[rescue] your next Solaris machine ??? (Sol/x86 booting on iMac)

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

On Fri, 14 Apr 2006, Andrew Weiss wrote:

> [...] The new POWER
> 6 is supposed to be pretty light on power use and scale to 6 Ghz.
> 
> The latest POWER5's have like 8 cores on die and like 8MB of cache on
> die per processor.  [...]

...which is exactly why Apple's move to Intel couldn't have been more 
stupid.  As the "full-blown" POWER architecture evolves and scales, you 
know that key improvements would make their way into PowerPC.  And the use 
of PPC in gaming platforms means more innovation and drive to improve 
performance in graphics - and since the birth and rise of the "engineering 
workstation" class in the early 80's, the demand for better/faster 
graphics have driven a lot of the most interesting designs...

And what sucks is that Motorola/Freescale's "G5" (what did they end up 
calling it, the 85xx series?) could have been a nice desktop chip, but 
Jobs' shortsightedness and impatience drove Moto to divert that line into 
embedded applications - but there was a quote from Moto that said 
(roughly) "Apple is just one customer, and we have other markets for the 
PPC.  But we'll be back with a 'G6'..."  With IBM and Freescale both 
working on the PPC architecture, Apple _could_ have helped ensure that a 
consumer market for general-purpose desktops using high-end PPC chips 
existed, and I think they'd have benefitted.

But, apparently Jobs wants Apple to be a box shifter, a Dell clone with 
cachet, and that's their choice.  It just means that cool old "historical" 
machines like the G5 will end up in my collection for pennies on the 
dollar sooner, rather than later.

It is pretty funny seeing Solaris on a Mac, though... Now, if it were 
running OpenStep on top of Solaris with an Intel chip inside and an Apple 
logo on the outside...

-- Chris