First Developer Intel Macs (Photos)

[rxse7en]

Why would they want to? They already make Virtual PC for Mac OS X. Why not just sell Windows XP for Mac Users. They make the same amount of money and more people will want it becuase its the real Windows and not a converted version.

Makes one wonder how much money MS lost in this deal. They just bought VPC and now it's EOL--at least for until the new X86 Macs are out.


p.s. I don't think I can call them "Mactel" just yet. Kinda brings up the warms spits still...

 

[AidenShaw]

No, they made a Gazillion of them; they're all rental cars down here in Florida.

Avis (GM), right?

That's why I go with Hertz (Ford) so that I can get the new Mustang convertibles - really sweet machines!

(Only bad thing about the new Mustang convertibles is that the top is a bit slow - the last generation tops would open or close a lot faster. Kind of a big thing when you're tooling along the northeast coast of Oahu and a sudden squall hits.)

 

[AidenShaw]

take off the Mac blinders, the Connectix buy was about much more important things

Makes one wonder how much money MS lost in this deal. They just bought VPC and now it's EOL--at least for until the new X86 Macs are out.

Microsoft didn't give two hoots about VPC/Mac !!

Microsoft bought Connectix for VPC/Windows and specifically for Virtual Server (runs Windows virtual machines on top of Windows Server 2003 hosts).

Have you ever run Virtual Server? I have a couple of hundred of them running right now (two to three hundred virtual machines running on about a hundred W2k3 systems). Very stable, a very good product.

Apple's decision to drop PPC is probably the best thing that's happened to VPC/Mac. Now MS can offer nearly native speed Windows applications running on top of Mac OSX - MS gets to sell VPC, Windows OS, and sometimes the applications!

As long as the app isn't graphics-intensive, or IO/sec intensive, VPC/OSX86 will scream! (Note that IO MB/sec isn't a problem, the issue is the added overhead per IO. Lots of small IO calls will suffer, but large IO calls won't see any significant hit.)

 

[plinden]

ARGGGGGGGGGGGG! Stop with the inane car analogies!!!!!! Or at least find a new one.

Oh! Oh! Can I do one? Having just bought a Honda Odyssey (growing family)? It's a bit unpolished at the moment ... the analogy, not the Odyssey.

Hardware: Wintel PCs are like Toyota Siennas and Macs are like the Odyssey - the base Sienna is less expensive than an Odyssey, but when you add in the extra options that are standard on the Honda, you end up paying more for your Sienna (PC) than for your Odyssey (Mac). But in general there's not much to choose between them.

OS: The OSs are not equivalent to the engine in the Odyssey/Sienna, rather are the OS is the car driver. From a standing start the Sienna (PC) might get to the destination faster, if all goes well, but the Sienna driver is prone to blinding headaches that makes him pull over several times per journey. He lives in a bad part of town but fails to lock his car doors and regularly finds his stereo ripped out. The Odyssey driver lives in a better part of town and keeps his car in his garage. In fact he obsessively can't leave the car parked outside unlocked.

3rd party software: Both the Sienna (PC) and the Odyssey (Mac) driver like to eat out. The Sienna driver has lots of restaurants to eat out in, but they are mostly fast food joints that make him fat and bloated and prone to heart attacks. The Odyssey driver doesn't have as many restaurants to choose from, but they are of a higher quality and offer more nutritious food.

Is that better?

 

[Platform]

The FSB is 800 MHz because the memory is effectively 800 MHz. The FSB is also 64-bit bi-directional.

The PPC970 (in the high end PM) is also using 800 MHz memory, so Intel isn't "sandbagging" as much as Apple is "over-hyping" a bus that's under-utilized because it's running faster than the memory controller in the Northbridge.

Apple marketing has it's own "MHz myth" about FSB speeds (of course we don't mention the Powerbooks).

Thanks for that info...... 😉

But I thought that the FSB also was about how much the CPU could be feed from all ends not just memeory 😕

 

[AidenShaw]

Thanks for that info...... 😉

But I thought that the FSB also was about how much the CPU could be feed from all ends not just memeory 😕

But the FSB is the CPU to memory bus - and the CPU only interacts with memory.

You're probably thinking of the spin that was being spun when Apple had a DDR memory controller (on the G4) and an SDR FSB.

In that case it's true that in theory an SDR data transfer between the CPU and memory could occur in parallel with a DDR DMA transfer between an IO device and memory.

That's a rationalization to justify that having an SDR FSB with a DDR Northbridge could in some circumstances be better than have SDR for both FSB and Northbridge.

The rationalization doesn't apply to the PPC970 at all - the FSB runs at 1/2 or 1/3 of the CPU, but the memory is 400/800 MHz. Running the FSB at absurdly high frequencies doesn't help if the Northbridge and memory are stuck at 400/800 MHz.

 

[whatever]

Not completely true!

Thank you. I figured as much so, but it's juts been something I've been leery of and haven't hear much about. 🙂

If you have a virus on the Windows partition and that partition can see your OS X filesystems, there is nothing preventing a evil virus from wiping out everything it sees.

