Text 52504, 53 rader
Skriven 2009-01-08 10:12:20 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 52495 av James Bradley (1:342/77.0)
Ärende: PC Operating Systems on
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James Bradley -> Alan Zisman wrote:
 JB> on 01-02-09 21:29: Alan Zisman to James Bradley re: PC Operating Systems
on

 JB> Apple designates a computer as a "PowerPC" equipped system, and there
 JB> are (at
 JB> least) two different CPU cores used in different generations, the
 JB> earlier using
 JB> a Motorola/IBM co-development, and the later sporting an Intel badge?

No- Intel was never involved in PPC development or sales... Motorola and IBM
were involved (with Apple) in their development. Some models used by Apple were
built by Motorola, later models (like the G5) were IBM products. By the time
Apple dropped PPC for Intel CPUs, I think Motorola was no longer actively
involved- Apple was unhappy that IBM was not able to produce either a 3 GHz G5
CPU (on the time frame they had predicted) or a G5 model with low enough power
requirements to use in laptops


 AZ>> Older Macs do not use Intel-style CPUs; as a result, they
 AZ>> cannot boot to OSs designed for those Intel-style
 AZ>> processors, no way, no how. (There are PowerPC-specific
 AZ>> Linux distributions that can be used, however). They CAN
 AZ>> run Intel-style OSs under emulation- but not using more

 JB> Parallels???

Parallels, VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox, etc are virtualization programs- software
designed to run OS's built for a particular CPU inside a different OS built for
the same CPU... similar but not identical to emulation- running an OS built for
a totally different CPU than is on your system's hardware- like emulating a
Sony Playstation on your PC or Mac.

 AZ>> efficient, faster virtualization... there needs to be an
 AZ>> additional, performance-sapping level of translation to
 AZ>> emulate Intel CPU low-level commands for the PowerPC chip.



 JB> EG: Is it true that their OS's are still distributed on ROM chips?

See my message to Jeff... briefly- their complete OS was never distributed on
ROM chips, but for a long time, some of the low-level OS code was included in
the Mac's equivalent of the PC BIOS. That's no longer the case.

-- 
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