partly ot: Apple to use Cell? Cell PCs?

[MfA]

If you have a dozen or more cores you wont get away from parallelizing at least the rendering, and not just at the backend of the rendering pipeline. With those amounts of cores developers who want to get the most out of the hardware will also have to start parallelizing other parts of the game loop, probably wont happen with first gen games. But being able to do physics more accurately (soft-body/particle/fluid/etc) and for an order of magnitude more objects physics will IMO allow good developers ways to impress gamers.

 

[Saem]

BTW, there was no Mac VS PC holywar, I suggest paying closer attention.

In anycase, I've finally gotten around to catching up on FreeBSD news, seems their team is basically poof. Open and DF seem like the only viable alternatives.

IIRC, as for Apple going for BSD, around the time OSX would have started being developed, Linux USB and Firewire support would have been absolute shite. Apple DID evalute Linux, quite publicly at that. At the time, BSD also had far superior networking and so on.

 

[crystalcube]

In anycase, I've finally gotten around to catching up on FreeBSD news, seems their team is basically poof. Open and DF seem like the only viable alternatives.

why would you say that ? As far as I understand FreeBSD 5.x is progressing well. DF & FreeBSD have taken different approach for few things but DF is basically derived from FreeBSD 4.x codebase.

IIRC, as for Apple going for BSD, around the time OSX would have started being developed, Linux USB and Firewire support would have been absolute shite. Apple DID evalute Linux, quite publicly at that. At the time, BSD also had far superior networking and so on.

*BSD always had better networking but linux has closed that gap to certain extent. With respect to driver support *BSD have been lagging behind linux for long now. So Apple didn't chose FreeBSD because of USB/firewire.

 

[Saem]

With respect to driver support *BSD have been lagging behind linux for long now. So Apple didn't chose FreeBSD because of USB/firewire.

You are misinformed. Go and have a look at which stable linux kernel version finally brought USB and Firewire (IIRC, that was 2.4 and it was buggy for some time) back porting wasn't that helpful because it was still very buggy. Even to this day you hear about folks having issues with USB kb mice under Linux. This most likely weighed in on Apple's decision because it relies heavily on it. USB and Firewire are a big part of Apple's simplicity marketing pitch.

why would you say that ? As far as I understand FreeBSD 5.x is progressing well. DF & FreeBSD have taken different approach for few things but DF is basically derived from FreeBSD 4.x codebase.

They've lost some talented members who put out good work over some infighting.

 

[crystalcube]

With respect to driver support *BSD have been lagging behind linux for long now. So Apple didn't chose FreeBSD because of USB/firewire.

You are misinformed.

ok lets see :
None of the BSD till date have native ATI drivers.
NV drvers from NVDA were added to freeBSD much later.

( you can find a post by me where I have said thet ATI is always following NVDA and never leading based on these facts).
FreeBSD doesn't have very good Firewire support yet.
I cant say much about Linux's USB/Firewire support as I hardly used linux.

FreeBSD ( even other BSD) have very poor sound support while Linux's ALSA is way ahead now. e.g. no 5.1 sound for FreeBSD.

Network adapters a lot of them are supported natively for Linux but not for freeBSD.

IDE/SATA/ATA support is almost equal for both.

Now from where I see FreeBSD is lagging in driver support , this fact is accepted by most *BSD people.

With respect to driver support *BSD have been lagging behind linux for long now. So Apple didn't chose FreeBSD because of USB/firewire.

Go and have a look at which stable linux kernel version finally brought USB and Firewire (IIRC, that was 2.4 and it was buggy for some time) back porting wasn't that helpful because it was still very buggy. Even to this day you hear about folks having issues with USB kb mice under Linux. This most likely weighed in on Apple's decision because it relies heavily on it. USB and Firewire are a big part of Apple's simplicity marketing pitch.

And you think apple used USB/Firewire drivers from either linux or freebsd. You are wrong if you think that USB/Firewire suport of either of the OS led Apple to decide. Even now Apple's USB/Firewire support is light years ahead of linux/FreeBSD.

