[X4U] Apple's move to Intel chips

[Michael Winter]

On Jun 8, 2005, at 7:22 PM, Robert Tillyard wrote:

> Universal Binaries don't have to be limited to PPC/Intel, Apple  
> could add in a many architectures as it sees fit, so who knows  
> maybe Power5, AMD64 or SPARC in the future. My PPC/Intel "Fat"  
> binary is 880KB, the same thing for Win95->XP is 5MB so there's  
> room for a few more.

That's one of the strengths of the way OS X was designed. But in many  
ways we've been using "Fat" binaries on OS X for a long time. For  
many graphics calls, if you have the appropriate GPU, it will run the  
GPU version of the binary. If its not there, it will run the AltiVec  
enhanced binary version. If you're on a G3, it defaults to using the  
PPC binary.

So now there will also be an x86 version of the binary. When you  
launch an app, it simply loads and links the fastest "version" for  
the hardware available. Maybe its just that I remember the days when  
you had to "tell" a computer what kind of hard drive it had before it  
could use it, but always thought this facet of OS X was really  
impressive, especially when you consider how seamlessly it seems to  
work.

On another note, after reading the Ars review of Tiger a few weeks  
ago, I was left thinking that Apple had moved so much of the graphics/ 
video code to the video card GPU, that AltiVec wasn't all that  
necessary any more for new Macs when doing "normal' stuff. Then look  
at what they go and do...

-Mike