According to MacWorld UK, quoting a report from Forbes, we’ll be seeing some notably faster G5 chips this summer. And contrary to popular belief there is a G5 Powerbook on the horizon as well – possibly as early as January. But it will be at least two years before a 64-bit version of OS X hits shelves, according to analyst Peter Glaskowsk.
New G5 chips, but no 64-bit OS X for at least two years
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That’s probably because it will take two years for most Mac users to upgrade to G5. Even Microsoft has found that there are still LOTS of people running Windows 95 and 98. Notice that sales of W2K and XP are no where near the sales of ’95.
I’m running Mac OS X (10.3.2 Panther) at work on a G3 Tower and at home on my 800mhz G4 iMac (lamp). It runs plenty fast for me except for a couple of games with all graphics settings turned up. So I just adjust them down and it still looks “pretty good” and runs good enough. My iMac is about 1.5 years old and I probably won’t be getting rid of it anytime soon. Though I do plan on buying a G5 in probably the 2nd half of 2004.
Once a big enough percentage of Mac users have G5s. That’s when you’ll see the full 64-bit version of Mac OS X. Oh. And it will still be a year or two after that before Longhorn.
That maybe, but its also going to take a couple of years
to get Darwin to be a 64bit operating system. Too many
key data types are still 32bit and making them 64bit can
be a painful process.
when all you need is 64 bit libraries to be able to run apps that want the memory?
Two years ? Is this accurate ?
I guess I’m not going to buy my G5 now. I’ll stick with the G4 to finnaly try and use OS X.
I was thinking the very next version of the OS would be already using the 64 bit memory address… and leaving support of G4.
The kernel has to be 64-bit clean to get good performance out of 64-bit apps. You can use hacks to allow applications to use more than 4GB, but memory above the barrier will have the restriction that you basically cannot pass any of that memory to system calls. Applications that assume that you can use memory above 4GB unrestricted will not work on OS X until the kernel is 64-bit clean. Thus, OS X will have to expose special APIs (like Windows does to take advantage of PAE on x86) and apps will have to be specially coded.
I jstr wanted to add that I think this knid of IBM news (move to 0.9 nm chips) and no 64 bit version of the Operating System are bad for Apple bussiness, who in their perfect mind will buy an expensive G5 before summer ?
Thankfully, OS X itself doesn’t need to be 64 bit for Mac users to take fully advantage of 64 bit applications.
I think that OSX will be 32 bit compatiable till 10.5, then they will leave G3 and G4 machines behind, take them a couple of years to do that. But the G5 laptop in January, I am really not seeing that, maybe faster desktops. Summer might see the laptop version of the G5
All of this.. ALL of it is just rumor.. And bad ones at that.. They can’t name their source not becuz their source would get in trouble, but becuz there is none.. It is all just guess work.
Apple’s underlying OS is not FreeBSD. FreeBSD is used for the userland (and it should already be 64-bit clean there, because there are 64-bit FreeBSD ports) and some filesystem bits. The actual core OS is 4.4BSD/Mach 2.x, and these are the parts that need to be ported to 64-bit.
Here are the facts:
1. No one really knows when there will be a 64 bit version of OS X; this is a rumor.
2. OS X does have libraries that take advantage of the 64 bit-ness of G5s for 64 bit math.
3. When 64 bit memory addressing isn’t required, using 64 bit pointers does not speed anything up at all, and can actually slow things down.
4. There are currently zero mainstream applications that require 64 bit memory addressing.
So my question is: who cares when there will be a 64 bit version of OS X? Current apps can take advantage of the 64 bit math libraries, and until there’s some killer app that requires 64 bit addressing, there is absolutely no advantage to having a 64 bit OS.
“All of this.. ALL of it is just rumor.. And bad ones at that.. They can’t name their source not becuz their source would get in trouble, but becuz there is none.. It is all just guess work.”
The faster G5s from IBM isn’t a rumor. IBM has confirmed this many times. Apple has stated that OS X won’t be 64 bit for a few years, but the applications will still take advantage of the hardware. Laptops are a maybe, but more likely they will start using the new IBM G3+altivec chip, which IBM says they have it running at 2 GHz. The G3, clock speed for clock speed, was always more efficient than the G4. Altivec and clock speed made the difference there, so this new one with altivec and a higher clock should be killer.
The Forbes report may be based on rumors, the fact remains that IBM delivery trucks didn’t come in overnight to dump thousands of G5 chips in Apple backyard. Apple execs knew what IBM was working on. Somehow, Jobs and his pals decided they had enough work with OS X and that it wasn’t necessary to speed up the production of a 64-bit kernel.
Even before AMD officially released the Athlon 64, groups like NetBSD, Suse or Mandrake were already working on a compatible OS. So, please, don’t you people tell me Apple engineers aren’t good enough to perform the same feat. Don’t give me the Intel excuse : “We don’t produce a 64-bit CPU for desktop users because right now there is no need for it”.
I was thinking about buying a G5, maybe I’ll just wait till 2005, hoping Apple will clean up their act.
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Even before AMD officially released the Athlon 64, groups like NetBSD, Suse or Mandrake were already working on a compatible OS. So, please, don’t you people tell me Apple engineers aren’t good enough to perform the same feat.
