----- Message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------
Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2006 02:41:17 -0500
From: John Tamine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: Unsupported OS X <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: OS X x86
To: Unsupported OS X <[email protected]>
And now we get a processor architecture whose guts are from the late
70's to match. The whole Intel move is a huge mistake. .... 4
general purpose registers and a BIOS... vomit!
Andrew
Aaaaahhh! now we're getting closer to the crux of the biscuit.
while i will reserve judgement until the new intel macs are out, from
a performance perspective, it may be a huge mistake. back when some
wintel folks were poo-pooing the apple ppc machines, because their
spiffy new pentium processor was rated at 2GHz, and apple was still
struggling to get to 867MHz, those same 867MHz macs were
substantially outperforming their 2 gig pentium counterparts on
real-world computing tasks, approaching double the speed in some
cases. the reason? despite a processor speed that was more than
double, the bottlenecks and flat out retarded design of the whole
intel processor/motherboard architecture (compounded by the windows
clusterf***) rendered the pentiums paper tigers.
I think for single tasking, the IA32 architecture does manage to be
quite a bit faster. As soon as you do any context switching, this
falls on its a**. The problem isn't so much replacing the G4 in the
Powerbooks since IBM simply wasn't going to make a G5 for a Powerbook
on Apple's timescale. The problem is that the G5 desktop platform
simply doesn't need to be replaced by an inferior technology. Where
else but Apple can you get the near equivalent of a SunBlade 2500, IBM
Intellistation POWER 285, or HP c8000 at commodity prices. Now I
understand that you get some freebies for greater than $10K like fibre
channel, but honestly a cross-bar switched POWER4+ derivative is
nothing to sneeze at. A simple thing that made me a believer in the
POWER architecture was simply compiling flops.c on a Pentium III 550
and a POWER2SC at 160 Mhz and racing them. The POWER2 was twice as
fast at 160 Mhz. So yes it's a real dumb idea to take a design that is
80% Apple, highly optimized, and based on the best architecture in the
world and trade it for dime-store off the shelf garbage where one has
to engineer the solution to stop cloning into the platform (rather than
rely on platform obscurity) Apple can now never say their machines are
better than the competition. (at least in no measureable way)
whether or not apple is going to successfully apply their superior mb
design in implementing the intel processors remains to be seen, and
if they do, it could likely be the reason that the intel version of
OSX will not work on non-apple x86 machines. they are just plain
junk.
They've already indicated that OpenFirmware is going away so the hope of
anything SGI 320-like (a decent motherboard / firmware which happens to
use an Intel proc) is moot. There's a slight chance of EFI, but
again...
....i am so pissed at apple for making the intel move, i'm seriously
considering going the linux route, and letting apple screw with
someone else's wallet.
Well I for one am buying a Quad G5 this year so it will last me for a
long time. After that I may use Intel OS X but I don't think I'll buy
an Apple simply to spite them for such a bad decision.
i guess it would be too much to hope for, for every apple user in the
world to barrage apple management with a relentless flood of hate
mail until they rethink this blunder. actually, re-think is giving
them way too much credit.
It may take releasing the G5 replacement and having it perform so much
worse that they decide to keep PPC on the high end. Problem is that
their major customers don't give a fig and are very SLOW to anger. It
may take customer desertion to do this.
Andrew
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