OT: RE: Apple Goes Intel...

[Steven N. Hirsch]

On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Jules Richardson wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 07:36 -0400, Steven N. Hirsch wrote:
> 
> > self-virtualize seamlessly, how long will it take for someone to hack up a 
> > "preboot" supervisor layer which will support OS X on a garden-variety PC?
> 
> Have Apple said that they're going to run on PC-like hardware? I
> *thought* their only comittment was to x86 chips and that nothing's been
> said about system bus, support chips or other architecture. In which
> case there might be substantial differences between Apple hardware and a
> cruddy PC that'd mean a big rewrite / bodge of a lot of the OS to get it
> to work.

Ah, but that's the point of virtualization.  The environment can be setup 
to look like something quite different from the actual hardware.  Also, if 
Apple is really aggressively looking at cost savings, they'll be likely to 
use the Intel north and south bridge chipsets.  Unless they plan on 
custom asics galore, there's a bound to how "different" the hardware can 
look.

Steve