Rosetta — the software to be used to translate PowerPC instructions to x86 instructions — is no good if your application requires a G4 or G5, or AltiVec. FAT/Universal recompiled binaries will be the way to go for these apps. Also, XCode 2.1 was posted for download today along with QT 7-beta for Windows. Performance of HD h.264 on Windows XP on a 3 GHz P4 was hugely dissapointing compared to a dual 1.25 GHz PowerMac G4. Elecard‘s h.264 decoding solution is still better than QT’s on the PC — so far.
Intel Macs: No G4, G5, Velocity Engine Emulation; QT 7 Beta Posted
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Who cares about CPU performance for HD h.264, the next crop of ATI boards are going to sport dedicated support for it at virtualy no cost to the CPU.
I guess in the short term its an issue until these GPUs are adopted, but then again if you’re the type to be doing HD on your PC at this level, you probably are in the market for a card like this anyway. NVidia won’t be far behind.
what content is available other than a few movie trailers?
oh please oh please do not tell me any accurate information until you’ve considered all the possible ways in which the accurate information might be irrelevant to somebody.
😉
…iPods that play WMA?
-phrosty
Elecard does not even install properly on XP SP2…
I’m sure performance on the macx86 will be much better. It’s probably a weird encode or decode problem specific to macs, as opposed to processors.
There are simpler and more elegant ways to go about what they’re doing, but I’m not about to suggest to Apple those–they already stole my ‘Rosetta’ idea from my website:
“The DOORS API will include TurnStyle, a special resource that only handles things from other operating systems in an ‘interpreter’ and ‘morphing’ type fashion. In conjunction with Rosetta (found in the InFOE File Manager), incoming data of other types can be converted into NOVIO’s native formats on-the-fly, or simply wrapped with code and made ready for use within the digital environment.”
I accurately predicted Apple was going to move to x86-64; it was only logical and rational, considering the marketshare and the declining flame of Microsoft.
Apple will have some company over there soon enough, I bet. 🙂 It’s going to be Apple vs. AMIGA, like Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola–and Microsoft will become an afterthought. What plans Apple announced today nearly mirror those of AMIGA. But AMIGA might just have a bigger secret that will wind up putting Apple at #2.
–EyeAm
Thats the only thing you can miss truely.
Is a joke on Athlon XP 1800…
I mean, come on.. Mathematica in 2 hours?
and Photoshop ran well after loading under rossetta. Sure it is on a 3.6 GHz Xeon, but I think taht it will work out fine.
Yup once PS was loaded it worked fine and all the filters. Mac Zealots pooped their pants today…it’s so funny. A few words….let Apple move ahead and move ahead!
A lot more possibilities with Intel. Faster laptops, possible more graphic softwares coming the OS X to I would image and droves of Windows users wanted the security and OS X with the option of dual booting.
I have to say that being a computer geek, it has always been a dream of osx coming to x86. Do you think however, that with the migration of osx, many linux buffs will drop linux altogether in favor of osx (which does support hardware better)? I would hate to see my beloved suse to start to go undeveloped on the desktop end, I have grown quite accustomed to it.
I think the presumed ability of a Intel PowerBook (“PowerBook X1”) to also boot Windows would make it a very, very attractive buy for many potential customers. Such a notebook would certainly have more appeal than an equivalent Dell box.
I thought QT was in 4.0 beta…
then it hit me, you mean QuickTime!
heck.. who needs duel booting when now users can just get a bochs or virtual PC and install windows on it.
QuickTime.
Biggest PoS multimedia codec viralware available on a PC near you. I hate the thing. I’ll take WMV anyday over QuickTime. I’d prefer Divx amd Ogg’s first over the proprietry formats in quality and the fact they are open standards. Why hollywood wants to continually use QuickTime is beyond me though, someone being a devout mac head somewhere starting the trend.
I knew it wouldn’t happen fully by 2007, they say June 2006 for the first Macx86 box, but I think it might be later then that. Only time will tell, the one advantage that the Mac did have which was the Powerpc’s Altivec, but if you recompile for SSE2/3 and so on, that performence should once again be there, it’s the compilers that do the trick, and Intel makes really good compilers.
The dual boot with MacOSX and Windows sounds interesting, but I still have to wait and see what MS can do with longhorn, the feature set hasn’t been locked at all, that’s not coming till Beta 2, I have a feeling we haven’t seen anything yet.
So again, only time will tell, and Apple locking MacOSX to just Apple x86 hardware, how good will the upgradability be? How much can we change inside the box?
