The Intel switch A to Z Pt. 1

A large number of Mac and PC users have no idea why this Intel switch is such a big deal for the Macintosh and you would be surprised how many questions I get in regards to this and why it’s such a big deal. I have people asking me questions like, “everyone uses Intel, right?� or, “is this going to make the Mac look like windows because only windows runs on Intel.� Yea, it’s kind of funny how many individuals have no idea what any of this means and if you understand hardware, software and basic technical aspects of today’s personal computer then maybe you should read on to some of my previous works.

Let’s start with Apple’s chip history and how their PowerPC architecture has been superior to the x86 flavor for years now and only recently has suffered from defeat. Apple used IBM, Motorola then IBM again for their CPUs but all of the chips were a chip architecture called PowerPC and the difference between PowerPC and X86 is how they translate what the user wants to process. Imagine if you would like to speak to a German but cannot understand nore give feedback one what they are saying then you would need to translate all of that information to their language and they would have to do the same. This is the same for processor architecture. A prime example the version of Mandrake Linux for x86 chips and for PowerPC is a different version altogether because every aspect had to be written so to be translated on each piece of architecture.

Documents are a different story. A word document and a jpeg image is cross platform as long as there are applications available on each platform to open that document. I can take an image from a PC formatted hard disk and created with an x86 native machine and open that on my Mac because I have an application to open that file. That is, if that application is encoded to work and communicate with the CPU. It’s all about the extensions and if you delve within the system folder on your Mac OS 10 box, you will find “PPC.ex� files and more architecture specific files in place to communicate with your processor and other Mac specific hardware.

We are finally getting to what makes the Intel switch such a long transition. To be honest, FreeBSD (the core of Apple’s Mac OS and Darwin) is natively compiled to run on x86 hardware and Steve Jobs and NeXt were the first to compile this to run on PowerPC hardware and be the core of the NeXt step OS eventually adapted into Apple’s current OS but that’s another story altogether! Anyway, Apple is now having to recompile all of their operating system aspects to run on the x86 chipset. With this switch, Apple could theoretically place an Intel or an AMD chip in their machines and have no issues as long as the operating system is completely X86 compliant (which it now is).

Tune into part II on Monday!