Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Feb 2007 21:56 UTC
Remember PA Semi? The company has just released, as promised, its first chipset. "They are full 64-bit PPC, support virtualisation, and would do Alitvec but that name is copyrighted by Freescale. Instead they do 'VMA'. The three parts run at a max wattage of 25, 15 and 10W for the 2.0, 1.5 and 1.0GHz parts respectively, with typical wattage listed at 13, 8 and 6W. The individual cores are said to have a 7W max and 4W typical power consumption at 2.0GHz." PA Semi was one of the prime reasons why Ars's John 'Hannibal' Stokes doubted Apple's reasoning for the switch to Intel.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
On the possibly related point, is there any evidence that OSX runs more smoothly than XP or major flavors of Linux? Don't know of any.
As somebody who has used Linux for five or six years now, I can definitely say that the hardware/software integration is a major plus for OS X that linux does not have. The benefit is not so much that the hardware can be designed for the software, but rather by shipping the hardware and the software as a unit, the software can be customized well to the hardware. When the same company that designs the OS specifies every chip that goes into the machine, they have a tremendous amount of flexibility in making sure the two sets of decisions are compatible.
Poor support of the hardware in any given machine is the single biggest thing that makes Linux complicated to use. It is also a major thing making Windows complicated to use, but at least Microsoft has the benefit of being the 800lb gorilla that everyone designs their hardware for. Consider something simple like putting a laptop to sleep. It's a complete crap-shot whether it'll work on any given machine with Linux, and not a whole lot more reliable in Windows. In contrast, suspend always works on Apple's laptops, for the simple reason that Apple has enormously fewer combinations of hardware and software to test and support.
Apple could easily do the same with Linux, btw. There is no reason OS X is any more suitable for such a purpose than Linux, and Linux certainly has more overall hardware support. The difference isn't the OS: it's the fact that the software is developed with the hardware in mind, and the whole thing is shipped, sold, and supported as a unit.