Hell freezing over? Apple in talks with Intel

[Jammrock]

I wonder...
Could this imply that OS X might become available for non-mac branded PC's...?


Jörg

absolutely not. OS X x86 will only run on Apple Mac computers. Or so Mr. Jobs said.

Apple uses special authentication techniques implemented at the BIOS level to prevent Mac cloning, and I'm sure Intel and Apple will work very hard at making it impossible to crack on a normal PC. My guess is that there will be a special Apple only chiset needed to run OS X x86 and that Intel will only sell it to Apple. Anyone caught trying to reverse egineer will more than likely be assaulted by a small army of Apple lawyers.

[KeiFront]

Regarding Itanium:

Itanium is dead, certainly for workstations and in the future for servers. Intel certainly has the money to keep pushing Itanium, but it hasn't worked so far. It all comes down to price/performance. And a Intel Xeon has a better price/performance ratio (and it's x86 compatible even 64bits x86). Same goes for an Opteron processor.

In short: Itanium is failing because it's expensve and it isn't truly x86 compatible. It achieves x86 compatibility using emulation. Xeon or Opteron achieve x86 compatibility simply by being x86 processors themselves no emulation needed. More and more customers are choosing Xeon/Opteron over Itanium because of price, performance, and compatibility (Xeon/Opteron are 64bits x86-compatible).

VJ: http://news.com.com/Apple+throws+the...ml?tag=st.next

After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that." However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.

Sad thing I read in the "Universal Binary Programming Guidlines" on Apple's site is that there will be no openfirmware on a Intel Mac "Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware."

[GT98]

I wonder how much "cheaper" this will make Macs, hopefully more reasonable then they are now.

[cjolley]

I give them about a week after release befor someone comes up with a way to run OSX on a comodity PC.
Possibly by using a boot CD to replace the bios on startup.
Or, a true crack.
Who knows?
But the truth is that nowadays stuff gets cracked, and it gets cracked fast.

[Umfriend]

Does this mean that it'll be easier to port games to future Apples as well? That'd be a positive IMO and if and when MS decides to implement VBA with office for the Mac I might actually consider getting me a machine with style.

[magician]

ABout Itanium...if some processor can be bought for 10€ at pl auction site, it's dead...

You've seen it on auction for 10€? Really? Which model?

How do you know it wasn't broken? Maybe it is an old engineering sample or something which could not be used in production servers. It's certainly not a 9MB Madison.

Regarding Itanium:

Itanium is dead, certainly for workstations and in the future for servers.

I can't agree with that. Maybe in coma, but not dead. In fact it's not even born yet as an workstation CPU. Follow this link and read about SGI's Dorado visualisation workstations based on Itanium2, as a successor to MIPS line of workstations.

Intel certainly has the money to keep pushing Itanium, but it hasn't worked so far. It all comes down to price/performance. And a Intel Xeon has a better price/performance ratio (and it's x86 compatible even 64bits x86). Same goes for an Opteron processor.

In short: Itanium is failing because it's expensve and it isn't truly x86 compatible. It achieves x86 compatibility using emulation. Xeon or Opteron achieve x86 compatibility simply by being x86 processors themselves no emulation needed. More and more customers are choosing Xeon/Opteron over Itanium because of price, performance, and compatibility (Xeon/Opteron are 64bits x86-compatible).

I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated then that. First of all, Itanium is positioned against SPARC and Power PC processors, and no Power PC (or SPARC) processor is x86 compatible, but I don't hear bawling about it's perishing, especially now when Apple ditched it in favour of Intel's CPUs. That is because Power PC belongs to an entirely different class. Apple was just a nice deal for IBM, not an ground base for an entire project.

Consumer market is based on x86 and that's what generates huge profit for Intel and AMD, but that doesn't deny existence of other (niche) markets such as RISC servers/workstations. x86 has pushed it's way in server market far behind ever imaginable limits all because of recessions and enormous investments in it's R&D.

Considering price/performance aspect, x86 can have adventage in some circumstances (be it most) but Itanium, Power PC and SPARC scale much better then any x86 processor and they certainly have their advantage in multithreaded applications, for which they still exist in this world. It is a niche market but it is still a market.

The fact is that superscalar architectures can't scale as well as VLIW and sooner or later we will and up with some sort of Itanium, like it or not. This whole multicore trend just speeds up downfall of x86 as it scales much worse then a VLIW. I'm telling you, x86 will not last forever, at least it's better it don't.

I thought maybe Intel will offer some kind of light-weight version of Montecito, which could be incorporated in some reasonably priced Power Mac workstations. SGI already started replacing it's MIPS/IRIX line of workstations with Itanium/Linux ones so maybe Apple will jump into this wagon too.