Question: I don’t know much about this FAT/Universal format and wanted to ask the users on here if they think there is a performance penalty by using the FAT/Universal file format? I am guessing it will surely take up more hard drive space as compared to regular files, but how about performance?
Curious since I just bought a new iMAC 20″ 2ghz and wondered if using the FAT/Universal format will just hurt performance more in the future.
If you wonder how I feel about the purchase now that Intel is announced, I have no regrets. The system works wonderful and will continue to be supported for years to come. I have used 68k and PPC since my Amiga days, and still think PPC is a great CPU.
The thing I really hope for is now that they are moving away from PPC, maybe the system specs for the old PPC machines will be more open so they are freely available to alternative OS’es. I would love to see Amiga OS 4.0 running on my PPC G5 Mac someday, and maybe because Apple don’t care about PPC anymore I can see that ported over to it. I doubt it, but I can always hope.
Piers,
Try and scrub frame by frame w/ full audio/video response through a Windows Media file. I might be wrong but I’m pretty sure that’s not possible.
According to The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/06/apple_intel_migration/
Apple’s Rosetta is likely to be Transitive’s QuickTransit.
http://www.transitive.com/
what has linux got to do with this? nothing! after all, Mac OS X wouldn’t run on your ordinary clone PC…too bad though
And anyone who uses a mac despises windows media. In my personal opinion .wmv looks like crap…that is when it actually manages to play properly.It’s a two way street.
Remember how long we had to wait till the G5 hit 2.7 GHz? IBM promised 3GHz for last year but was unable to deliver. What’s with Big Blue? No fast G5 for Apple, but lots of fancy hardware for Xbox2. IBM was asking for it.
I am just as surprised as the next guy, but look at the good side: Apple will have to bring lots of goodies to convince developers to stay, we will get really fast emulation, more powerful hardware and lots more switchers. Apple will be able to go toe-to-toe with Windows just when MS is struggling to get Longhorn out. Apple is offering a developer kit with an Pentium 4 Mac, which means that Mac OS X is indeed running well on this platform.
I suggest developing the desktop yourself. It’s not terribly hard to update and tweak and add goodies once you figure out how
I still think that games will eventually move to PCs instead of game consoles…
IBM is investing in something that has strong short term sales…. but long term stability? hahahaha.
I always invisioned the PC as a center for telephone, fax, games, television, etc. and that has all come true although not perfected. Once things get better im sure there would be no use for consoles…
but you know, games for consoles take advantage of specific hardware requirements. they could for the mac you know since its hardware wil be specific probably. they could market themselves as a gaming pc to they may have something going.. eh i dont play games much so maybe im just FOS
Your comments are so wrong in each and every way that I really don’t know where to begin.
H.264 is not Quicktime.
H.264 is not proprietary.
H.264 is not an application.
WMV is not a standard.
WMV-ASF is a poor transport mechanism.
thats just for starters.
Please educate yourself.
You can’t just get up and walk away from Linux. It’s hard mainly because all us buffs grew up with it, wrote our term papers on it, wrote our code on it and helped it get where its now. We can’t just ditch that for some corporate code running on Xeons. Ironically this was the last straw for some Apple devs I know who write propritary apps for OSX, they are now moving to Ubuntu on PPC. Stick that in your troll pipe and roast it.
If you’re more interested in customizability than glitz Linux offers the far better desktop experience (I’m writing this from a powerbook running Debian). So this move is unlikely to harm Linux in any way. In fact it may be rather beneficial because of the fallout of people pissed off about the Intel move and looking to run a different OS on their now unsupported PPC machines.
For me, PPC was a large reason for buying a Mac. Way to go Steve. The only useful function Apple now retains is to get people to try out an OS that’s not Windows. After they’ve ooh’d and aah’d at the flashyness for half a year they can then move on to a real operating system.
The other thing I really can’t help but laugh about is that for years now Apple has touted the PPC horn and proclaimed that GHz don’t matter if the architecture is better. Now, in one speech, they go “we’re moving to a different processor, because it’s faster, just look at the GHz”. That’s beyond lying and could almost be construed as fraud IMO.
Not to mention the fact that Intel have been playing catchup to AMD in the 64-bit area for years and it doesn’t look like that’s changing, so the bit about “the most innovative chip-maker” is just hilarious.
maybe im just FOS
got one thing right at least
Linux on the desktop really never had a chance because of historical incidents, but OSX going x86 put the final nail in the coffin.
Apple won’t be using openfirmware. This has been confirmed on their develloper site and Apple’s vice president didn’t even really try to downplay the fact that you’ll be able to run windows on these boxes.
