RoughlyDrafted magazine has been investigating the details of Apple OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” operating system revision. Last week, they shared an article outlining “what’s new in Snow Leopard. They are also outlining myths of Snow Leopard. Although very few details are available, it certainly has not resulted in a shortage of discussion of the next operating system from Cupertino.
There has been much discussion about the fact that Snow Leopard is an “Intel-only” OS. I view this from a few angles.
Firstly, all of this is speculation based on the fact that the Snow Leopard preview DVD was Intel only. This is not confirmation. The build may have been an incomplete preview. PPC support may be forthcoming. Either way, this is hardly “proof” that Apple has dropped PPC support.
That said, I think that we have seen the last PPC supported OS from Apple with Leopard. The improvements set to be delivered in 10.6 are not a boon for PPC systems. There is no confirmation that PPC multi-core systems will be supported by the new “Grand Central” thread model, so that may not be an advantage. And Quicktime X and Mail 4, which delivers native Exchange 2007 support, can easily be delivered via software updates or even an “add-on” DVD that can be sold in Apple Stores. No one has suggested that Apple will no longer make universal applications, which means anything not based on Quicktime X should run out of the box on PPC — albeit perhaps slower if it’s properly multi-threaded.
While Snow Leopard will start to push 64-bit system-wide, there is debate as to whether this is a good idea at all on the PPC platform. So Snow Leopard may not be an attractive update after all for PPC Mac owners. It’s entirely plausible that Apple continues to deliver updates to PPC owners long after Snow Leopard hits shelves.
Of course, I do not believe that these technologies will take shape in 10.6 and restore 10.7 to universal status. Rather, I suspect that we’ll see Leopard updated alongside Snow Leopard for some time, as much of the core code will be exactly the same. I think this is largely why the codenames are so similiar, because Apple wants to ease the transition. I firmly believe Leopard will be supported through the release of 10.7 Cougar (or whatever), at which time we’ll finally see the introduction of a non-PPC compatible OS X which may include massive updates like ZFS as the default file system. By that time, likely in the second half 2010 at the earliest, the newest PPC system will be over 5 years old, certainly a fair timeframe for Apple to move to security- and maintenance-only updates.
What do you think?
Why do you write:
“There are no multi-core systems on the PPC”
There are many multi-core PPC systems. There are even quad-core PowerMac G5s.
The PPC970MP series had 2 cores and Apple put 2 processors in each machine, so yes, effectively quad-core. Those were the last of the series before the Mac Pro
I’m sorry, what I meant to say is that there is no confirmation on whether Grand Central will be designed to take advantage of multi-core PPC chips.
I don’t see why you need to make that distinction. If it supports multiple cores, it will support any multi processing. It doesn’t matter if it’s running on PowerPC, AMD or Intel.
This is very different from vector processing that is dependent on the instruction set (i.e. Altivec vs SSE vs 3DNow).
Is that for certain? Is it possible that Grand Central is built using only the Intel instruction set? I don’t want to misstate something… again.
I would think the programming — even of a framework or API — would have to be “univeral” for it to work on both chips.
I don’t think that there is any Intel specific instruction set that makes parallel processing any easier. Preventing deadlocks and breaking down an algorithm into “chunks” that can execute in parallel are the main problems in writing multiprocessor aware code. I can’t really see an instruction set helping out with that.
Even so, the experience (remember 64 bit Carbon?) tells me that PowerPC support could be dropped for purely political reasons.
Edited 2008-06-18 17:41 UTC
I was really, really hoping for ZFS as the default file system sooner rather than later. HFS+ is a big joke (Case Insensitive, Unicode Normalization…etc)
Not enough to stop me from making my next purchase from apple, but still an annoyance
Maybe they didn’t go for ZFS due to the overhead that is required for it; ZFS isn’t a ‘slim file system’, it loves to let it all hang out, so a machine with atleast 1gig memory might have persuaded many off within Apple making it the boot file system.
Then again, this is an early preview, what appears there, and what might appear in the final version can be worlds apart. If there are enough demands placed on them by customers, I’m sure they’ll make ZFS atleast an option.
Edit: Btw, I run Solaris on two machines, and use ZFS on all my drives; its a great file system, but with ever good, there is a down side.
Edited 2008-06-18 16:57 UTC
nowadays, case sensitive looks more like a limitation. Especially when filename aren’t limited to 14 character anymore.
Case insensitive is opposed to performance resolving file names. This operation could be executed thousands of times per seconds. Currently OS X can be installed with both modes: case sensitive/insensitive and as far as I know there is no intention to drop any of them.
What makes you think that Case Insensitivity is going to go away…
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/caselog/2007/244/;jsess…
Personally, I hope that ZFS makes it to client machines and not just server…
IMHO: That site is a joke.
Basically 10.6 will break a lot of old apps and screw old PPC customers, but it will be good for the enterprise.
