Apple on Intel: Take a deep breath, let it out ? Wow ! ^_^ ! a sneak peek into the wild wild, wooly ride that Steve Job’s has held Apple back from for years. At WWDC 2005 Apple has unleashed to developers their next WOMD (Weapon of Mass Domination) machines with OS X running on the outside, but Intel on the Inside! – Oversized cases with mini-motherboards, onboard (Intel) GMA 900 graphics chips, DVI risers and a phat PCIe bus to boot. But developers are humming about way more than just the hardware – Steve Job’s genius travels far back into the past when he imagined a byte code tapestry that could be woven to run on any chip architecture…
Apple on Intel: Take a deep breath, let it out ? Wow ! ^_^ ! a sneak peek into the wild wild, wooly ride that Steve Job’s has held Apple back from for years. At WWDC 2005 Apple has unleashed to developers their next WOMD (Weapon of Mass Domination) machines with OS X running on the outside, but Intel on the Inside! – Oversized cases with mini-motherboards, onboard (Intel) GMA 900 graphics chips, DVI risers and a phat PCIe bus to boot. But developers are humming about way more than just the hardware – Steve Job’s genius travels far back into the past when he imagined a byte code tapestry that could be woven to run on any chip architecture.
That technology is the Mach-O Binary Runtime format, and is finally poised to take over the world with Intel as the muscle behind it. Mac+x86 might feel like heresy, but you know even the most snobby Mac user occasionally dreamt of a day when Apple was freed from the shackles of PowerPC and cut loose onto mainstream hardware. Let’s face it, these days it’s about what runs on TOP of the hardware, not the chips themselves. Mac users are as power-hungry (if not more so) as anyone and demand things like fast, low power chips in their portables, and CPU’s that break the 3GHz speed barrier, and this new partnership will make it happen.
Sure Altivec might be thrown under the bus as vector operations are sent out over the PCIe bus to be swiftly handled by the GPU, but now worries; Aqua is snappy ? no darn right ?perky’ even on the integrated graphics chip in these machines. But let’s remember, what makes this all possible is leverage of Mach-O and xCode whereby developers can perform seamless cross-compilation of their programs to PowerPC, Intel (x86) or wherever coders can take them with the click of a button.
Apple Intel labs has made sure from day one that core code compiles on both platforms, which naturally makes one ponder the brilliant vision of Steve Jobs, and the sliver lining he has sown into the company’s future. Heck, I’m even starting to think Apple finally moved their foot in time this go around before pulling the trigger.
