Re: [SLUG] Apple shifts to Intel

From: SOTL (sotl155360@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Jun 13 2005 - 08:59:40 EDT


There are some comments about this and a complete article on Groklaw.

One of the comments concerning DRM suggested that it would be possible to
replace the kernel in Mac OC X and evade embed chip or motherboard DRM which
may become a very desirable feature to anyone wishing to view streamed video
or streamed audio with out cost.

Question:
[Without revealing how since that would open a can of legal worms that is
irrelevant to the question]
How difficult would it be to replace the kernel in a BSD distribution like Mac
OC X with a Linux kernel that would allow operation of the system without
DRM?

Frank

On Sunday 12 June 2005 20:06, Andrew Barber wrote:
> True that they never mention which Intel processor,
> but the development boxes are P-4, and I'm not aware
> of any Itanium laptops. If they are going to have fat
> binaries for PPC/x86, then the binary for Itanium
> would be fatter: PPC/x86/PA-ish. Otherwise
> performance would suffer.
>
> Andy
>
> --- Ken Elliott <kelliott4@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> > >>I may be mistaken, but my understanding was that
> >
> > the Itanium was not
> > really x86. It is RISC that has a hardware
> > instruction emulator for x86,
> > which was proven at one time to be much slower than
> > a similar speed Pentium.
> >
> > You are correct. The Itanium is based on HP's
> > PA-RISC long instruction word
> > architecture. X86 was emulated in microcode. Had
> > it been emulated in
> > hardware, it might have been accepted better. But
> > since the Pentium runs
> > x86 code faster, and was cheaper, most folks took a
> > wait-and-see attitude.
> > Intel put less effort into making the Pentium fast,
> > expecting it would have
> > a short life as we all embraced the Itanium, and
> > that allowed AMD to
> > leapfrog them.
> >
> > But Apple's OS/X is CPU independent, so I believe
> > they would find it easier
> > to move to Itanium than Microsoft. In theory, NT
> > (W2K, XP) is also
> > CPU-independent. But someone more knowledgeable
> > than me suggested that they
> > have added x86 code to XP in order to better run
> > older apps.
> >
> > Apple's Steve Jobs says the move is about processor
> > power per watt, and that
> > makes sense from a laptop standpoint. But I suspect
> > there is far more to it
> > than that.
> >
> > Secure64 is on record saying the Itanium can be made
> > to run about 20x faster
> > than x86, and far more securely. And Jobs never
> > once said "x86", "Pentium"
> > or anything else to indicate what Intel chip. Since
> > the Itanium can run
> > big-endiam and little-endiam code, it should emulate
> > the PowerPC far better
> > than the Pentium could. HP moved from Motorola CPUs
> > to PA-RISC, then to
> > Itanium - all big-endiam CPUs. Apple moved from the
> > same Motorola CPUs to
> > PowerPC - also big-endiam. But Intel uses
> > little-endiam CPUs, so the
> > Itanium had to be able to run both.
> >
> > A page on little-endiam vs big-endiam:
> >
> > http://www.noveltheory.com/techpapers/endian.asp
> >
> > Ken Elliott
>
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