[Quote:]

” I’m going to keep this brief, so please write me with the questions you have and any tests you want run on one of the dev kits. I will have one of my own next week as well.

First, the thing is fast. Native apps readily beat a single 2.7 G5, and sometimes beat duals. Really.
(I asked about real-world apps – if any were already available in native code-Mike)
All the iLife apps other than iTunes, plus all the other apps that come with the OS are already universal binaries….

They are using a Pentium 4 660. This is a 3.6 GHz chip. It supports 64 bit extensions, but Apple does not support that *yet*. The 660 is a single core processor. However, the engineers said that this chip would not be used in a shipping product and that we need to look at Intel’s roadmap for that time to see what Apple will ship.

It uses DDR-2 RAM at 533 MHz. SATA-2. It is using Intel GMA 900 integrated graphics and it supports Quartz Extreme. The Intel 900 doesn’t compare favorably to any shipping card from ATi or nVidia. The Apple engineers says the dev kit will work with regular PC graphics cards, but that you need a driver. Apple does not write ANY graphics drivers. They just submit bug reports to ATi/nVidia. So, when we asked where to get drivers for better cards the engineers said “The ATI guys are here.” He’s right, they’ve been in the compatibility lab several times.
It has FireWire 400, but not 800. USB 2 as well. USB 2 booting is supported, FireWire booting is not. NetBoot works.

The machines do not have Open Firmware. They use a Phoenix BIOS. That’s right, a Mac with a BIOS.
(I asked if the Bios had any tweaks like Memory Timing which is common for many PC motherboards, although Intel OEM motherboards don’t usually have any end user tweaks like that.-Mike)
They won’t tell us how to get in the BIOS. I’m sure we can figure it out when out dev kits arrive.

They run Windows fine. All the chipset is standard Intel stuff, so you can download drivers and run XP on the box.

Rosetta is amazing. (see earlier post on limitations of the Rosetta emulator – it’s a G3 emulator basically – will not run Altivec code, etc. and performance isn’t going to be as good as native code, but most Mac apps will run on a G3.-Mike) The tests I’ve run, both app tests and benchmarks, peg it at between a dual 800 MHz G4 and and a dual 2 G5 depending on what you are doing.
(I mentioned to him the limitations of Rosetta (posted below)-Mike)
It’s true Rosetta does not support Altivec, but most apps run on a G3, right? Rosetta tells PPC apps that it is a G3. Apps should fall back to their G3 code tree. Everyone I tested did.

The UI tests in Xbench exceed a dual 2.7 by a large margin. (other specific tests are much lower than a G5 per Xbench site results.-Mike)

I’ve been talking to and watching a lot of devs. There are a lot of apps from big names running in the Compatibility lab already. Some people face more pain, sure, but Jobs wasn’t kidding when he said that this transition would be less painful than OS 9 to OS X or 68K to PPC.

Game devs seem optimistic. They see porting Windows/x86 to Mac/x86 as much easier. They look forward to the day they don’t have to support PPC.
I was talking to a (game Developer) that said about 1/3 of the process is handling endian issues, the rest is Win32/DirectX. For the next 3-5 years, their job will be harder since they have to port to two processor architectures and most bugs *are* endian related and that they will have a hard time making the PPC versions run as well as the x86 versions.

This transition is not about current P4 vs G5. It is about the future directions of the processor families. Intel is committed to desktop/notebook and server in a big way. Freescale/IBM are chasing the embedded market and console market. Apple would have been in a lurch in 2 years.

Also, all the cell people and the AMD people need to be quiet. Apple evaluated both. AMD has the same, if not worse, supply problems as IBM. Their roadmap is fine, but the production capacity is not.

The tested Cell as well. That processor is NOT intended for PC applications. (it was designed for game systems, not as a general use CPU) The lack of out of order execution and ILP control logic creates very poor performance with existing software. Having developers rewrite for cell would have been MUCH more work than reworking for Intel. And that’s what this is, you rework your codebase in ALL cases, not rewrite it. “

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“The grammar of human language, the railway track width and the radio frequency of the telephony system have something in common”, Georg Greve, president of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) says: “These conventions are supposed to make co-operation and interaction between human beings and technical equipment possible. Conventions can never be ‘inventions’!”

In software, this does not seem to be so obvious to everyone: The European Commission published a press release yesterday regarding new proposals from Microsoft in the pending antitrust suit in which FSF Europe is participating as a third party, also representing the Samba Project.

According to this release, Microsoft wants to ban software developers from publishing Free Software on the basis of the interface information requested. This information is needed for Windows and GNU/Linux-based computers to interoperate in a company network.

“The proposal specifically precludes the information from being used in a Free Software implementation, such as the Samba workgroup server software. As Samba is the only remaining major competitor of Microsoft in this market, the Microsoft proposal translates to: Of course we will give you the specifications – unless you happen to be a serious competitor of ours, that is,” explains Greve. “The European Court decided in December 2004 that Microsoft is to publish this information immediately. This proposal, if accepted, will effectively revert the court decision for the most serious competitor of Microsoft in this market.”

Regarding publication of the specifications, the commission concludes “This should be possible for the protocols that do not embody innovations.”

“By accepting the notion that some protocols may be considered innovation, the European Commission opened a pandora’s box of legal house-to-house fighting: Microsoft will declare all the protocols as innovative and will defend them for as long as they can. Its would-be competitors and the Commission on the other hand will never be able to compete with Microsoft’s army of several hundreds lawyers”, Greve explains in a press release of FSFE.

He concludes: “We therefore recommend to not be misled by the incorrect notion of applying the label of inventions to mere conventions — and decide about the new fine. It is very clear to us that Microsoft is trying to drag its feet as long as they can. This way they are abusing the good will of Ms. Kroes at the expense of European citizens and the economy.”

“We are keeping our engagement to ensure our best support to the Commission in this litigation, even under these circumstances and without any real achievement on the implementation of the measures. However, I am still confident that our views will prevail, as I have been personally reassured that the Commission takes our position in very high regard” closes Carlo Piana, who is representing the FSFE towards the European Court.