Re: Apple's Developer Transition Kit

[Alex Fernandez <alejandrofer@gmail.com>]

Hi Johannes,

> > I am totally confused on this, is the new mac gonna have an x86 chip
> > in it, or is intel going to make a newly designed chip?
> 
> They'll use x86 chips.

Steve Jobs was talking about the future Intel roadmap. Probably you
mean that they will use chips within the x86 family, even if the chips
themselves are new. I guess Apple will not go back to 32 bits now, so
I would bet for the x86_64 architecture (or whatever the Intel
knock-off is called).

> > And for people who also run the mac os (like me) by a universal
> > binary, is that code that is not dependent on the processor, but on
> > the os?  So like it would run on either a ppc mac or the new one, as
> > long as they have the mac os?
> 
> No. Or maybe a universal binary is like the 'FAT' binaries in that it
> contains code for both architectures. Not sure.

Yes, a "universal" binary contains code for both architectures, like
"fat" (not "FAT") binaries in the 68k->ppc era. It's not
processor-independent code, since that would mean either source code
or bytecode.

In fact, for Java programs it would be bytecode, which is
platform-independent; for the rest it means two binaries in one.

> >   And is this basically going to be like when mac switched from the
> > 68k to the PowerPC Chip, where the PPC chip ran stuff from 68k,
> 
> I don't think they'll add a ppc emulator, so probably no.

I think Jobs has said that they will use a ppc emulator, to run
"legacy code" (in this case PPC). Apple has licensed something called
"QuickTransit" for fast emulation.

Alex.