So it’s OSX for the desktop, and opensolaris, bsd, and linux for the server.
I wonder why they don’t support Altivec? I mean, SSE2 supports all the data types that Altivec does.
Yes, registers would have to be reallocated and some instructions probably don’t have an exact match and will require workarounds, but the same is true for standard integer and floating-point code and it seems to work there.
And what are those G4/G5 features that Rosetta won’t support?
if wine and cadega were compiled for OS X x86 then where would actually be no need to dual boot whats so ever, windows binarys would run natively on native hardware meaning near 100% performance from windows apps …. this IS becoming interesting.
Jobs never said “its faster, look at the MHz.” He said the PPC products Apple has now are great, but the FUTURE ROADMAP doesn’t align with the products he wants to make in the future. It basically comes down to the fact that apple realizes the notebooks are taking over the PC market, and desktop computers will become unnecessary for everyone but graphics pros. Intel can and will deliver for both ends, because its already in the business of delivering for all these markets for the windows x86 market. IBM does not sell desktop chips to anyone but apple and apple associated 3rd parties. the G5 is a server chip scaled down for desktop use. You can’t scale down the Power 5 server chip all the way into a laptop. IBM doesn’t want to come up with a whole new design for one segment of a relatively small customers business, and apple doesn’t want to keep complaining about not getting what they need. The move to x86 is just very strategically right. No more will apple have to try to convince the larger public that their hardware is faster even though it runs at half the GHz. The company will now be able to do what it does best without distraction: Leading industrial hardware design and making advanced software technologies available and easy to use.
The concern that this move will kill sales of macs for the next year is a two edged sword, and its a faux one at that. First of all, people’s worries about the current mac offerings being past technology or unsupported are absolutely untrue. In fact, since Rossetta will not emulate at full speed (lets guesstimate around 50% speed, give or take 10%) Many of your current apps will be SLOWER on the new hardware. Only NEW VERSIONS will be binary compiled, and therefore you will have to upgrade your entire software suite to get the software that works natively on your new Intac. But if you buy a Powermac today, it will run at its full native speed for its entire effective life. Which will be as long as you decide to use it. New programs will continue to be binary compiled until 2009 at least. The other thing to notice is that if this DOES make a significant impact on the sales of mac hardware for the next 9 months, it most likely means something positive: People are exited about the possibilities of Mac on iNtel and want to save their money for these future mac products. This will generate a lot of pent up demand, which could give the mac platform huge momentum next year.
It could also mean that people will just by a cheap PC and try to get a hacked version of Mac OS X Tiger on iNtel to run when it enters the marketplace, and some switch to linux. Personally i believe it will be a mixture of these reactions/consequences, but mostly i believe that hardware sales won’t take as big a hit as tech people imagine. Many people will not be worried of the technical aspects of the transition, and will just buy when they’re ready.
Thats the only thing you can miss truely.
I have been using Macs and keeping up on their stuff for about 2 years now and yesterday was the first day I heard of Altivec.
I have heard of Velocity Engine when I got my power book and shortly after that there wasn’t much more about it. These technologies became so common that no one talks about them anymore, or no one has really used them.
the P4 Steve was running OS X on, was a P4 with EM64T ?
or just a plain x86 32bit P4 ?
Here’s Apples guide to the main differences between Altivec and SSE which for some reason does not perview as clickable.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/universa…
Also check the equvalent code to vec_floor
Some example quotes…
AltiVec has 13 or so different flavors of integer multiplication with variations. The x86 architecture has 3 with almost no variations.
There is no direct translation for vec_perm
The x86 architecture doesn’t have a left shift that can be used during runtime.
simply put, there will be none. it is not one binary file, it is two. an Intel one and a PPC one. the launcher program knows what architecture it is on and launches the right binary.
Mplayer CVS seems to be getting there, with regards h.264 playback on win32.
http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-beta/
I had my hopes up of getting OS X finally to see what the fuss is about. Had credit card in hand and was willing to shell out $200…
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers’ hardware. “We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac.”
So I can’t run OS X on hardware I put together, and I’m sorry that’s the only kind that enters my house. I build my machines to the numbers with many years of practice and they almost always out-live their usefulness (I had one that got fried from a lightning bolt that hit close to my house).
They’re still locking us in with Over-priced under-speced hardware…. and now we don’t even get to claim its a different chip architecture or start trying mock-up tests/demos to show the different performance numbers.
If they can make it cheaper, like PC cheap I’ll think about it.
NO, NO , NO…
A, single, one, uno binary file. It contains the code for both procs. On launch it detects the type of proc and runs the appropriate code.
