Comments on: Potential Intel Products

By: mark byrne

mark byrne — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 02:18:56 +0000

Dell is now selling workstations with two 4-way Xeons (IE, 8-WAY BOXES). I wonder when Mac will catch up? I have a poer PC G5 and am waiting on this as I will feel suckered if I buy a four way and the next week there is an eight way.

By: Alice

Alice — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 09:01:18 +0000

as much as i think its good people finally are getting out there and “prophecizing*” I really would rather hope intel makes a completely all new processor to their line, something a bit different than a pentium, it will give apple an edge, but also the ability to use the other processors in the weaker machines.

I also rather hope they dont get rid of the emac, its a perfect machine ^_^ its a good alternative for those who want a mac, with a monitor, and not the imac budget… >.

By: Martin 'MC' Brown

Martin 'MC' Brown — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 17:02:38 +0000

Twist:

You contradict yourself in your own comment.

The cards will be the same as the PC versions. They wont cost more, because they wont need specialized firmware to operate in what is essentially a PC system. Firmware is bound to the platform and CPU, and it will now be Intel x86.

What has increased the price on graphics cards up until now is the work required by companies to write specialized firmware for the cards to work with a different CPU and architecture.

That wont be an issue any more. As long as Apple – or the manufacturer – can write a software driver, we’ll be able to use the same cheap graphics cards as any other Intel user.

By: Twist

Twist — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 15:55:36 +0000

“Mac Compatible” is still going to be an issue for AGP and PCI cards. For years now the issue hasn’t been a hardware issue it has been a firmware and driver issue. Switching over to Intel CPU’s isn’t going to change this because Mac OS X and Windows are still not going to binary compatible (Windows application won’t run under Mac OS X without some kind of translator like VirtualPC) even if they are both running on Intel hardware. I doubt we will see any change on the video card front. We will still get the Mac versions later and they will cost more and offer less features than their PC counterparts probably just like they often do now.

The change is going to be if we can run Windows on Apple hardware. We will be able to use high-end graphic cards for PC’s at full power under Windows and they will probably run under Mac OS X as well with a bit of feature and performance loss due to the less optimized drivers. Hopefully they will be firmware compatible between Intel based Mac’s and normal PC’s though. If they can get them working under both OS’s with the same firmware perhaps they will devote more time to their Mac OS X drivers so we won’t see such a large difference in GPU performance between the two platforms. Of course Apple will need to switch from AGP and PCI-X to PCI-E as well.

By: Leo

Leo — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 18:05:30 +0000

In regard to your keyboard setup have you seen: OSX2X You run this on your main mac machine (which has the keyboard plugged in) then run VNC (free for almost any platform) on the other machines. Launch OSX2X, give it the names or IP's of your other machines and you can then drag the mouse of the side of a mac, and on to your windows BOX! or off the otherside and on to your X11 box. It even allows some cut and paste between machines (I can only get it going from MAC->PC, not the other way).

By: Raj

Raj — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 17:33:14 +0000

Except for the PowerMac/xServe, I see Apple’s entire lineup moving to the next generation of Pentium-M/Celeron-M chips. These chips will be available in dual-core (Yonah) and single-core varieties and with 64-bit support. Going with a common architecture across so many lines will save some of the NRE development costs (fewer board designs, less amount of hardware to support) and will have the added benefit of cooler/quiet computers (important for iBook/PBook as well as iMac/eMac). They could drop the dual-core Yonah into the Powerbook and iMac and go with the single core Pentium-M/Celeron-M in the iBook, eMac, and mini. Even though they’d be sharing a lot of hardware components, the products would be sufficiently differentiated in performance giving them a full line-up.

By: Electric Monk

Electric Monk — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 16:10:33 +0000

Yeah… The PowerBook name was used before they used PowerPC chips, and the PowerMac name was derived from them, although they did also PowerPC chips.