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AMD added 64 bit extensions to the x86 instruction set (and more registers), so you can speed up code by using the new extensions. The PPC instruction set has always been 64 bit clean (actually IIRC it was designed for 64 bit machines and then “back-ported” to 32 bit). So again, there is absolutely zero reason for apple to go to 64 bit addressing right now.
The only advantage of Apple working on a 64 bit version of OS X is that they might take the opportunity to clean up the Mach ABI a bit. But there’s no guarantee they’ll do so, and they could make ABI changes without going 64 bit too.
So my question is: who cares when there will be a 64 bit version of OS X? Current apps can take advantage of the 64 bit math libraries, and until there’s some killer app that requires 64 bit addressing, there is absolutely no advantage to having a 64 bit OS.
You have obviously never:
1) Tried to edit a high resolution movie with a NLVE (I’m not even talking about HDTV)
2) Tried to edit/layout high resolution photograph(s) for print work
3) Tried to mix a long sequence of multichannel high sample rate audio at once
These things can suck down RAM very, very, very (did I mention very?) quickly. There are most certainly applications for having >4 GB of RAM right now. Granted they are specialized, but who else has the money to spend $500 for a 2 GB DIMMs anyway?
and will only be available to pro desktops.
since a 64 bit OS will really only be useful in the server and on high end pro systems, I don’t think that the imacs, ibooks, powerbooks, and emacs will be using it for some time, and when you buy a powermac, you will be given a choice between the to OSs and the pro version will be standard and the home version will be cheaper.
i still wish apple will release ‘marklar’ in the next 2 years
guess im dreaming…
So my question is: who cares when there will be a 64 bit version of OS X? Current apps can take advantage of the 64 bit math libraries, and until there’s some killer app that requires 64 bit addressing, there is absolutely no advantage to having a 64 bit OS.
Mainly becasue Apple advertised that they have the greatest PC ever and 64-Bit is the way to go blah blah blah. So the real questions is why as a Mac user/owner should i pay so much money to run a 32bit OS on a 64-Bit hardware platform? NT 4.0 on Alpha ring any bells? Especially when AMD64 versions of Windows,Linux and BSD are already here or will be soon. I hope this is just a rumor becasue Apple will end up looking real stupid next year.
It seems that it existe soon a 64 bits version of linux running on PPC64.
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So the real questions is why as a Mac user/owner should i pay so much money to run a 32bit OS on a 64-Bit hardware platform?
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Pay more than what? The dual 1.8 and dual 2.0 G5’s are very competitively priced (try spec’ing out a dual Xeon with the same features and see for yourself). And having an OS with 64 bit mem addressing would allow you to do… what exactly vs. a 32 bit OS? Oh that’s right, *nothing*. It wouldn’t help you in the slightest.
I think it’s hilarious that so many people are getting all worked up over the bit-ness of the OS when to the vast majority, it makes zero difference in practice. What exactly do you think 64 bit addressing is going to do for you?
I grant that NLE and a few other fields can make use of > 4GB RAM. However, these are not mainstream applications. Also, the G5 still gives much, much better performance than the G4, and with it’s support for >4GB RAM (just not per-app), does allow you to run multiple RAM-hogging apps at once.
My point is that the majority of the people whining in these posts about not having a 64 bit OS have absolutely no use for one. And the people saying they’ll get a G4 instead of a G5 just because OS X isn’t 64 bit are absolutely insane.
I know this is off topic, but somebody mentioned 64-bit Windows coming out for x86-64. Anybody know when this is scheduled? The Athlon64 has a lot more to gain from 64-bit than the G5 (like additional registers). With the G5, all you really gain by going to 64-bit is 64-bit addressing, so having to wait isn’t a big loss to Apple home users. Professional video and audio users, on the other hand, could benefit from the extra memory.
My point is that the majority of the people whining in these posts about not having a 64 bit OS have absolutely no use for one. And the people saying they’ll get a G4 instead of a G5 just because OS X isn’t 64 bit are absolutely insane.
I think this is a bit contraditory. If (home) users whinning about no 64 bit OS have no use for it than they can make their life and work with a non G5 Apple PC. So, they will do better by buying a G4 instead and not pay the premium price, thus not being insane but rather reasonable.
They can wait two years to buy a G5 (and, maybe, in this time period >1 GB memory stick prices will drop a lot).
“And contrary to popular belief there is a G5 Powerbook on the horizon as well – possibly as early as January.”
How was this not happening a popular belief, anyone who has a clue about cpu’s and laptops knew this wasn’t going to be an issue. Only clueless people would think there would be problems getting a G5 in a laptop. I think most everyone expected the G5 power books in january from the lanuch of the G5 powermacs. Sure apple wasn’t going to say much and kill powerbook sales for 6 months. But getting a G5 in a laptop is no differant then getting a P4 in one.
Apple will probably use a smaller die size, slow the speed down. The huge heatsink in the towers is more about noise control then cooling.
“All of this.. ALL of it is just rumor.. And bad ones at that.. They can’t name their source not becuz their source would get in trouble, but becuz there is none.. It is all just guess work.”
It’s funny how every time someone says something like this on a news item about Apple or MS, they just make a fool of themselves, when the item is proved true.