“I can foresee a future where the best engineers at Intel move to the Apple project. Being able to start with a blank slate for x86 will probably be the most interesting job over there,” Sam Pullara writes for javarants.com.
“For the past 25 years or so the x86 has been forced to be backwards compatible back to the original MS-DOS. This includes all aspects of the architecture, from the instruction set, to the memory system, and even the BIOS. If you made an x86 machine without this backwards compatibility, could you do better? I think this is the question that Jobs is posing to Intel right now. Ironically, this new system would probably still run Linux, but running stock Windows might be difficult. It’s hard to say how much of that backwards compatibility is required for Windows to boot, let alone run programs,” Pullara writes.
“At the current x86’s core is a RISC chip with a big huge layer of crud on top if it that emulates all the CISC instructions. That layer could be trimmed. The current chipsets contain tons of legacy support that could be jettisoned, as Intel has shown with tons a prototypes that were never picked up by the industry because of Windows users who demand that Lotus 1-2-3 still runs on it,” Pullara writes. “The form factor of the board is completely open for discussion as there need not be a standard case that accepts it. So if they really take advantage of the situation I could see a Mac running on Intel that is faster than the fastest Windows PC.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “Intel has shown with tons a prototypes that were never picked up by the industry because of Windows users who demand that Lotus 1-2-3 still runs on it.” LOL!
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