[Ham-Mac] MacOS X x86 Intel Support

Richard Rucker rrucker at bellatlantic.net
Tue Jun 7 06:12:39 EDT 2005


On Jun 6, 2005, at 8:42 PM, Bill Coleman wrote:

> One curious nit -- no where in any of the PR material does it say 
> "Intel x86" processors. It just says Intel processors.
>
> It could just as well be Intel 64-bit processors, or an Intel 
> processor of specific design for Apple.

I'm sure you are right.  There is a lot of cruft built into the x86 
line left over from the early days, or so I have read. The fact that no 
specifics on the CPU family to be used were discussed I find 
encouraging.  It means that SJ and Intel have at least one more 
surprise for us in due time.

I read that some of Motorola's best chip designers on the PowerPC were 
hired by Intel some years ago.  It seems reasonable that there's a new 
generation of chips that combine the best of both design worlds; I 
imagine that would include a high performance-to-power ratio, 64-bit 
registers, dual-cores, etc.  Perhaps also some features that minimize 
the pain of low-level code writers where the differences between chip 
architectures make a difference.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop,

Dick Rucker, KM4ML



More information about the Ham-Mac mailing list