10:41 am, 6 Jun 05
os x x86
Steve Jobs just confirmed OS X is moving to x86.
It doesn't surprise me too much, but does this mean all future apps are gonna be distributed as two separate binaries? What about endianness issues in data files?
And what does it do to Apple's business model? [AAPL stock]
It doesn't surprise me too much, but does this mean all future apps are gonna be distributed as two separate binaries? What about endianness issues in data files?
And what does it do to Apple's business model? [AAPL stock]
I can already see Dell offering Windows or OS X with your purchase.
"Hate Windows, Use OS X without buying a new computer!" or like the person at the store told me "OS X can't get viruses like Windows, and look at the widgets! Windows doesn't have a dancing hula girl." One more way to Apple to get it's foot in the door for people that buy a computer like any other electrical appliance in their household.
NeXT ported Mach/OpenStep to x86 back in the early '90s, so porting it back wasn't too bad, though. I believe the open-source Darwin stuff has been x86-compatible for years now.
(Yeah, ages ago I did see System 7.1 running on a PC. But not very well! The PCs and x86 dev tools of that era were barely able to deal with a 32-bit OS.)
x86 doesn't necessarily imply PC. There's much more to the “PC architecture” than the CPU. In fact, I don't really see anywhere in the article Evan linked that says it'll be x86: it could, for example, by Itanium.
Unless Apple is drastically changing its business model, I'd expect that the new Intel-based machines will be about as compatible with “normal PCs” as Amiga was to 68k Macintosh back in the day.
A Mac with an x86 in it will still be a Mac — the motherboard will be nothing like a PC. Apple uses lots and lots of custom VLSI, not the off the shelf components PCs use.
Even today the same devices will work with Macs and PCs, given drivers, since they use basically the same hardware interfaces (IDE, PCI, AGP, USB, FireWire, PCMCIA...)
I guess it may make it more likely that companies will make Mac drivers, if they won't have to deal with a different CPU (and endianness) than Windows.
This makes Mac drivers into de facto Linux drivers, making everybody happy.
I'll take you out for a bubble tea regardless, though =)
However, I think the real question is indeed about the business model. Apple's current business model is to supply everything related to the computer - the hardware, the OS, the office software (well, they try), the accessories. Can they keep that up if they switch to x86? Probably. OS X wasn't the only OS that ran on PowerPC, but Apple still managed to do a fairly good job of keeping their OS from running on non-Apple PPC hardware. Buy will they? I don't know. This could be a precursor to a really big change in their business model - a serious move in on Microsoft's market.
On binaries
Wired's article on the Apple/Intel deal claims some company named Transitive has a way to handle the x86/PPC issue. The story references another Wired story about a blockwise runtime translator, which apparently gets ~80% efficiency at running one (hardware,OS) combination on another.I'm usually pretty skeptical of such things, but based on their description, it seems at least plausible. I can definitely see the cross-translation cost being as low as 20% of cycles, for code blocks that get executed more than a few times.
FWIW, an alternative, and what was used in the 68k->PPC switch, was Fat Binaries. Icky nasty kludge, but effective.
As for the endianness problem: it'll require code fixups, for sure. There's just no way to signal that a memory access is string or integer without much better typing than Obj-C et c. allow. Thankfully, most binaries won't have this issue, which is a good enough "solution" for probably 80% of applications.
As far as data files, I have no clue.
As far as busness model, well, that's certianly a strange graph... But the Mac mini showed them that they can release hardware with a much lower profit margin without the sky falling. Also, I'm not clear if this means they will be releasing hardware with an Intel chip, but having OSX still run their hardware, or being able to run on commody x86 hardware... or even if they mean 32-bit or 64-bit Intel.
Most major Mac developers have already had to deal with this because they have cross-platform file formats. Either that or they use non-binary formats (like XML), or they use lower-level file libraries like sqlite (or Berkeley db?) that abstract away the endianness conversions.
Mac OS will not run on generic PCs. It would be fatal to Apple's hardware business. NeXT and Be showed that you can't sustain an OS business without hardware sales, unless you either have overwhelming market share (MS), or if 99% of the OS's development costs are government-subsidized by an army of volunteer grad students (Red Hat).