Thornir Alekeg said:
Looks like starting with models next year. I wonder how this will play out with the graphic design and animation people. I thought the whole "floating point" thing with PPC chips was what made Macs superior for that kind of work.
The AltiVec units in the PPC chips were extremely efficient for proccessing a lot of the Photoshop kind of operations. But PPC clock speeds have languished so long that its not the edge it used to be.
Though it was never really the performance that drew most people to macs, it was the generally hassle free nature of the operation and use of the computers that attracted a lot of the creative types. They wanted to do something with it and not bother with having to learn obsure commands.
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On a separate Note -
One of the things that a few of the articles pointed out, was that the real advantage to Apple of switching to intel, was not the processors, but the system chip sets for memory controllers, glueing on PCI, AGP slots etc.
Creating these has taken a substantial amount of the resources that Apple has had to invest in creating new systems/motherboards and is one of the main reasons why Apple has tended to stick with models as long as they do. Despite what a lot of people think Apple is not going to be saving any money on using Intel CPUs, they were getting the PPC chips at a very good price.
The other question is what exactly will this mean for running windows and third party hardware.
Since Macs will now be using the exact same hardware as the windows machines, it should be possible to simply install windows on an HD partition and dual boot, or with a multi-proc system have both OS's running at the same time. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that we would be able to simply build systems off the shelf and install OSX on them. Jobs is too much of a control freak to permit something like that. Despite iTunes and iPods, Apple still makes the majority of it's money off of hardware. So the question becomes how integrated will they make using windows with the Mac OS? Might get some of the game whiners to shut up about that sort of thing at least. I suspect that Apple will really miss Virtual PC at that point, since it would likely have made it much simple and easier, not to mention more secure with it's Virtual Computer approach to things.
On the bright side we should get at least as ready access to new hardware as the Linux people do. Since it should be at least as easy to write/modify the drivers for OSX as it is to make them for Linux. Which should ease the graphics card access considerably at least.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