Of course you do realize that I'm talking about future prospects of this parthership and not something that will happen in the next couple of months.

[ZokesPro]

absolutely not. OS X x86 will only run on Apple Mac computers. Or so Mr. Jobs said.

Apple uses special authentication techniques implemented at the BIOS level to prevent Mac cloning, and I'm sure Intel and Apple will work very hard at making it impossible to crack on a normal PC. My guess is that there will be a special Apple only chiset needed to run OS X x86 and that Intel will only sell it to Apple. Anyone caught trying to reverse egineer will more than likely be assaulted by a small army of Apple lawyers.

Imagine if it was! I'd wanna try it on my pc. Would be a welcomed alternative to Windows.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

I don't think this look good for AMD.

x86-64, developed by AMD, is cloned by Intel as EM64T and makes it seem like its Intel's work. And now, Apple is adopting Intel, and I'd imagine its EM64T processors.

And in the press release Apple was saying "looking ahead Intel has the strongest processor roadmap by far,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

Steve, my ass

AMD really gotta improve on the notebook front... power consumption on the Turion 64...

Which also reminds me, I officiall hate Apple 1) PowerPC is the major advantage of macs IMO and they just have to go x86 2) I really really hate closed, imcompetible hardware.

[Nowhere]

Perfectly ok pair of two Itaniums just below 1GHz...it would be fun to play with them but mobo + psu would be probably impossible to buy cheaply...

[magician]

Those belong to first Itanium generation which is considered to be more of an alpha version then a production hardware. They certainly don't have any appliance and that's why they are sold for symbolic price.

You know, you could just easily say that SCSI is dead, because you can buy a 9GB SCSI HDD for less then $20, and just a couple of years ago those were priced at more then $500. Or just look how much more is a SCSI drive expensive then a SATA one and figure it out which one has the best price/performance.

As I said... niche market technology was always more expensive then the mainstream, but that is how it is. We murcers should know this better then anyone else.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Those belong to first Itanium generation which is considered to be more of an alpha version then a production hardware. They certainly don't have any appliance and that's why they are sold for symbolic price.

You know, you could just easily say that SCSI is dead, because you can buy a 9GB SCSI HDD for less then $20, and just a couple of years ago those were priced at more then $500. Or just look how much more is a SCSI drive expensive then a SATA one and figure it out which one has the best price/performance.

As I said... niche market technology was always more expensive then the mainstream, but that is how it is. We murcers should know this better then anyone else.

The Parhelia

[Kurt]

absolutely not. OS X x86 will only run on Apple Mac computers. Or so Mr. Jobs said.

Apple uses special authentication techniques implemented at the BIOS level to prevent Mac cloning, and I'm sure Intel and Apple will work very hard at making it impossible to crack on a normal PC. My guess is that there will be a special Apple only chiset needed to run OS X x86 and that Intel will only sell it to Apple. Anyone caught trying to reverse egineer will more than likely be assaulted by a small army of Apple lawyers.

Apparently it will be standard enough for Windows to run on it.

Continuing with Apple's tradition, I don't see them supporting more than their hardware with drivers, but it should be possible to use BSD drivers for the system (tweaked or not).

As for the kind of lock they might implement to prevent OS X to run on a non-Apple built PC, who knows...

Next year we can run a direct Apple to Apple comparison between OS X and Windows

[Jammrock]

Next year we can run a direct Apple to Apple comparison between OS X and Windows

Very true. MS better hope that Longhorn delivers or they may find themselves in a world of hurt. Well, maybe not that bad, but a quick loss in market share among casual users and people fed up with security problems in Windows.

[Nowhere]

Those belong to first Itanium generation which is considered to be more of an alpha version then a production hardware. They certainly don't have any appliance and that's why they are sold for symbolic price.

You know, you could just easily say that SCSI is dead, because you can buy a 9GB SCSI HDD for less then $20, and just a couple of years ago those were priced at more then $500. Or just look how much more is a SCSI drive expensive then a SATA one and figure it out which one has the best price/performance.

As I said... niche market technology was always more expensive then the mainstream, but that is how it is. We murcers should know this better then anyone else.

oh c'mon, but a "workstation class uber-cpu" selling three times less than similarly clocked amd or pentium?

[Wombat]

In short: Itanium is failing because it's expensve and it isn't truly x86 compatible. It achieves x86 compatibility using emulation. Xeon or Opteron achieve x86 compatibility simply by being x86 processors themselves no emulation needed.

That's a misstatement. Neither the Xeon/P4 nor the AMD K7/K8 are "x86 processors." They emulate x86 as well, spending their first couple pipeline stages decoding the x86 into the macro ops that they actually compute with.