They've lost some talented members who put out good work over some infighting.

Thats funny. I thought even in major commercial software companies people migration is quite common. And freeBSD is not even commercial so it should have been well accepted to loose and gain people over time.

But ofcourse whole scenario changes if you are implying that new members of freeBSD team lack talent and you have proof to back it up.

 

[MfA]

They've lost some talented members who put out good work over some infighting.

That isnt saying much, the defection rate of BSD developers (to other flavours) is high to begin with

 

[archie4oz]

Linux was never really a serious contender... The major competition to replace MacOS was between BeOS and NEXTSTEP. BSD wasn't a choice, it was something that came along with NEXTSTEP...

but by next year, shouldn't dual core PowerPC for MAC be feasible?

Since we're talking about "Macs" and not "MACs" you'd better get used to droppin the caps... It'll spare you the grief when you run into Mac users who *do* care a lot more..

I don't understand why the current generation PowerPC (970) or the next generation PowerPC can't be dual core like their POWER relative

Ummm.. The Power4 and Power5 *are* multi-core PowerPC processors...

IIRC, Apple was part of the failed ACE consortioum way back in the early 90s (including M$) where their OSs were separated by a HAL. They would've evaluated and compiled their OSs on severeal architectures from Mips, x86, Alpha, PowerPC etc

Who cares? NT ran on all the above architectures anyways, NetBSD practically runs on anything that will compute, and Darwin's predecessor ran on 68k, x86, SPARC, and was in the process of being ported to PowerPC before Apple acquired NeXT.

It is also rumoured that Apple have a x86 version of MAC OSX locked away for an emergency!

Well Darwin runs on x86 (the build is done for sanity checks on the code), but I don't know about the rest of the OS/services (if it is, it's horribly unoptimized and not ready for immediate release). Besides, you don't use an operating system, you use applications. Makes little difference if you can move your OS over if the apps don't move over with it...

OS-X however aint exactly designed for massive parallelism

No, but it and many of it's apps are sure threaded like a mofo...

It is freeBSD and current version OS X is at par with freeBSD 5

Actually originally there were portions of both NetBSD and FreeBSD in OS X... Of course much has changed over time...

An amusing point to note is that Rick Rashid, one of the key members of the team that created Mach at CMU, works for.... Microsoft

And Avie Tevanian (another key CMU member that worked on Mach) is at Apple... Point?

Did you also know that ex-MS guy Steve Perlman (Mr. WebTV) also was at Apple and created QuickScan (QuickTime's hardware based predecessor)?

One of the key contributers to the design of DirectSound (forgot the guy's name) now works at Apple? (after creating ACID)...

but most of the value they put in the closed parts of OS-X.

Actually CoreFoundation, IOKit, CSDA, DSS are all opensource as well... While I consider Cocoa the crown jewels, GnuStep is basically a re-implementation of the same thing...

ost likely weighed in on Apple's decision because it relies heavily on it. USB and Firewire are a big part of Apple's simplicity marketing pitch.

Neither BSD or Linux have a solid driver model, so it's really not a consideration. Besides that's why Apple implemented I/OKit...

 

[aaaaa00]

An amusing point to note is that Rick Rashid, one of the key members of the team that created Mach at CMU, works for.... Microsoft

Point?

It's a small small world.

 

[crystalcube]

Actually originally there were portions of both NetBSD and FreeBSD in OS X... Of course much has changed over time...

Thats probably because a lot of developers contribute to both NetBSD & FreeBSD . Also being same license model (and most of the developers lacking gigantic egos ) they do copy/move codes among both OS. So even if you get freeBSD you will find NetBSD licenses among the code.

 

[London Geezer]

An amusing point to note is that Rick Rashid, one of the key members of the team that created Mach at CMU, works for.... Microsoft

Point?

It's a small small world.

So true, u have NO idea how many of my ex's friends who i later found out are friends of my friends, i met in the last 2 weeks in clubs and stuff.... Oh sorry this is a Cell/IBM/whatever thread...