Thursday, September 5, 2002 |
14:38 - Well, at least it's (sort of) official...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,496270,00.asp
|
(top) |
Can't get enough of the OS X-on-x86 rumors? Well, Nick DePlume (of Think Secret fame) has posted the mother of them all on eWeek. If we're to believe the "insiders" who have provided this information (and considering DePlume's near-perfect track record in the past, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt), the long-rumored x86 builds of OS X are indeed real, and in fact are being kept current and built in parallel with every PPC build of the OS.
According to sources, the Cupertino, Calif., Mac maker has been working steadily on maintaining current, PC-compatible builds of its Unix-based OS. The project (code-named Marklar, a reference to the race of aliens on the "South Park" cartoons) has been ongoing inside Apple since the early days of its transition to the Unix-based Mac OS X in the late '90s.
Sources said more than a dozen software engineers are tasked to Marklar, and the company's mainstream Mac OS X team is regularly asked to modify code to address bugs that crop up when compiling the OS for x86. Build numbers keep pace with those of their pre-release PowerPC counterparts; for example, Apple is internally running a complete, x86-compatible version of Jaguar, a k a Mac OS X 10.2, which shipped last week.
(Whatever the pros and cons of actually switching to Intel, I simply have to say that I can't get enough of Apple's internal code-name scheme. Marklar. I love it.)
We've been speculating for some time about the feasibility of Apple moving to Intel, and I'd say that rather than proving that Apple is about to jump ship to the x86 platform, this discovery merely solidifies what appears to be the game plan and its related contingency options: the IBM PPC64 is the first choice for a successor to the G4, and from what is being uncovered by the rumor mill, it's going to work out well. It's certainly preferable to the x86 in a number of ways-- SMP capabilities, vector processing, RISC architecture, and orthogonality to the existing PPC assembly language and APIs are continuations of what have always been Apple's selling points, and wouldn't force Apple to about-face on what it considers important in computing. But if something unforeseen crops up and the PPC64 effort falls through somehow, Apple has the option to roll out Marklar (heh... I sure like that better than "OSX86") in very quick order. Looks like there's plenty of method to what's going on across the street, and matters would appear to be well in hand.
Heh. Marklar.
|
|