Wednesday, November 23, 2005 |
00:59 - This is serious business
http://www.osx86project.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=68&Itemid=2
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This (via evariste) is a big relief:
First, the Rosetta emulation platform in 10.4.3 build 8F1111A has been upgraded to feature full G4 support, including Altivec. This not only adds a new layer of compatibility to Rosetta, but also improved speed for Altivec-equipped applications. This upgrade is reportedly available as a small downloadable update to build 8F1111.
I'd been wondering whether Rosetta's lack of Altivec support was due to some insurmountable physical constraint on Intel architectures, and that we'd be doomed to sluglike performance on anything that used it, like, say, Photoshop, until we shelled out for the next full-version, natively built upgrade—or whether it was just something they hadn't yet gotten around to coding. But apparently it's the latter, and the speed penalty is no longer an issue.
Now comes the question of how and whether the Intel Macs will natively support Altivec-style software. Will Intel be supplying custom chipsets with Altivec-workalike instructions and registers, either onboard or in a coprocessor? Or will Apple be smiling wanly at all those big cluster installations with Xserves running BLAST and such, and saying, "Sorry, guys—thanks for buying all those thousands of nodes for your supercomputers, and thanks for posing for all those pictures and giving all those interviews for our pro-PPC/anti-Intel marketing, but there ain't gonna be no more execution speed or power consumption advantage to going with Macs anymore"?
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