition was pretty much seamless, I bought a PowerMac 7200/66 and spent something like $800 to get 16 MB of extra RAM:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powe...ac_7100_66.html

that will rather be a negative point... the GMA950 is not as "good" as the Radeon 9550 which powers the current iBook. In the Pc world, Intel-GPU based notebook are synonyms of entry-level (cheap and dirty?) notebooks. I hope that if apple will be introducing a new iBook as it seems to be the case as the iBook12" is EOL (see on hardmac.com); it will not be based on a rather slow GMA950 GPU.

Knowing that many mac users were already complaining about the low amount of VRAM powering hte Radeon 9550 (32MB), I do not believe that Apple will come with a Intel GPU using a shared-memory system.

I might be wrong of course, but for sure this point will be carefully look at by the mac community.

Well, actually looking at most Pc models (desktop and notebooks), msot of them feature a FW400 port; including Intel-motherboard based models. So I do not think that Appel will drop FireWire400 since it is adopted by all. Now comes the question regarding FW800. One month before the famous WWDC 2005 announcement, Intel has announced that they want to add FW800 support in their next generation motherboards and chipset (in other words, NAPA and Co). So was it a hint to the future Intel transition made official a month later by Steve Jobs, or really a support by Intel for the FW800?

Apple has dropped FW400 in its iPod, simply due to both retro-compatibility with older PCs not all featuring FW ports, but also due to cost. a USB2 controller cost much less than a FW400 controller.

I am currently using a FW800 external HD for backing up my data from my PB; and it clearly rocks.

but the FW800 has a strong competitot to come : the eSATA.

all HD controllers are going to be SATAI or SATAII so it will also become quite tempting for chipset and motherboard manufacturer (such as Intel) to developp a controller aound SATA format(internal and external SATA).

So I think in the future the MacIntel could come with FW400 + eSATA instead of FW800, or both of them during a transition phase.

Apple's problem is not the desktop space, where FW400 is commonplace, *especially* on Intel-chipset mainboards (my own ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe includes FW400 as standard). Adding FW400 support to an *existing PC* is usually as simple as adding a PCI FW400 card, and the easiest way of doing that is installing a Sound Blaster Audigy-series sound card (any Audigy for desktops will do). The problem for Apple is the Intel-powered successors to the iBook and PowerBook, where battery life is king and ATI, not Intel, rules the graphical roost. Also on the desktop front, the latest two drops (both in the 8F1111 series) of OS X 10.4.3 for Intel include rather *strong* non-Intel graphics support (including Quartz Extreme and Core Image support for ATI cards that never shipped for the Mac, such as my own A-I-W 9700 Pro AGP). In fact, this leads to another interesting possibility for Apple, if they are brave enough: OS X for recent-model (not new) PCs.

I'm not kidding, so listen up.

All the talk about the next version of Windows (Windows Vista) is that it requires all new hardware (even though it certainly isn't so, the hardware vendors, especially the system vendors, are trying to rebound from what has been a mostly flat last two years). Against that you have OS X for x86, which runs just fine on all that old hardware that Microsoft and their partners want to make obsolete. (I mentioned my AIW 9700 Pro, which is PC-exclusive. In 8F1111, both Quartz Extreme and Core Image actually work, and work very well. Pretty darn slick, considering ATI hasn't made either card or chipset for four years, and EOLed the card six months ago.) On top of that, you have application support that no other non-Windows OS, especially the various distributions of Linux, can beat, and an install routine that is darn near idiot-proof. In order to protect the MacTel base, you could literally customize this version so you can only install it on non-Apple hardware, remove support for PCI Express, and aim it pricewise below the lowest-end versions of Vista (Vista Starter Edition). A true lowball version of a proven operating system that can keep alive all those needlessly-soon-to-be-obsolete Intel PCs. If anything, that can generate more sales of new Apple Macs (both G-series and Mactel) out of gratitude. Now why would Apple have a problem with that?

(...) Also making the rumor rounds over the past few days is this one from MacRumors (and others) about Apple's plan to resurrect Yellow Box as "Dharma" to allow cocoa apps to run on Windows.

 

A first time poster to MacGeneration (French) forums posted the contents of an email, which was originally sent to another website.

 

The writer claims that Apple is reviving "Yellow Box for Windows" -- a development environment which promised Mac OS X developers the ability to develop and then deploy of both Mac OS X and Windows environments. The original plans for Yellow Box were promised during early developer sessions by Apple, but later killed.

 

The letter claims that the project has been relaunched internally under the name "Dharma". Resultant applications will be true "Universal Binaries", allowing developers to released their applications under the Windows environment also.

(...)

As a note: Dharma means the message of Buddha (Siddharta Gautama). SJ happens to be buddhist and this fits in the idea of 'evangelization of the Mac'. Technically speaking it is an interesting concept, but IMO it should also be available as a Unix/POSIX package.

I believe Woz when he said that Apple sticks to their guns and they're going to make you buy their hardware in order to run their Operating System.

Maxxuss is a fricken genius, and if anyone can get the retail release of OS X 10.4.4 to run on standard PCs, I trust he will. I'm sure he's going to sweat a gallon in the attempt, at least.

:pirate2: That said, I don't think Apple put that much copy protection and hardware sensitivity into these releases we call OSx86. They use a relatively stock Intel reference platform, and they knew they were NOT going to sell that exact hardware to the public, so the short-term answer is make OS X temporarily compatible with PCs that can or will basically match this reference platform.

The TPM will be our bane, just as DRM is to those of us who'd rather have free and easy movement of copyrighted music to all our computers and portable players.

I think you can bank on retail releases of OS X for Intel processors being as easy to "crack" as an SSL transaction. Possible, but unless a major error takes place, such as what permitted the creation of DeCSS DVD-copying software, I think we may be up the creek without a paddle.

My thought is that if apple really cares (and they certainly seem to), then this sort of hacking will only be effective until about third quarter of this year, when they settle down in their hardware. Then they might be able to nest the protection far enough that nobody will be able to crack it before a new OS update comes out. It's likely that several updates will follow 10.4.4 to iron out the initial bugs, and that will cause some big trouble for those running hackintoshes.