Intel switch :)
Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 10:21 am
What's your opinion on it ?
VJ-A2D wrote:What's your opinion on it ?
Well, we like the PowerPC architecture, but it seems that IBM is not very interested to push it in the direction of general purpose CPUs. Of course, it is pretty surprising, with the announcement of the XBox 2 and the Playstation 3 that are all based on the PowerPC; plus the new Cell architecture that sounds very interesting... Apple seems to have informations that we don't have regarding the PPC roadmap.
Now regarding Modul8, which is a modern application based on a kernel (OMT) that already compiles perfectly on x86 and with the rest of the application that is Cocoa/OpenGL based, a simple recompile should be okay. Fat-binares were already common in the era of NextStep, and I don't see any problem with the creation of a fat-binary version of Modul8. We'll have to rewrite the altivec filters and it's not a very big deal, because we were already planning to move all these filters to the GPU in the future.
Intel prepares very good dual-core CPUs for portable and this is exactly the kind of machine that Modul8 would love (with its multi-threading architecture).
Without a dual-core G5 ready for a PowerBook anytime soon, Apple just did not have the choice.
Yves.