In fact someone could write a dual boot virus, which will lay dormant on most computers, but when it encounters one with OS X, it could attack, wiping out only OS X files. The attack would occur while he user is dual booted in Windows.

My advise, don't dual boot. It's just not worth it! Use something like Virtual PC which operates in a controled environment.

Whatever!

 

[Mechcozmo]

Apple doesn't have L3 cache on the FSB, so that's not an argument.

PPC970 cache is on-chip, running at chip frequency - just like all the current Intel chips.

Yeah, gone are the days that you can upgrade your L2 cache with a simple chip that gets stuck into the motherboard... ~sigh~... good ol' 604s...

I wish Apple brings back the L3 cache in every single line of computers except maybe the iBooks and Mac Minis. The L2 cache makes a huge difference (CHUD tools let you play with it) and the L3 cache would make a great difference. At least the PowerBooks would pull ahead of the iBooks 😀

 

[apple_g5]

1) My biggest fear is that Apple and Intel will have huge problems with building a fast computer... so we'll end up with a P4 in our macs next summer.

2) The thought of a Intel chip in my Mac makes me vomit.

3) I'm getting the feeling that apple insider is trying to get another lawsuit.

 

[potofgold]

2) The thought of a Intel chip in my Mac makes me vomit.

Hmm, biggest chip maker in the world, great products, excellent supply records....Where is the part that would make you vomit? 😕

 

[Scottgfx]

Oh! Oh! Can I do one? Having just bought a Honda Odyssey (growing family)? It's a bit unpolished at the moment ... the analogy, not the Odyssey....
Is that better?

//Slaps forehead and wimpers to self//

 

[Scottgfx]

Hmm, biggest chip maker in the world, great products, excellent supply records....Where is the part that would make you vomit? 😕

Perhaps it's what people do in Austria for fun?

 

[welborn]

Parts is parts?

So ... if I pick up a motherboard with this chipset, et cetera, and 'find' a copy of OS X-Intel, do you think it would run?

Has anyone compiled a good parts list?

I'm a registered developer, but I'd rather not pay $1k for a machine I have to give back in 2 years. (And I don't have any real work to do with the machine ... I just want one to play with.)

For example:
This board
looks a lot like the Intel Dev Mac

 

[gerardrj]

Hey, could someone answer this question for me?

If you have Windows on a partition and OS X on another, what will the situation be with virus's and all the other Windows problems? Will the Windows issues affect the OS X partition at all? If XP goes nutso, will you Mac booting or its system? Please pardon my ignorance on the specifics of this subject.

OS X will continue to use HFS volumes and Windows will continue to use NTFS, Fat32, etc. Windows does not have any built-in facility to mount or use an HFS volume. Even if viruses run rampant on a dual-boot machine they can't touch the OS X portions of the disk.

That's not to say the virus couldn't try to overwrite the partition tables and corrupt the drive at a lower level.

 

[stephenli]

Makes one wonder how much money MS lost in this deal. They just bought VPC and now it's EOL--at least for until the new X86 Macs are out.

I tell u what, M$ bought VPC not because of Mac Users like us, they just want x86 emulation on PPC ---- for XBOX 360 ---- as its backward compatability.

 

[Huked on Fonick]

Yup thats defenatly a computer allright. Thought it was a cheese grater for a second, but then i realised that wasent cheese, just a stanky p4.

 

[Tealeaf]

Dual Booting sucks.

Virtualisation, baby. New feature of some of the up-coming Intel (and AMD) chips. Run more than one operating system concurrently.

Say you're in OS X, doing some photography work in Photoshop. You suddenly decide you want to play Windows Solitaire. Press a couple of keys and you're in a fully-fledged Windows environment. When you get beat by/fed up with Solitaire, press a couple of keys and you're back in OS X.

http://www.intel.com/technology/computing/vptech/?iid=search&

As for viruses, I've been using PCs since 1999 or so and I've had a grand total of no viruses. It is not difficult to avoid them. Use Opera or Firefox. Run anti-virus and firewall software. Use Ad-aware to scan for spyware. The end.

 

[Azurael]

Yeah, gone are the days that you can upgrade your L2 cache with a simple chip that gets stuck into the motherboard... ~sigh~... good ol' 604s...

I wish Apple brings back the L3 cache in every single line of computers except maybe the iBooks and Mac Minis. The L2 cache makes a huge difference (CHUD tools let you play with it) and the L3 cache would make a great difference. At least the PowerBooks would pull ahead of the iBooks 😀

My Wallstreet II w/Sonnet G4 500 card still has offboard L2, in fact 4x as much of it as my TiBook 550 with it's onboard 256k. Even though the 1MB in the Wallstreet II is half CPU speed, for anything non video-intensive, it's usually 10-20% faster. Many people complained at the time that TiBooks with Gigabit Ethernet at 550/667MHz (PPC7450) were actually slower than the previous generation at 450/500MHz (PPC7400/7410) with twice as much but offboard L2 - eventually, the PPC7455 came along with 512kB of L2 built in, which corrected the performance problem in later G4 machines.

