Cross- Compatibility
Many of you know about this week’s major announcement at MacWorld. For the rest of you who are lost in space: Apple, breaking 20+ year relationship with IBM, announced the next generation of Macintosh computers will be run by the Intel Core Duo chip.What does this mean? First of all, what is a Core Duo chip you ask? Basically, it’s a fancy name for a slight modification of the Pentium D line, but for all intensive purposes it’s a Dual-Core CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) processor whose ancestors date back to the original Pentium line and further (Intel 386 anyone?).
Why is this special? Traditionally CISC chips have run the PC platform and Windows with it, while on the far end of the court, Macs and their Power PC line are RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer), the Mac OS being specially designed only to run on RISC CPUs.
I won’t enter the debate between the two processor design theories, although the loss of Mac means that RISC processors have lost most of their footing in the commercial market. While other applications still exist, mainly involving gaming and graphics, this turn of events could mean the end of IBM’s time in the CPU market.
Additionally, this decision has some profound impacts on the computer world. First, it increases the market share, and thus dominance of Intel and assures that AMD will stay in second place for a long time to come. Second, since Macs now run CISC chips, software that normally wouldn’t run on them might be more comfortable, making the Mac a bigger market. I could almost see the Mac clones making a come back.
Finally, since the Mac OS now runs on an Intel chip, which is rather similar to a Pentium D, the next logical idea would be that a Mac running a CISC CPU and a CISC version of the Mac OS could dual boot into Windows, and vice-versa. The idea is something that geeks have been dreaming about for ages. Will it happen officially? No. No doubt that Apple will try to lock it down, but I’m sure a group of hackers somewhere are waiting to get their hands on a new Mac Book Pro to try it out.
My predictions for the coming year: the Mac market share will finally make it into the double digits; a lot more viruses will now be Mac friendly; iTunes will finally stop trying to conquer my system; I will get a pony. Okay, kinda made the last one up.
Wisdom of the Day: Start everyday without an Egg McMuffin.
posted by JediCraft at 1/14/2006 10:51:00 AM
3 Comments:
> this turn of events could mean the end of IBM’s time in the CPU market.
How about AS/400?
> this turn of events could mean the end of IBM’s time in the CPU market.
I take it back. Correction: this turn of events could mean the end of IBM’s time in the consumer CPU market, with the exception of the Nintendo Revolution.
and why are you Anonymous?
The new Macs use the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), not the traditional PC BIOS. Until Windows Vista gets released, you won't be able to run Windows on the Mac without creating some sort of hack to make the EFI look like a BIOS (there apparently is such a hack, but I doubt the programmers are going to make it easy for just anyone to use.)
As for viruses being Mac-friendly, that just isn't true.
Viruses rely on vulnerabilities in the system architecture, not the hardware it's run on. Most Windows vulnerabilities are due to the fact that Microsoft designed their OS before the Internet became prevalent. One of their bad habits left over from this era is leaving a whole slew of services and network ports open that the average user will probably never use, but are kept in there just to make sure they're available should the need ever arise.
Also, the default Windows user runs with full privileges, which means that malicious software can enter the system and inherit access to every part of the system. OSX always prompts the user when running any software that requires such system-level access, and the user has to know the administrator's password in order to allow it to run. Barring social engineering, this is a very simple and effective method.
Finally, a lot of viruses take advantage of such Windows subsystems as ActiveX, which simply doesn't exist on the Mac. Another area viruses like to target is the system registry (Sony rootkit, anyone?) which the Mac doesn't have.
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