WWDC 2005 Keynote up on the Apple Site

[Paul Kyte]

Why would you post benchmarks from the manufacturer? We all know they are spun to hell and back. Let’s start looking at independent benchmarks.

I gave up on believing that G5’s were a faster machine than a similarly priced Intel box a year ago. Sure there were tasks that it would beat the PC at by a large margin, but there many others that it would come up short. I went Mac mostly for the advantages of the OS and the best editing solution (FCP), which was exclusive to it. Speed advantages came from better interaction, not raw horsepower. Saving two minutes on a render was easily lost by a crash, or difficulty figuring out the interface.

The Mac experience will not change at all when an Intel chip is inside it. I think product updates will be more regular, availability will be stronger, and Apple won’t continue to fall behind in the mobile computing sector.

My biggest worry is how SSE3 will fair compared to Altivec, and how tough it will be to translate over.

[Dom Silverio]

Notice the benchmark for video…

2 different CPU platform
2 different OS
2 different PROGRAMS!!!

Does Apple even realize what a benchmark is?

[Misha Aranyshev]

In its dev docs Apple doesn’t talk about SSE3, only SSE2 and there is no “translation” but rewrite from the scratch. In this light I wonder why there is no emphasis on GPU as SIMD? Is it even more limited than SSE? Is it because portables from Apple will use whole thing from Intel with integrated graphics? Is it because audio is as big user of SIMD as video but can’t use GPU?

[Christopher Tay]

If moving to the Intel architecture finally allows the Mac to support all the wonderful high end graphics card out there, I’m all for it. And if it means giving us PCI-Express bus and dual or multicore HT type of performance, hey, why not ? And add OSX to it…I think for people like us in the creative industry, it means everything. Like Marco said, most of us wouldn’t even be bothered with what’s inside the box as long as it is more horsepower. With OSX, most average users probably won’t even realise that it’s “Intel Inside”.

-chrispy

[Mitchji]

[mishka] “In its dev docs Apple doesn’t talk about SSE3, only SSE2 and there is no “translation” but rewrite from the scratch.”

Hi,

Except for programs that are currently cross platform (AE for example).

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Ron Lindeboom]

[PaulD] “It would seem to me that Apple has bought a new CPU to bring to its own Apple-ROM architecture, rather than buying into the IBM-compatibility BIOS syndrome.”

I am sure that that is true but what I was implying and which I still maintain is true, is that in OSX (as opposed to the old classic MacOS variants), there are still many ways to get in “under the hood” and really make a mess of things. Luckily, most Mac users are not used to getting in under the hood and so few will ever experience the joy of it. ;o)

It was Phillip Schiller senior vice president of Apple who made the dual-boot comments at the WWDC following Steve’s keynote. For more on this, search the Cow or CNET or Apple.

Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. “That doesn’t preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will,” he said. “We won’t do anything to preclude that.” However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers’ hardware. “We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac,” he said.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom

[Mitchji]

[Ron Lindeboom] “Me, I’d prefer a machine that runs all my various OSes that I use and can be rebooted to handle the job at hand.”

Hi Ron,

With OSX running on Intel it will be much easier for companies selling Windows software to port to OSX so there might be more software that is currently Windows only available for OSX.

Also emulation should be a better alternative. The three problems with emulation are:
1. Its not free. We should be able to run a lot of Windows software under OSX using Wine (or something similar) when OSX is on Intel Hardware:
https://www.winehq.com/
Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

2. Not all Windows software runs with emulators. The number of Windows programs that won’t currently run under OSX (using Virtual PC for example) should decrease when OSX is running on Intel hardware.

3. Emulation is slow. This should be much less of a problem when OSX is running on Intel CPU’s.

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Bill Willins]

1. from a sales point of view , won’t this announcement KILL sales of current models for the next year ?
2. One of my favorite things about this platform is the lack of virus’s … will this all now change with Intel chips ?

[Jerry Hofmann]

I’d think that viruses will come into your Mac if you run Windows on it… but not the Mac OS… it’s not a bullet proof OS it’s just a small market share OS… so the hackers don’t write for it… It’s not a big enough splash for them if they succeed.

Jerry