Apple Intern Spent 12 Weeks Porting Mac OS X To ARM 368
An anonymous reader writes "Apple hasn't released a Mac OS X device running on ARM yet, but a recently discovered thesis from a former Apple intern going by the name of Tristan Schapp details a 12-week project carried out in 2010 to port the OS to the ARMv5 architecture. The port got as far as booting to a multi-user prompt, but then hit hurdles to do with drivers and cache. The good news is that same intern now works for Apple as part of the CoreOS team. With rumors last year that a MacBook Air running on ARM could appear by 2013, could he be part of a team making that happen? If he is, I bet it will use the new ARMv8 architecture announced late last year."
Droping X86 may be suide for apple (Score:3, Interesting)
As how meany big apps will want to change architecture on apple yet again?
This may brake Photoshop plugins as well
Dropping X86 will take away windows dual boot as well.
Steam games and other games may also die on the mac
apple tv? (Score:5, Interesting)
Assumption is its for the new mac book.
Would be funny if it turns out to be the much rumored apple tv.
Re:Droping X86 may be suide for apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple is certainly big enough at this point to support two architectures. You may or may not be aware that, with Xcode, generating a fat binary supporting multiple CPU architectures involves nothing more than a setting. Of course testing may not be quite that smooth, especially at first.
At any rate, I'm quite sure Apple won't drop x86 support for the foreseeable future. However, there may be some real advantages to supporting both, including price competition for Intel.
Don't forget that Microsoft has already promised Windows for ARM (NVIDIA's "Project Denver"), so it may also be in Apple's best interest to be a player there as well - especially if the NVIDIA CPUs have some real advantages.
One of Many Reasons for Intel UltraBook Program (Score:5, Interesting)
It's no secret that one of the reasons Intel is subsidizing manufacturers over $100M for the Ultrabook project is to keep ARM at bay. This is compounded by Microsoft offering a ARM version of Windows. Apple putting out a really nice A8 MacBook Air could really shake things up.
However, the real issue Apple is going to have is MacOS or iOS. There's a lot of compelling reasons to move to iOS for Apple, but ultimately the closed nature of iOS would likely alienate the large programmer base they have built up.
Re:Stop masturbating over apple (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Apple history (Score:5, Interesting)
And not only that, this is in NeXTStep's DNA. That OS was made for portability, and ran on at least (if this link is accurate) four different [wikipedia.org] processor families. Apple also had a concurrent build of OS X on Intel while they sold PowerPC machines. Fat Binaries also would allow Apple, if they felt like it, to make the CPU all but invisible to the user for properly recompiled programs, letting them have multiple processors in their lineup (this does, however, leave anything older or not recompiled out in the cold; that doesn't seem to matter much to Apple, however).
This is just smart business; something goes wrong with Intel, they're ready. A new, decent competitor pops up? port it, and if it proves to be better, run with it. To not to have these projects going would seem to be a mistake.
Re:Droping X86 may be suide for apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Adobe deserves to die imho. They were indeed dragged kicking and screaming. Same for MS Office. You either adapt or die, if your code is so shitty you can't port it between slightly different architectures without breaking it, you have a really bad development team.
Re:NVIDIA (Score:5, Interesting)
Given Nvidia's (comparatively mature) GPU compute ambitions, and their displeasure at the fact that Intel has been shoving them out of all but the fat-'n-bulky laptop designs and discrete GPU desktop/workstation designs, it seems very likely indeed that Nvidia wants two things from ARM:
1. An ARM fast enough to, when combined with an Nvidia GPU, produce a tablet/laptop that people won't laugh at in comparison to a ULV i3/5/7 + Intel GMA.
2. An ARM fast enough(and with enough PCIe lanes and memory controller ability) to do boot, housekeeping, and care and feeding, for a big stack of 'Tesla' compute silicon.
Neither really requires(nor would it be obviously sensible) ARM to go up against high-wattage and relatively low thread-count x86 parts(in which struggle Intel is a very, very, dangerous adversary, and AMD a dogged and inexpensive one); but they likely would want something that can provide an adequate user experience compared to the intel power-constrained stuff, and something that can allow them to sell all-Nvidia Tesla compute stacks.
Re:Collude to take away freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
If you really like freedom a little bit, you need to be on your guard lest all manufacturers of computing devices priced for home users collude to design their products to take away the computing freedom of home users. This already happened decades ago in the video game industry.
Due to a wonderful concept called "free markets" this will almost certainly not happen. That is, unless perhaps the government decides that "free computing" is dangerous, and mandates that all PCs are locked down. The government, in particular the current US idiocracy, is the main enemy of free markets. In fact, the PS3 tried to make one if its distinguishing characteristics that it was a general-purpose device, but apparently rethought that for various reasons. Since video consoles are essentially fixed-function devices I guess it made sense to Sony, besides Sony's approach was always half-hearted.
Until then, someone will always offer "unlocked" computers due to market demand. Macs are in this category, along with virtually all desktops/laptops in the world. One of the more interesting developments in the area of "cheap, general purpose computing" lately is the sub $50 Raspberry Pi. Now there's a hacker platform if I've ever seen one! =:-D
Re:Droping X86 may be suide for apple (Score:3, Interesting)
They didn't learn from history either - Adobe InDesign (then Pagemaker) was an also-ran to Quark Xpress' stallion, but then Quark got complacent after the release of OS X and thought "nah, no need to do any work to release an OS X native version - everyone uses us, no one will is going anywhere" and then InDesign came along and said "thanks for the user base!".
Sad that Adobe forgot that with the move to x86 on the Mac. Still, I guess they just didn't care about the Mac platform all that much.
Re:Apple history (Score:5, Interesting)
Mr. Otellini. Thank you for meeting with us to discuss the Intel hardware performance-per-watt roadmap. It certainly looks like you have top engineers working very hard on this issue.
We have to head back to Cupertino in just a few moments, but before we conclude, I want to introduce you to young Tristan Schapp. He's an intern with us this semester and we've really enjoyed having him around the office. Now Tristan, can you show these nice gentlemen what it was you were able to cobble together in your cubicle over the summer?
Re:One of Many Reasons for Intel UltraBook Program (Score:4, Interesting)
Just goes to show you that there is not an open market in the PC sector and who has been controlling it for so very long. IMO
LoB