Moto’s processors are very inexpensive, much cheaper than Intel’s.  Haven’t priced AMD’s units recently, but with their own business taking a hit, I would imagine they are also inexpensive.

[quote author=“Johannes”]One question:

What would be so bad about seeind Mac OS X running on a AMD

Global warming.

Apple is first and foremost a hardware company. A switch to AMD blurs the hardware lines. Apple risks losing hardware sales.

Re: omgwtfbbq!

[quote author=“Anonymous”]You know, it just hit me.

1) M$ has been pushing the TabletPC.
2) Apple has been pushing Rendezvous and Bluetooth.
3) M$ is most likely in bed with Intel.
4) AMD needs a bed partner.

11) ???
12) Profit!

Someone’s been spending too much time at slashdot

Besides, just today AMD has been hyping its 64bit chip with a special prototype version of windows.

I too am playing Devil’s Advocate, but if Apple moved to AMD, or to Intel, Mac OS X would be locked to Apple’s hardware in some fashion. 

That’s the thing that has always annoyed me about the PC lemmings who want X on x86: They want it so they can run X on their home built jallopies, but that will never, ever, happen.  It’s not just about hardware sales either, though that is a huge issue, it’s about Steve Jobs wanting to offer (i.e. CONTROL!!!) the whole widget so that we can Compute Differently, his way.

64 bit and standardized hardware?

(lifted from a recent interview with Media100 CEO John Molinari)

“Understand putting hardware in the back of the Mac is always a “who knows” situation—because Apple changes the back plane, the power supply, the PCI bus characteristics.”

“...it makes more sense to develop that product on an open computing platform like the Intel boxes, than on the Macintosh which doesn’t have any power, may not have the physical slots, and if it does, it may not have those things in the future, because Apple reserves the right to unilaterally change those things. And none of the PC makers have that right because they’re all locked into a standard none of them can change.”

“Steve Jobs constantly emphasizes innovation, but innovation, to other developers, can often mean shutting them out.”

kinda disturbing to me…I’d hope the announcement to be a gameplan for a standard 64 bit Mac architecture for the next 5 or 7 years myself..
codec3

If apple makes the switch, I see the following things happening:
•Apple will make OS X run only on Apple-branded machines
•Apple will set up something simular to the 68k emulator on the PowerPC on any AMD chip they were to use (PPC emulator).
Granted, this is just speculation on my part. But isn’t it true that Cocoa apps are hardware independent and could run on OS X regardless of the processor used, or am I just horribly misinformed?

So the keynote has passed.  Where the hell is all this shattering news?   Haven’t seen anything post-keynote yet.

I think this is just a ploy for hypertransport, nothing more.

Wow, what an amazing announcement!  I would never have believed that would happen!  Earth shattering!

Oh, wait, nothing happened

From amdzone.com coverage…

Rob and I just got out of the Hector Ruiz keynote and after Q and A. Real quickly here are some key points.

Athlon XP 64-Clawhammer desktop name confirmed
Slash and Gibson digital guitars
power company business win with nForce powered Compaqs
Hammer wafer yields over 50% a month ago
64 bit Unreal demoed
400MHZ FSB nForce 2 demo, possibly new bus speed
IBM DB2 Opteron demo
Star Wars previsualization on Athlons

Nada, nothing, zip, see ya…

-zip

Altivec doesn’t matter

I could be talking out of my butt, but here goes. Altivec doesn’t matter when AMD/INTEL chips are running at 3 Ghz, they will still trounce a MOTO chip running at 1.25 Ghz. Then Apple put two of them in, and Apple still lags behind in mosts tests. Read barefeats.com Athlon, P4, G4 shootout article for a comparison.  Athlon, and P4’s also have multimedia extentions that help out their performance. If the Apple switches Procs, maybe we’ll see Multi-Athlon systems, which would argubly be the faster that anything thing out there. This is my two cents on naysayers against the AppleMD switch.

May not be so far fetched

[quote author=“DawnTreader”]Apple is first and foremost a hardware company. A switch to AMD blurs the hardware lines. Apple risks losing hardware sales.

Just because OS X may run on an AMD processor desn’t mean it will run on any old white box PC. There is a fairly well substantiated rumor that Apple released a couple of test mules that were literally welded shut and were running AMD Athalons. Apple could easily build a mother board with an AMD processor that could have proprietary chips on it necessary for OS X to run. That means no lost hardware sales. Also remember that Connectix released Virtual PC for PC’s. That product could easily run on an Apple AMD box, but it would run with virtually (no pun intended) no emulation, think speed! Consider the following points.

1. Jobs declares OS 9 dead
2. Apple states that as of January 2003 new Apple Machines will not boot OS 9
3. Recently Apple put out an urgent request to educational institutions to list OS 9 applications that keep users from switching to OS X totally.
4. It would be a simple matter to build “fat” OS X applications, those with code for both PPC and AMD (or whatever). The end user could easily strip out the unneeded code.

Hmm….

Hmm, so what did happen?  I checked comdex, Macobserver, no one seems to have any coverage on what AMD did say.  ??

I’m doubting something happened with Apple or Apple’s site would have changed.

The Order of Things

Step 1: Apple releases hardware on x86
Step 2: Somebody, somewhere develops a Windows compatibilty layer. If not Connectix, then some open source project
Step 3: Developers stop developing for the Mac—“why spend the money? The mac can run our Windows version. It’s almost completely compatible!”
Step 4: There is no step 4!

Given the chance to cut corners and discontinue coding for the Mac, most developers would grab it. Sure, Apple will still make stuff, probably Adobe and some others, but the pool of Mac software would shrink over time.

I’m also doubtful that any Windows layer would be fast enough or compatible enough to be truly transparent. People would begin to see the Mac as a poorer implementation of Windows.

So, we’d have poor Windows compatibility, poor PPC compatibility and decreased Max x86 development. Yeah, I can’t wait.