Aaron Burt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Speculation on the IP list is that if Apple switches
their Macs to
>Intel chips, they'll still be PowerPC. Apple's deal
with IBM lets 'em
>yank the G5 design and take it to another
manufacturer if IBM fails to
>deliver 3GHz and low-power G5s. Which is, in fact,
the case.
You're more than likely right to interpret it this
way. What would have been cool, though, would be if
they'd looked at building hybrid-architecture Macs
that had both a G5 and an ix86 inside, with the OS
running across both in such a way as to be able to run
programs containing instructions from either (or maybe
even both).
People have built heterogenius computers, in a limited
sense - there are plenty of cards containing "foreign"
processors for a wide range of systems - but I don't
know if anyone's really built a natively heterogenius
system, or a natively heterogenius OS capable of
running "mixed" binaries. (To be efficient, it would
probably need to be homogenius within each subroutine,
but the OS can perfectly well handle subroutine
branching and therefore split subroutines across
architecture types.)
(I was kind-of hoping that Transmeta would do
something similar, on the virtual level, as then the
underlying system would be consistant and therefore
much easier to work with, but it was not to be.)
I very much doubt that this is what Apple is doing,
but if they provide an excuse to dream, I'm not going
to turn it down. :)
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