A niggling difference I know, but it is still a difference.
you need to grow out of the adolescent need to build a computer.. it is not hard to do and it is annoying to hear people act like it is 1992 and building a computer was actually HARD.
yes yes yes yes yes!!!!
OS X programs are FOLDERS, they have a LAUNCHER, and they will select the right binary file from inside the FOLDER.
If OSX is processor independent and developers will be creating fat binaries for years to come, why eventually drop PowerPC?
Why not offer both? Intel on the consumer/laptop side of things, PowerPC on the high end Power Macs……..and hell, while we’re at it, AMD in the XServe’s?
It just doesn’t make sense, now that PowerPC is reaching critical mass due to it’s inclusion in game consoles.
You have to think it’s just Steve getting back at IBM for making him look foolish on his 3Ghz promise.
no one said it was hard to do, point is that it ensures that you can have a computer meeting exactly the spec that you require. Price is another good reason for doing it, buy a cheap PC and it’s often full of crap, for a similar price you can spec and build one with quality components. Then there’s the whole OEM windows cost thing…
It just doesn’t make sense, now that PowerPC is reaching critical mass due to it’s inclusion in game consoles.
it’s a POWER derived chip, but it’s not PPC as such.
as for eventually dropping PPC, it will reduce the burden on developers, another issue is the increased cost of producing PPC based equipment in reduced numbers. Then there’s performance, Apple are doing this, for the most part, because PPC hasn’t delivered the kind of perofmance needed to compete with x86, why would they want to sell more expensive system that perform less well than the intel equivalents?
1 – Is the Mac OS X Intel PREVIEW RELEASE able to run on a computer which is not the test model made by Apple?
2 – Will the new Macs be based on 32-bit x86 technology or 64-bit X86 technology?
1- I think so, but they are copies that have to be returned to Apple after a certain date. I assume that date will be the day they have some preview boxes available for developer use.
2- they are starting on the low end boxes and moving up to the high end in 2007. I suspect that the low end will have 32 bit.. and I think that the powerbooks and iBooks will both have Pentium-m in them. The emacs will probably have a P4 or maybe a Pentium -M as well for heat sake. the iMacs will certainly have a P-M, and I suspect you will see 4 types of powermacs, a Xeon, a dual core single chip dual dual core box, and an x86-84 box. the first three will be for pro workstations that do stuff like photoshop etc. the 64-bit box will run a 64 bit OS X and will be there for people who need a 64 bit workstation for their kind of work.
on the server side, I see 64-bit across the board, perhaps some low end servers that are 32 bit.
what do game consoles mean to a desktop system? NOTHING.
why drop them? because a company does not want to support two separate code bases for ever.
but…what about FreeScale? Don’t they still make low-power PPC chips? Don’t both Xerox and Cisco also still buy these chips for their products? Didn’t they publicly commit to their hybrid 32/64 bit G5 compatible e700? They already have a dual core 32 bit PPC chip released — it’s only 1.5 GHz, but better than what’s currently in Powerbooks or the Mini.
Oh well, I still understand why they did it. I know it wasn’t ONLY the 3GHz miff. I understand G5’s won’t scale down to Mac minis, laptops, or whatever new device Apple may release. I know also that Intel has industry-leading x86 laptop processors and popular embedded processors (ARM derived XScale). Besides, we may also get Intel’s XScale in the iPod, depending on how sweet the relationship between Portalplayer, Intel, and Apple is. They wouldn’t even have to completely rewrite the software.
As for the velocity engine, anybody know if SSE3 filled out the set enough to emulate most of Altivec? Yes, Virginia, there is an SSE3, such that Intel can still have features to hold over AMD’s head. VIA/Cyrix/Centaur’s latest core supports it too (making it another viable option for laptops and the Mac mini).
IBM proves that the POWER and the PPC can do heavy lifting. All 3 new consoles are using it, and IBM couldn’t be any happier about their hat-trick. I think they just stopped caring about Apple, as they have the resources to take either the MS or Nintendo PPC chips and redesign them for Apple. I guess the prestige of being IBM’s special friend didn’t justify digging into their future console profits for them. Because consoles are fixed, technology improvements will decrease costs. Because console sales are guaranteed (and ordered in the hundreds of thousands), IBM merely has to keep supply going. Because consoles have 10 year life spans, investment is justified, and customers are likely to come back.
–JM
“QuickTime.
