MAC OSX to INTEL Hardware?

[chaim79]

From somewhere I have heard the rumor that Apple is moving their hardware to Intel platform and just selling the OS. Has anyone else heard anything similar?

[engjohn]

Nah, that wouldnt happen, They use RISC processors, much better number crunchers...

but what they ARE doing is porting OSX to the intel platform. I cannot remember what it is called, but you can find it on their site...

[engjohn]

DOH!! Double Post...

[Ebola]

its called darwin.

i believe they chose the name to insult windows users.

and while some spec on the macs are better, pc architecture crushes the macs in some respects too.

[rugby]

Ebola, they chose the name just to irk you....:D

http://www.opensource.apple.com

Darwin is the CLI underlying base of OS X. Apple is first and foremost a hardware company. Their bread and butter are the high-end workstations. They might make a little money on their OS'es, but not much.

[David]

Do RISC processors (Reduced Instruction Set Cxxx ? ) have support for the extended instruction sets such as MMX, SSE, SSE2, 3DNow, ....

[rugby]

Yes, the G4 has the Velocity Engine. If an application is written that's optimized for the VE, there's a HUGE difference. I had a G3/400 and a G4/400 and with the distributed.net client that was optimized the difference was huge. However, like most MMX, SSE stuff, if it's not optimized it's pretty slow. Mac OS X is VE optimized.