Okay .. once you start catering to enterprises breakling compability is not really appreciated anymore .. so maybe it is a good choice to have a fairly “future-proof” base.
That said: I don’t think OSX has a lead on competitors _overall_ .. so waiting to release new features for 2 more years might be not such a good idea.
Who knows what Windows7 or (K)Ubuntu 10.10 will be like?
Amen.
Does this link seem better then Thom if that website is so bad?
http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=461
Edited 2008-06-18 19:21 UTC
A true UNIX must be portable and multi-platform. Drop PowerPC support is a non-sense, it’s a Mac OS X feature, a technical advantage over the competition. You can’t drop that advantage for free.
Apple does not cater to UNIX “purists”. Dropping PowerPC support makes sense eventually, seeing as PowerPC Macs have not been manufactured in the last 3 years or so.
This is a good thing, as I have a good chuckle everytime I load up Xcode and look at the project settings. To make everyone happy, I have to compile for PPC, PPC64, x86 and EM64T (and the options are there in Xcode). Now that’s a real fat binary. It makes sense at some point to fully go EM64T as all Macs shipped within the last 2 years support 64 bit. You get the performance benefit of EM64T (think 8 more GPRs) and you get slimmer binaries.
Edited 2008-06-18 17:28 UTC
Yep, that’s totally true for the consumer market. But Apple sells Mac OS X Server too, if they want to go Enterprise… PowerPC support can be a great feature.
And what hardware will it run on? System p? Give me a break.
That right there is the problem. If Apple drop PPC support on the OS level, developers will too stop making universal “fat” binaries. Right now, because the vast majority of the software is universal, Apple can switch back to PPC in a snap, if they so fancy. This is an advantage that no other OEM has – Windows is officially x86 (and ia64?) only, just about all the software for Windows is x86 only, and Linux is not really an option form most PC buyers. If you consider that ten years ago, when Apple were still scant on cash, they could afford to develop and build Mac OS X for both PPC and x86, secretly but still, I don’t think they’ll save (or need to save) all that much by dropping PPC.
Also, neither Grand Central, nor OpenCL necessitate dropping PPC. Auto-parallelization (or whatever Grand Central is supposed to be) is not dependent on instruction set (certainly there is pretty much no difference in that regards between PPC and Intel 64). OpenCL is also supposed to transparently decide between GPGPU and CPU vector units, so SSE vs. AltiVec should not matter either.
In short, Apple has quite a lot to lose and nearly nothing to gain from dropping PPC.
Probably they will keep an internal version that compiles in the three platforms : Intel, PowerPC, ARM. Dropping PowerPC support is just a commercial measure.
There is no quicker way to destroy OSN as a news source than by linking to Roughly Drafted. There is a reason why it is curiously neglected, and its not because of anti-Apple conspiracies. But you will have to find that out for yourself. What will happen is this. As soon as you select yourself as one of the only places on the net prepared to regularly link to it, you will be bombarded with a flood of stories from a horde of apparently different people.
They will all, these stories, say one of the same things. Apple computers are cheaper than PCs (after you add in various ridiculous costs to the PCs, Apple has larger market share than reported (after you double Apple sales by separately counting hardware and software), Apple security issues are malicious black propaganda by an anti-Apple news establishment. There are various convoluted reasons why every decision Apple has ever made was right. Apple has a brilliant master plan which is exemplified by its latest move, which has been universally misunderstood, but which will result in its total domination of [pick one: the Web, mobile phones, laptops, desktops, music downloads, TVs….] And so on.
This view of RD is generally accepted in the Mac world. Here for example is Technovia, quoting in support TUAW:
Posts like this that use underhanded techniques and shoddy math to prove a biased point aren’t helping the Mac community. In fact, they’re making it look even worse because, once found out, they are (rightfully) transformed into key evidence for clueless Apple fanaticism, which can easily harm the reputation of almost anyone with something genuinely educated and relevant to say about Apple or their products, whether it’s a good or *gasp* unpleasant statement.
Unsurprisingly, the post that TUAW is referring to is from Roughly Drafted, which can only be described as the lunatic fringe of Mac fandom. While it’s perhaps understandable that some Mac users will want to “strike back” against what they see as media bias against the platform, as TUAW puts it:
“These wholly inaccurate and misleading articles need to stop if computer users are going to learn the genuine advantages (and even disadvantages) of Apple and their products. Lying to grab attention for Apple may briefly taste sweet, but helping consumers make an educated choice (no matter what the outcome) based on pure, true merit takes the cake.”
When your own Party starts to describe your agitation on behalf of the cause as ‘lunatic’, you’re in deep trouble.
But, you will have to find all this out for yourself. Meanwhile, if you are going to start linking to RD, it would be nice if you can introduce some blocking feature into the site so we can filter it out. Its the Slashdot/Roland Picquepaille problem. Please help those of us who simply do not want to be reminded of its existence.
Edited 2008-06-19 07:37 UTC