Biggest PoS multimedia codec viralware available on a PC near you. I hate the thing. I’ll take WMV anyday over QuickTime. I’d prefer Divx amd Ogg’s first over the proprietry formats in quality and the fact they are open standards. Why hollywood wants to continually use QuickTime is beyond me though, someone being a devout mac head somewhere starting the trend.”
It’s not a TREND, you just don’t understand it, because Quicktime offers more. It’s called ALPHA CHANNEL and that’s very important for video, film and graphics. WMA doesn’t offer that and the artist or whoever is doing the Mask(green screen, blue screen, rotoscope, special fx)needs the ability to transfter that info from program to program. Qucktime offers that, WMA doesn’t.
Really, no performance hit when using the FAT binaries? My worry was that Apple will start compiling everything to FAT binaries. This means that since programs are compiled into a generic FAT binary, then less optimization will occur for the PPC. I could see this making future OS release slower, because less optimizing it being done directly for the PPC version, but rather a generic FAT binary is provided just to make it work on both CPU’s.
I just don’t see how you can create a FAT binary that supports both Intel and PPC and is optmized for both CPU’s. Seems like a big task.
I would expect PPC performance to just get worst because of this move to Intel and FAT binaries.
Of course I could be wrong and time will tell.
It’s not a TREND, you just don’t understand it, because Quicktime offers more. It’s called ALPHA CHANNEL and that’s very important for video, film and graphics. WMA doesn’t offer that and the artist or whoever is doing the Mask(green screen, blue screen, rotoscope, special fx)needs the ability to transfter that info from program to program. Qucktime offers that, WMA doesn’t.
I think you’re trying to say you don’t know anything about directshow or the fact that filters like VMR exist.
I wonder even if (when) the X86 OSX is cracked, won’t we still have a major issue? Drivers.
Solutions?
(quote from Barkley) “Linux on the desktop really never had a chance because of historical incidents, but OSX going x86 put the final nail in the coffin.”
Linux isn’t going anywhere but up. Novell is doing a fine job with SUSE, and with every other version of Linux improvements are being made. It has been growing steadily. If anything, Apple will one day have to address compatability issues regarding Linux and/or its drivers.
Open Source operating systems will be here for a very long time to come. The smart companies will figure out ways to form symbiotic relationships between the proprietary and non-proprietary applications. (particularly feasible under an exokernel design is the idea of a commercial OS with some open source modules and correlating community).
–EyeAm
is getting nothing but better. Someday I’m hoping the guys over at Enlightenment.org fianlly get it all together. I love that eye-candy laden desktop.
Yeah, yeah overhead…. but for the most part I’m just surfing the net, checking email or typing TPS reports…
I can spare the horsepower.
I’m not sure where you come off like that, i never insinuated it was hard. It simply spans from
A.) My small budget
B.) My extreme dislike of extra bloatware/software and crap parts
If you buy a pre-manufactured machine from anywhere you are either Paying WAY too much or getting a machine full of the cheapest parts they could find and more often than not… BOTH!
Plus I like doing it. Perhaps you should take “YOUR” elitest attitude somewhere else. If I were “L337” I’d have some god awful sig proclaiming my system specs. I don’t because they just aren’t impressive. But I can guarantee you wouldn’t find a pre-built machine out there with the same parts for less money.
So true, Arakon. It is much cheaper to build your own system 🙂
My reference to quicktime is end user expierience only. Ok so Apple incorporates some open standards but for the end user experience compared to WMV or Divx, it is a really poor viewing medium hampered mainly by crappy client software, Quicktime Player.
As for the content creation side of life, not my area as I have never needed to use those formats for any video work I have dabbled in.
p.s. I do not endorse the use of WMV it is however just used to illistrate a point on end user experience and it is widely used on the web. That aside I personally advocate for open standards.
Get it?
>Yes, Virginia, there is an SSE3, such that Intel can still >have features to hold over AMD’s head.
Latest AMD64 processors has SSE3 (stepping E).
Which software from moonlight do yuo download to play h.264 movies. Is there a plugin for firefox to handle the hd trailers. I tried the player was unsuccessful.
A fat binary is actually a “package” consisting of two or more binaries. In the case of OS X, one compiled for PPC and one for x86. This has been the case since NeXT. Try open an application like a folder in terminal, and have a look.
I wonder even if (when) the X86 OSX is cracked, won’t we still have a major issue? Drivers.
Good point.
Solutions?
OSX’s foundations are open source, so hackers could take BSD or Linux drivers and adapt them to Darwin’s driver interface. I guess quite a bit of that has already happened with Darwin/x86, but it’s gonna get extra momentum now.
Question is, how can you combine that with the proprietary parts of OS X?