Mac Forum / General / Hardware / September 2007

Phrased poorly. Vector units in the CPU don't speed up video display.
They speed up the performance of identical manipulations on large blocks
of data by doing them concurrently. Probably the most common target for
this optimization is A/V data, but it's about data manipulation, not
pushing stuff out to the raster device.

The G4, G4e and G5 all have multiple vector units, but they're for
different specific operations.

... or floats ...

But it is leveraged by Mac OS and some applications when present.

G

The problem with the PPC was how Apple implemented it. The original idea
was that IBM would provide the technology but not make the chips. IBM
prefers much higher profit margins than you can get out a commodity PC
chip.

They prefer to go for the high end desktop workstation and server market.

The original deal was to have Motorola Semiconductor make the chips for
them. Motorola Semiconductor was spun off from Motorola and now operates
under the name Freescale. They concentrate on making low power versions
of their own chips, I have owned several cell phones and Palm Pilots
with 68000 chips in them and a slightly improved version of it still is
sold.

They never could get a working G5 chip in the quantities Apple needed
and so IBM was making them for Apple. This was neither good for Apple
nor IBM. IBM never never did produce a decent laptop version of the G5.

The idea of running MacOS using an X86 is not new, Apple ported MacOS to
the 80486 processor in a project they called "Star Trek". It worked, but
was abandoned when the IBM deal was made.

The switch to Intel type processors was a good mode for Apple, because
instead of trying to get the only manufacturer in the world to keep up
with their demands and technology needs, they only need a small fraction
of their output. Plus if Intel can't/won't supply their needs, there are
AMD and others. Instead of being totaly dependent upon one company,
they have a choice.

Apple is also no longer the driving force behind improvments in performance,
the PC game market is, which is much hungrier for improved performance and
much more willing to spend money for new and faster hardware.

The two other issues are almost irrelevant. Piracy is not a real issue
becase it does not stop people from buying Macintosh computers. MacOS does
not run on a standard PC, you need to add a special boot loader to get
it going. Once you do, you find that some of your hardware does not work.

Apple only provides drivers for hardware they sell, and third party
hardware vendors don't often provide MacOS drivers. The ones that do
make expensive add-ons, not motherboard components.

Originally Apple had planned to put DRM chips in their computers and you
were not supposed to be able to run the commerical release of MacOS on
PC's without them. The developer machines used to "seed" production of
Intel programs were commodity PC's without the chip (Intel produced the
motherboards) so that version of MacOS was easy to "hack".

Because the base operating system behind MacOS is open source,
it was too easy to "hack" around the DRM chips and Apple gave up.
In the end it does not loose them money, there is no cost to them
for your running it on your PC, and most likely you would not have
bought a Macintosh anyway.

If you like MacOS so much, in the end you will probably buy one of
their computers, so it may end up being free advertisement.

The second issus viruses, is not as big a problem. There have always
been MacOS viruses, I encountered one in 10-15 year old software,
going through some old disks. Luckily the 5 year old anti-virus
I had caught and fixed it. :-)

The two things that make the Mac as lesser target for viruses is the
lack of Macintosh systems in the real world and the UNIX base of
the operating system.

Because of the UNIX base, the operating system is much harder to write
viruses for (even though it's open source) and since you have a chance
of infecting at most 12% of the computers in the world, it's less than
worth it.

Most virus writers these days concentrate on the large number of older
Windows systems out there, where do not run any anti-virus or anti-spyware
and are easliy "hacked". Microsoft no longer supports them and if you are
running a bootleg copy of Windows/XP or Vista you can no longer use
Windows Update to get security fixes.

These systems are ripe for the picking and often are.

Geoff,

At the time Apple first decided to use the G5, it was indeed an
excellent processor, and it still is. I have a PowerMac G5 and I am
happy with it and I have no plans to replace it any time soon.

Viruses from Windows with not migrate to Mac OS X simply because the
processor chip Apple uses in new Macs is from Intel now, not IBM.
Viruses take advantage of operating system vulnerabilities, not
processor chip bugs.