Apple x86 Ramifications?

[Phil Regnauld]

Michael Dexter (dexter) writes:
> 
> Peter & Co.,
> 
> Any thoughts on Apple's announcement that they will slowly transition 
> to Intel processors and thus phase out PowerPC? Does IBM's "Power" 
> (power.org) initiative yield a viable target in light of many of us 
> hardware donors being unable to afford any to donate?

	IMHO the PPC Mac is a doomed platform now.  IBM has probably no wish
	of continuing to make efforts for Apple when a) they got flamed by
	Apple (rare thing) for not delivering and b) they got Sony, Microsoft
	and Nintendo as customers.

	10.4.1 w/P4 development machines will soon be available (two
	weeks). I'd bet they're "vanilla" Intel boxes, though I wouldn't
	be surprised if the future boxes will be OpenFirmware based with a
	HW lockin (or simply: a lack of support for any hardware/chipset other
	than what Apple will provide).  Shouldn't be too hard to get FreeBSD
	to run on that (but at that point: why bother ?)

	Of course there are definitely plenty of PPC Macs out there, the price
	of which are going to be falling, but I see them no more useful than
	Alpha at this point (and then, Alpha at least made it possible to port
	FreeBSD to 64 bit).

	I think the question is: why should there be a PPC port in the future ?
	Certainly not for Apple machines, maybe for IBM (RS) boxes ?

	More than anything it proves (with Microsoft and the Xbox 360), that
	CPU architecture is less important nowadays.

	Let's see if the OS X developers and the market follows.

	NOTE: if this sounded like a recommendation NOT to donate to
	the FreeBSD project, ignore me -- Peter, David and Dag Erling 
	are certainly better placed than me to say anything :)