Cache makes a big difference with RISC chips, though I'm not sure about L3 - I think VPC was the only reason for having it (I seem to recall VPC got sizeable speed boosts from L3 because it stored it's code-cache in it).

CISC chips, by comparison seem to get much less benefit from large L2 caches. The AMD Duron, which had only 64kB of L2 was usually not significantly slower than the Athlon/Athlon XP/Sempron with 256 or 512kB of cache, in fact later on the main distinction AMD drew was a slower FSB on the Duron. The same comparison can be drawn between the current generation Semprons and Athlon64s, though not so much between Celerons and P4s because the Netburst architecture's very long pipelines, instruction recycling and small L1 mean it depends very much on L2 cache.

 

[iGary]

Hmm, biggest chip maker in the world, great products, excellent supply records....Where is the part that would make you vomit? 😕

Hmmm...biggest software maker in the world, "great" products, excellent supply records....

Sound familiar? 🙄

 

[Gordy]

So ... if I pick up a motherboard with this chipset, et cetera, and 'find' a copy of OS X-Intel, do you think it would run?

Has anyone compiled a good parts list?

I'm a registered developer, but I'd rather not pay $1k for a machine I have to give back in 2 years. (And I don't have any real work to do with the machine ... I just want one to play with.)

For example:
This board
looks a lot like the Intel Dev Mac

Looks like its the same motherboard all the components match up.

 

[manu chao]

Some may prefer that the Windows program acts like a Windows program....

I certainly would find it way too bizarre if my Linux virtual machine started to act like its Windows host! 😱 (or vice versa)

I would have preferred for Matlab to be fully OS X native, i.e. being able to open files in it by doubleclicking on them or dragging them onto the Dock icon or the same print and open file dialogue etc. instead of its X11 windows (actually the newest version, 7.0.x, has aqua style boxes now, but most stuff in the print dialogue does not work, i.e, no printers with spaces in its name).

 

[Photorun]

Makes one wonder how much money MS lost in this deal. They just bought VPC and now it's EOL--at least for until the new X86 Macs are out.


p.s. I don't think I can call them "Mactel" just yet. Kinda brings up the warms spits still...

Nice logic... except you forgot people have already bought, are buying today, and will buy for the next couple years PPC machines. Sales may slow a bit but they'll hardly just stop.

 

[SPUY767]

If you have the ability to dual boot and get 1,001 viruses on Windows you will have 0 on OSX. No matter if its seperate hard drives or partitioned or anything else. They are two totally seperate beasts, viruses don't work the same on OSX as it does on Windows. The virus would have to be written for OSX, not just Windows.

So in other words anything bad that happens to Windows should not affect OSX in the least.

Not True, if you have a windows virus that chews up files, and you're booted into Windows, If Mac OS is running on a Windows compatible partition, which I'm not sure if it will or not, the win32 virus would be more than happy to gnaw on your Mac OS files. however, if the Macs still use an HFS+ or other windows incompatible system, we should be in the clear.

Second, the production model BETTER have 8 DIMM slots. It's so awesome to have 8 gigs of ram.

 

[sunilraman]

remember the g5 case prank?

remember the hoax where some guy allegedly took a perfectly good powermac g5, ripped out all the innards and put an Intel PC running windows in it?

how the Mac community was *up in arms* and throwing up in their mouths? 😱 .... circa 2003.

well my friends. the day has come. this time:

1. it's not a hoax
2. it wasn't a rich kid with too much time
3. it wasn't a 7337 haxxor or whatever
4. it was apple.
5. f**k me i swear i've done too much drugs or listened to too much trance music or something coz i'm now in some weird parallel universe. what's next? israel and palestine living alongside each other in peace? 😉 😕 😕

 

[AidenShaw]

a virus can read/write HFS

however, if the Macs still use an HFS+ or other windows incompatible system, we should be in the clear.

Not true - all the virus would need to do is include a simple set of routines to open HFS filesystems. You can download HFS source code for Windows from http://www.f.kth.se/~f96-bet/hfsutils/

Second, the production model BETTER have 8 DIMM slots. It's so awesome to have 8 gigs of ram.

The Intel 925 chipset that the devo systems are based upon is a low-end chipset.

The higher end Intel chipsets support up to 16 GiB of RAM - one would assume that Apple would use these chipsets in a P4-based PowerMacintel - and the lower end chipsets in the iMacintel and 'books that don't need more than 4 GiB.

BTW - remember that the Pentium M itself doesn't support more than 2 GiB of RAM using the 915 or 855 chipsets.

But, if Apple is going to wait for the next generation of Pentium M follow-ons (instead of using the current Pentium D and Xeon chips) any talk of max memory support is speculation about unreleased products - the new CPUs will have new chipsets.