A little bit of randomnness
Some random thoughts about Apple's recent releases of the Intel iMac and the Macbook Pro.
They herald a new era for the Mac platform. Things like the possibililty to run Windows and all the pros and cons of that are very interesting - but myself and others have touched on those.
The dual processors in a laptop is nice. I must feel a little bit sad that they aren't 64-bit chips however. The 64-bit processors, whilst on other architectures mostly for larger address spaces and (possibly) causing slight slowdowns, on the x86 is so much cleaner and more register rich it would have been nice to think what would have happened if all Intel-Macs would have had 64-bit from the go-get. I guess I should look up comparisons of 32 vs. 64 bit apps on Linux, BSD or Windows. Still, even if my conjecture is true it's not to be, since Intel won't have anything good enough for Apple until the second half.
For programmers I think this shouldn't be overly hard - although there will be tuned apps that probably won't make it (older games for instance).
One are that is a bit of a pain, although not strictly related to Intel, is the whole C++ builds with gcc 4 is not compatible with Mac OS 10.2. It's therefore necessary to build with gcc 3.3 for 10.2 and gcc 4 with 10.4 for intel OR just be compatible with 10.3.9 onwards and compile both Intel and PowerPC with gcc 4. Oh well, I guess it will all sort itself out with time.
They herald a new era for the Mac platform. Things like the possibililty to run Windows and all the pros and cons of that are very interesting - but myself and others have touched on those.
The dual processors in a laptop is nice. I must feel a little bit sad that they aren't 64-bit chips however. The 64-bit processors, whilst on other architectures mostly for larger address spaces and (possibly) causing slight slowdowns, on the x86 is so much cleaner and more register rich it would have been nice to think what would have happened if all Intel-Macs would have had 64-bit from the go-get. I guess I should look up comparisons of 32 vs. 64 bit apps on Linux, BSD or Windows. Still, even if my conjecture is true it's not to be, since Intel won't have anything good enough for Apple until the second half.
For programmers I think this shouldn't be overly hard - although there will be tuned apps that probably won't make it (older games for instance).
One are that is a bit of a pain, although not strictly related to Intel, is the whole C++ builds with gcc 4 is not compatible with Mac OS 10.2. It's therefore necessary to build with gcc 3.3 for 10.2 and gcc 4 with 10.4 for intel OR just be compatible with 10.3.9 onwards and compile both Intel and PowerPC with gcc 4. Oh well, I guess it will all sort itself out with time.
posted by RobZed at 8:09 pm
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