[G4] Much Ado About Harddrives

[Eric Wood]

Am Jan 18, 2008 um 2:13 AM schrieb Eric Smith:

> Eric Wood wrote:
>> I for one am trying to keep going on PowerPC as long as possible.  
>> I'm a fan of the RISC philosophy and I find my PPC systems to be  
>> very capable.
>
> I agree with you completely.
>
>> I'm counting on qemu making running Intel apps on PPC possible -  
>> that would be fun.
>
> Sounds interesting; what is it?
>
> My guess is that under the guise of requiring a certain level of
> hardware performance Apple will restrict a future OS version to
> Intel-based systems. It will probably be as unnecessary as the way
> they set an arbitrary CPU speed to support Leopard, when reports
> are that even slow G4's run Leopard at about the same performance
> as Tiger. But Apple will enforce it by distributing only an Intel
> version and forcing anyone who wants the latest to buy new hardware.
> Who knows if it will be with 10.6 or when, but I have a feeling
> that Apple will orphan the PPC platforms before too long.
>
> Eric S.

There can be no doubt that PPC will be abandoned - 10.6 is likely a  
good bet, too. Qemu is a "Fast!" processor emulator developed as open  
source. It can do both CPU emulation to run non-native programs (in  
Linux mostly) and also does full system emulation, albeit poorly at  
this stage, except perhaps its Intel emulation. I know there was talk  
somewhere on the web of getting qemu to run Intel apps on PowerPC  
Macs, but I don't know how that's doing now. I also wonder if Intel  
apps all require 64-bit architectures, which I suppose would make for  
slower emulation. I see that I can emulate a 64-bit PC on my G4 at  
least when using Q, which is a free program based around qemu for OS  
X that focuses on system emulation. That's to be found on  
versiontracker.com.

I know my course will always be away from Intel.

Eric