OSX has been cracked...

You're missing a step. How is OSX going to gain popularity and market share? Why would OSX gain popularity if it doesn't support any hardware? See this is the issue, it's chicken & egg, critical mass, and all the other jazz.

People won't buy OSX if it doesn't support their hardware out-of-the-box (or damn close to OOTB). If people don't buy OSX, IHVs won't write drivers. If IHVs don't write drivers, OSX won't support PC hardware OOTB.

The only entity who can break the cycle and give OSX a fighting chance on random PC hardware is Apple, by investing crap-loads of time and money writing drivers for third-party PC hardware.

I dare say that hackers and geeks will pony up some driver support for various devices, but given the market Apple is selling into (where ease-of-use is everything, Windows is "hard to use") having a Linux-style hack-'n'-recompile-your-kernel-and-it'll-work-(sometimes) just ain't going to sell to the people they need to sell to to get OSX to 30% of the market-share.

 

I agree with the most of the things you said nutball and i want to add some little things.
One of thing,Mac supporters like to brag about is their so called superior UI compared to Windows XP.
However this is achieved because Mac are closed system with hardware specs generally much higher than average PC.
If Mac OS X has to run on average PC then there are a lot of the UI features which will have to be scalable or modifed(tuned down) to enable the system to run on lower specs PC.
I don't sure that Apple is ready to make significant modifications to their UI just to have it run on lower specs hardware than the minimum they actually require.
Btw wasn't the x86 version of OSX supposed to run on very high specs X86 hardware(a.k.a P4 SSE3 based) ?

 

A P4 2.8 Ghz has more power than the lowest specs Macintosh CPU required to run OSX.
I am a bit surprised to see that the UI run fine with the Intel GMA 900.
Though it remains to be seen how this UI runs with both a weaker CPU and an integrated video accelerator.
I very doubt that OSX can run as fine as Windows XP on the average joe PC.
For the record,i have already run Windows XP Home edition on a 550 Mhz P3 with a TNT riva and 256 MB of RAM without troubles for over a year.

 

I know this is why i said that it remains to be seen how the UI work with a weaker CPU and integrated video accelerator(being the GMA900 or another solution).
From what i know the GMA 900 partially rely on the CPU to do its work.

Perhaps but i know a lot of people who are still using P3 and weakest P4(with SDRAM).
On these kinds of PC i am sure that OSX won't run very well.
Windows XP would run well on much more PC configurations(especially with lower specs) than OSX.
And i should add that i doubt that anytime soon there will be a version of OSX which will have even remolety the hardware support of Windows XP especially as Apple has no interest in enabling their OS to work on PC.

 

If you're using an Intel onboard graphics chipset, and have OSX, it should be blindingly fast on the desktop. AFAICS, all you are really doing is compositing and that should be very fast.

What it comes down to is that all the data is in RAM and you don't have to traverse things like the AGP bus which is slow, relatively (FSB and main memory) speaking.

 

I heard that the OS only works with 64bit AMDs (does a CPU check at bootup). I also heard that theres a way around it (in the form of a patch to disable the CPU check). If thats the case, i'll be able to install this os on my x86 computer at home.

 

So it is specific to Intel solutions.
What about other companies solutions ?

 

Ahh ok...I guess the last place I should be getting my info from is a torrent forum

I can't wait till the full release is..released. Once then..it will probably be leaked and there will be a way to and get it working on general systems.....driver support aside..i'm will to work with it.

 

WinXP Pro on P-II 350@360MHz / 256MB PC-100 / Matrox G200 8MB. Best uptime 66 days, 12 hours. (after that one HDD didn't wake up from powersaving without total shutdown and reboot. )


ok, I admit that it was student flat file server, so not so much heavily CPU bound, but still...

 

Pentium 90mhz with 192mb of ram on an old-assed HP Vectra XA with a Matrox Millenium 4mb PCI card and 3Com 3C905B nic. Uptime in excess of 400 days on XP with no service pack I've got a screenshot if you wanna see it...

Back on topic, while I'm not a huge Mac person, I'd love a chance to take a whack at OSX on my Wintel box. What would be even better is loading it inside a VMWare session if possible, which would allow me to use my 3.6ghz / 2gb ram / .5TB raid workhorse

 

It seems to be working on this 32-bit, SSE2 Pentium M.

Ironically, seeing it on another laptop isn't as interesting to me, because I always thought Apple laptops can compete in every way (looks, slot-load optical, connections, screen, backlit keyboard, battery life) but CPU power. Can't wait to see a Powerbook packing an ultra-low-power dual-core Intel chip.

 

I have to say the MacIntel is working quite nicely so far, even got things like MSN Mac working on it and the colour laser printer, be pretty interesting to see how this pans out, and what Apple do actually do with it.

To anyone considering downloading the software to give it a try, I say it is well worth it, appears to be very stable so far.

 

AFAIK, SSE3 finally superceded Altivec for fp optimization, and since most of Apple's software included altivec-specific stuff, it doesn't surprise me that It's suggested to get a pni(sse3) cpu for running OSX. I'm sure it's possible to use other chips, but it'd be buggy at best.

 

Meh, SSE3 has made it's way into all of the present chips now, so if/when Apples does sell x86 OSX I doubt they'll be targeting SSE2/1. Unless Apple has a lot of idle employees, I alsa doubt that they'll offer a re-write of pretty much all the softwear they've made since they bailed from Motorola for IBM.

 

Curiously, Apple said that SSE2 is the "lowest spec" on their developer's site. That means SSE3 is optional. Furthermore, the default options in the Xcode tool also doesn't include SSE3. I don't know what that means.

By the way, SSE3 does not really add much to SSE2. The most important instructions in SSE3 are probably those for complex number arithmetics and the "last x87 instruction" for converting FP to INT with truncation (which saves the trouble of setting the control word). I think Apple used a lot of this instruction in the dev version of Mac OS x86.