intel hardware has always been pretty solid. I got an old 300a celeron overclocked from 300mhz to 450. A 33% speed increase with only stock cooling and its been running overclocked like that since 1998. In fact nearly all my intel CPUs have been overclocked and i have never had one die on me yet. i have never owned an AMD machine simply because the chipsets from 3rd parties havent been as reliable as Intels.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Intel and PowerPC Mac OS X Up to Date?
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
There is apparently an x86 binary of quake 3 but maybe it is not stable enough yet. but the only graphics drivers are for the integrated video in the dev kits. (which btw supports CI and QE )
I've read about people trying to get into games like World of warcraft, which will work except openGL won't load so it is pretty useless. The important thing is that the other processes are working fine through rosetta.
to be honest, this thread is full of many misconceptions about os X on x86 and i expect better of MR people. It is stable enough for many people who aren't running a video production shop or whatever to use daily. there are many folks who have ditched windows for a hacked version of osx or bought a mac because of such a great experience.
i encourage anyone who wants REAL information about osX on x86 to check out the community websites. it doesn't make you evil.
P.S. Intel products are stable. So stable in fact that they deserve to run the mac OS.
I've read about people trying to get into games like World of warcraft, which will work except openGL won't load so it is pretty useless. The important thing is that the other processes are working fine through rosetta.
to be honest, this thread is full of many misconceptions about os X on x86 and i expect better of MR people. It is stable enough for many people who aren't running a video production shop or whatever to use daily. there are many folks who have ditched windows for a hacked version of osx or bought a mac because of such a great experience.
i encourage anyone who wants REAL information about osX on x86 to check out the community websites. it doesn't make you evil.
P.S. Intel products are stable. So stable in fact that they deserve to run the mac OS.
Re: P.S. I'd rather have AMD, AMD processors have proven to be soooooooooooooooo(to infinity)_ much faster than Intel processors - example:matix said:
My AMD Duron 1.10 GHz 384MB PC133 RAM beats my Moms INTEL Celeron 2.5GHz 640MB DDR266 RAM
That is one of the most misleading comparisons you could come up with. The Celeron series is deliberately crippled in order to keep it from competing with the Pentium series.slooksterPSV said:
When you pick a comparison that is fair (such as each vendor's high-end chips, like an A-64 PR3400 vs. a 3.4GHz P4), you'll find that the differences are minor. Depending on the apps you use for your tests, either one can end up performing better.
The only reason I recommend AMD to people building PCs is that they cost less. Although an A-64 system performs the same as a P4, the A-64 chip will cost hundreds of dollars less.
But this only applies when you're buying individual chips. If you're going to be buying millions (as Apple and Dell do), both companies offer massive discounts, and that great price advantage vanishes.
Now, let's combine all this with the fact that AMD has a history of yield problems. At many different times in the past, AMD has had to contract out to third-party fabrication facilities (like IBM). Apple has been burned many times by this problem, both from Motorola and from IBM. They'd be crazy to risk it yet again from AMD.
Intel also occasionally has yield problems, but when they do, the entire PC industry has to wait, so it won't give a competitive advantage to Apple's competitors.
shamino said:
I dont agree that AMD are overall better than Intel mainly due to motherboards chipsets, but that could be a fair comparison because isnt the Duron AMDs equivalent of Celeron ? Im pretty sure thats correct, so when you consider the difference in mhz on cpu than that would be impressive.
Hoewever there are many other variable that come into play with A/B tests like this. Both those machines with fresh installs and no other background tasks running etc, i dont think would show AMD winning. With both systems tuned similar i think the Celeron would easily win.
It is in the sense that both are sold as low-cost chips.Bulb said:
But it's also unfair because name-brand PC vendors (like Dell) sell several P4 systems for the same price as the Celeron systems. A consumer doesn't care about marketing - he just cares about how much power you can get for a given expenditure.
I'd like to think that if IBM came up with an amazing chip in the next 2 years Apple would be using it. If Apple plans on having most systems on Intel by middle of 2007... then the ones still on PPC better be using IBM's latest and greatest or they'll be looking seriously old. As for 2008...? I think Apple probably benefits greatly from having one platform (Intel) and that will be their goal, but in 2008 I'm sure Apple would have the flexibility to still use PPC if IBM released something brilliant (or Intel had a problem).RobHague said:
Although your experience sounds negative, an Intel-Mac would have SSE3 and OpenGL (since Apple will write a graphics driver for their Mac), and some native apps ... so from what you're saying the OSX development seems to be going well.driftingaway said:
GregA said:
It's a catch 22. As long as Apple is its only real customer, IBM (or Freescale for that matter) doesn't have much incentive to make the latest and the greatest.
BenRoethig said:
Microsoft and Sony might disagree with the assumption that Apple is IBM's only real customer considering their new game machines have PPC chips.
Sunrunner said:Has anyone considered all of the PowerPC programmers @ Apple? What is going to happen to them once the x86 transition is complete. Are a whole bunch of the PowerPC guys going to be booted to the street in a year or two?
Is there any chance that the Apple programmers are just all grade A code ninjas? Could they not understand PowerPC and x86 programming at the same time?
I'm a designer, not a coder, don't know how plausible that would be.
All I can say is that I'm happy with the Intel switch and lets just hope that Apple aren't stupid enough to put a Celeron and Intel Intergrated graphics in ANY of there consumer products...... Because those two products from Intel are below par.
Most programming (aside from very low-level device code) is written in high-level languages like C and C++.djdarlek said:
If you're a good C/C++ programmer, your skills will be applicable on any chipset. Most of the differences are handled by the C/C++ compiler. The differences you need to be concered with (varibale sizes, byte-orderings, etc.) are things every good programmer should already be aware of.
A programmer that can't handle a processor change, especially when the OS's APIs are remaining the same, isn't a very good programmer.
The only case where I'd make an exception would be those who have to do most of their programming in assembly language (which varies radically across processor architectures.) In general, the only people where this applies are those who develop compilers, and those who write the lowest levels of the OS itself. And even these people, if they're good, will be able to pick up a new architecture after a few months of training.
shamino said:
I think a lot of Altivec gurus will be heading for Sony and Microsoft after the switch, but yeah, in general I agree with what you're saying.
I'd say that this has already happened. Both XBox360 and PS3 are approaching release. These kinds of programmers would've been hired a year or two ago to develop the OS and core library modules.Catfish_Man said:
The programmers developing the games themselves will most likely be using the libraries without much (if any) direct AltiVec programming.