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Slight · 09-02-2002, 10:25 AM

I hate to say it but this is old news. It has been widely know that Rhapsody & then OS X has been running on x86 since it's inception (not that I 100% believe this story). Darwin, the open source, base OS of OSX has openly been ported to x86 (But why do we need another *BSD on x86?) I doubt apple intentionally leaked this as Steve is a secret freak. Its just that the idea is so sensational to the mac public that once someone finds out everyone knows about it. You can also see evidence of it in cruft left around different releases of OSX. Speculation that it is being used as a vaporware scare tactic is weak at best. It is more likely that it is being maintained specifically for a rainy day. That day is when Motorolla bites it. Currently IBM does not build the PPC chips that go in macintoshes because apple likes Moto's AltiVec vector unit on the G4 chip.

One look at Apple's yearly earnings report will tell you that Apple currently makes most of its revenue from hardware sales. While it is not out of the question that Apple could release a general purpose port of OS X to supplant Windoze, the driver support of all the millions of varying harware setups would instantly kill Apple. They could do 1 of 3 things: Support only their x86 hardware or certain hardware of their choosing. 2 they could release it and die of a Be type death or, 3 They could rely upon the open source community much as linux has to write drivers. I think apple would go with option 1, their hardware because Steve hated the clones. But I find option 3 the most intriguing.

It would be fairly easy for apple to get developers to re-release software recompiled for x86, because I am pretty sure gcc and CodeWurks can cross compile. The hard part would be recompiling drivers, code written in asm and code optimized for the G4 vector unit.

I see this as a long term decision, developed as an out. It would require mucho time to both redesign current hardware and convince the faithful that the /switch/ is good. Btw, I think project marklar used to be called project enterprise

09-02-2002, 10:25 AM	#4
Slight Semi-Evil Genius Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Boulder CO Posts: 195	I hate to say it but this is old news. It has been widely know that Rhapsody & then OS X has been running on x86 since it's inception (not that I 100% believe this story). Darwin, the open source, base OS of OSX has openly been ported to x86 (But why do we need another *BSD on x86?) I doubt apple intentionally leaked this as Steve is a secret freak. Its just that the idea is so sensational to the mac public that once someone finds out everyone knows about it. You can also see evidence of it in cruft left around different releases of OSX. Speculation that it is being used as a vaporware scare tactic is weak at best. It is more likely that it is being maintained specifically for a rainy day. That day is when Motorolla bites it. Currently IBM does not build the PPC chips that go in macintoshes because apple likes Moto's AltiVec vector unit on the G4 chip. One look at Apple's yearly earnings report will tell you that Apple currently makes most of its revenue from hardware sales. While it is not out of the question that Apple could release a general purpose port of OS X to supplant Windoze, the driver support of all the millions of varying harware setups would instantly kill Apple. They could do 1 of 3 things: Support only their x86 hardware or certain hardware of their choosing. 2 they could release it and die of a Be type death or, 3 They could rely upon the open source community much as linux has to write drivers. I think apple would go with option 1, their hardware because Steve hated the clones. But I find option 3 the most intriguing. It would be fairly easy for apple to get developers to re-release software recompiled for x86, because I am pretty sure gcc and CodeWurks can cross compile. The hard part would be recompiling drivers, code written in asm and code optimized for the G4 vector unit. I see this as a long term decision, developed as an out. It would require mucho time to both redesign current hardware and convince the faithful that the /switch/ is good. Btw, I think project marklar used to be called project enterprise