The $999 Mac-Intel Developer Machine

[piedad]

Got this from Powerpage.org.
It looks like another vendor's Pentium motherboard that was put inside the G5 case! I am sure that the OSX version that comes with it will get out into the p2p world and I suspect it would work on any typical Intel motherboard!

[piedad]

[piedad]

More "bad news"!
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MacFixIt reader William Kucharski writes:

"It appears Apple may be giving up on 64-bit computing as far as the new Intel platform is concerned, at least to start with.

"As you may have noticed, the new Intel developer platform is Pentium 4-based, and the new Universal Binary Programming Guidelines document refers only to IA-32.

"This seems to indicate that Mac OS X will only support 32-bit x86 processors, not 64-bit x64/AMD64 (Intel calls them EMT64) CPUs (in anything other than 32-bit legacy mode), or the ABI would point people to the AMD64 ABI in addition to or instead of just the IA-32 ABI.

"This seems to indicate that Apple is abandoning 64-bit computing, or at least they don't feel it's as important as they've been positioning it as for the past few years.

"Certainly it's an important shift in philosophy, as it appears there is no capability to generate 64-bit Mac OS X Intel apps at present."
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Why the heck would one buy a G5 machine now if 64 bit applications are not going to be developed? True, why did the development machine not come with the 64bit Itanium????
I sure hope that Steve is holding some aces up his sleeve somewhere.

[jerrytieng]

The Itanium is a flop. I believe that they will invest heavily in the dual-core Pentium M platform in the next 2 years and squeeze every bit of performance out of it before going 64-bit.

[jerrytieng]

Likewise, 64-bit processors matters when you need a *HUGE* amount of RAM, anything under 4Gb, 32-bit processors are okay.

[mgd]

If you guess right, one day I can run OSX on an Alienware machine.

Originally posted by piedad
I am sure that the OSX version that comes with it will get out into the p2p world and I suspect it would work on any typical Intel motherboard!

[Edited on 6-8-2005 by mgd]

[tweek]

Got this from http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/

" I'm going to keep this brief, so please write me with the questions you have and any tests you want run on one of the dev kits. I will have one of my own next week as well.

First, the thing is fast. Native apps readily beat a single 2.7 G5, and sometimes beat duals. Really.
(I asked about real-world apps - if any were already available in native code-Mike)
All the iLife apps other than iTunes, plus all the other apps that come with the OS are already universal binaries....

They are using a Pentium 4 660. This is a 3.6 GHz chip. It supports 64 bit extensions, but Apple does not support that *yet*. The 660 is a single core processor. However, the engineers said that this chip would not be used in a shipping product and that we need to look at Intel's roadmap for that time to see what Apple will ship.

It uses DDR-2 RAM at 533 MHz. SATA-2. It is using Intel GMA 900 integrated graphics and it supports Quartz Extreme. The Intel 900 doesn't compare favorably to any shipping card from ATi or nVidia. The Apple engineers says they dev kit will work with regular PC graphics cards, but that you need a driver. Apple does not write ANY graphics drivers. They just submit bug reports to ATi/nVidia. So, when we asked where to get drivers for better cards the engineers said "The ATI guys are here." He's right, they've been in the compatibility lab several times.

It has FireWire 400, but not 800. USB 2 as well. USB 2 booting is supported, FireWire booting is not. NetBoot works.

The machines do not have Open Firmware. They use a Phoenix BIOS. That;s right, a Mac with a BIOS.
(I asked if the Bios had any tweaks like Memory Timing which is common for many PC motherboards, although Intel OEM motherboards don't usually have any end user tweaks like that.-Mike)
They won't tell us how to get in the BIOS. I'm sure we can figure it out when out dev kits arrive.

They run Windows fine. All the chipset is standard Intel stuff, so you can download drivers and run XP on the box.

Rosetta is amazing. (see earlier post on limitations of the Rosetta emulator - it's a G3 emulator basically - will not run Altivec code, etc. and performance isn't going to be as good as native code, but most Mac apps will run on a G3.-Mike) The tests I've run, both app tests and benchmarks, peg it at between a dual 800 MHz G4 and and a dual 2 G5 depending on what you are doing.
(I mentioned to him the limitations of Rosetta (posted below)-Mike)
It's true Rosetta does not support Altivec, but most apps run on a G3, right? Rosetta tells PPC apps that it is a G3. Apps should fall back to their G3 code tree. Everyone I tested did.

The UI tests in Xbench exceed a dual 2.7 by a large margin. (other specific tests are much lower than a G5 per Xbench site results.-Mike)

I've been talking to and watching a lot of devs. There are a lot of apps from big names running in the Compatibility lab already. Some people face more pain, sure, but Jobs wasn't kidding when he said that this transition would be less painful than OS 9 to OS X or 68K to PPC.

Game devs seem optimistic. They see porting Windows/x86 to Mac/x86 as much easier. They look forward to the day they don't have to support PPC.
I was talking to a (game Developer) that said about 1/3 of the process is handling endian issues, the rest is Win32/DirectX. For the next 3-5 years, their job will be harder since they have to port to two processor architectures and most bugs *are* endian related and that they will have a hard time making the PPC versions run as well as the x86 versions.

This transition is not about current P4 vs G5. It is about the future directions of the processor families. Intel is committed to desktop/notebook and server in a big way. Freescale/IBM are chasing the embedded market and console market. Apple would have been in a lurch in 2 years.

Also, all the cell people and the AMD people need to be quiet. Apple evaluated both. AMD has the same, if not worse, supply problems as IBM. Their roadmap is fine, but the production capacity is not.

The tested Cell as well. That processor is NOT intended for PC applications. (it was designed for game systems, not as a general use CPU) The lack of out of order execution and ILP control logic creates very poor performance with existing software. Having developers rewrite for cell would have been MUCH more work than reworking for Intel. And that's what this is, you rework your codebase in ALL cases, not rewrite it. "

[Maverick]

Game devs seem optimistic. They see porting Windows/x86 to Mac/x86 as much easier. They look forward to the day they don't have to support PPC.

oh i love this tidbit !!!

[Maccess]

Somehow, I see a bit of strategy here:

It will be inevitable that the P4 Mac OS X code will be leaked pretty soon.

Steve Jobs is not naive to think that it won't, and it could be part of his strategy.

Lots of bittorrent sites with Intel compatible Mac OS X installers. Many PC users (maybe not all due to compatibility issues) will b able to try and test Mac OS X (albeit an unoptimized one), readying the market for the introduction of Apple's true Intel Mac.

[Veegee]

Hi guys.. sorry to revive this thread but I saw something on multiply that kind of caught my attention.. someone's selling an Intel machine that can run OS X...
http://oniomaniacgoddess.multiply.com/photos/album/26

http://oniomaniacgoddess.multiply.com/photos/photo/26/3.jpg

I just thought of sharing.. I just don't know if what the seller claims is true