Mike Schaeffer's Blog

Oddly enough, the search term that brings the most visitors to my little website is "Texaco". I suspect most of those people go away totally unsatisfied, but there is a decent story behind the connection:

About ten years ago, a good friend of mine went to work in Texaco's IT Shop as a summer intern. One of his job responsibilities was to develop an intranet website. I forget the details, but somewhere along the way he decided he wanted to put a fancy banner picture atop the page. At the time, we were both interested in ray tracing, so we decided to throw together a raytraced version of the Texaco Star logo.

Using our copious free time, we found an online copy of the Texaco logo, took measurements of the star and rendered it as a white solid set against a metallic red hemisphere. We even went to the trouble of animating the star so it rotates, generating a bunch of frames and using a GIF tool to put together an animated GIF. The final result was a nicely animated Texaco logo with an "attractive" (This is by 1995 intranet standards, remember) banner to the side.

For some reason, that picture brings more visitors to this site than anything else. If you happen across this site and actually use the image for something you owe its presence to a ten year old accident of fate.

I just placed an order for a Dell Inspiron 6000D, using one of Dell's recent $750 off deals. With any luck, it'll ship in a couple weeks. In the course of doing research on the machine, I found this site describing James Carter's experiences with the machine. It is without a doubt the best, most comprehensive laptop review I have ever seen. If you write a product review for a laptop computer, you should emulate this.

Something else worth mentioning is that laptop vendors typically use standard parts in their hardware. While they don't publicize part numbers (partially so they can switch suppliers), it is possible to find datasheets describing things like LCD panels. While it takes some inference to figure out what part is being used, this can reveal statistics about LCD panels that might otherwise be hard to find. While Google is your friend, this site has a bunch of links to useful datasheets.

PS: I've ordered the WUXGA (>2 Megapixels, ~140dpi) display with the 128MB Radeon X300 video adapter. If on screen content isn't too small, I expect the detail to be fabulous. I'll post comments (and screenshots) when I get some experience with the machine.

I didn't believe it was possible when I first heard the rumors a few weeks ago, but Here it is: Apple will transition to x86, specifically Intel, in 2006. The whole line will go x86 in 2007. Microsoft is behind the switch, as is Adobe. Interestingly, the developer transition kit has an Intel compiler at its core. I wonder why not GCC.

The next question is how well it will be pulled off. In theory it could be seamless. It needs to be.

So, the big rumor is that Apple is switching to Intel processors, and Steve Jobs is going to make the announcement during his WWDC keynote address this morning (10:00AM PST). I had been planning on writing a debunking article, but now I'm not so sure. Here's why:

Reason not to switch	Counterargument
If Apple switches to Intel, they introduce another archicture break into their hardware platform.	Emulation can make existing binaries run seamlessly on Intel.
But isn't emulation really slow?	Modern emulation technology has gotten a lot better, it can compile code on the fly, just like a modern JVM or Virtual PC.
But I've run virtual machines before, and they're still really slow.	All of the operating system services can be made to run natively, at full speed. The only thing that will be emulated is the application code itself. So, except for very computation-intensive application code things could still run smoothly.
Okay, but a lot of OS X (like Quartz Extreme) is optimized to run on Macintosh hardware.	Macintosh video hardware is the exact same as PC video hardware these days. In fact, most of the supporting hardware in Macintosh is the same as on a PC.
The PowerPC is part of Apple's 'uniqueness'.	It doesn't matter to most consumers what chip or ISA is running their software. The reason people pay for Apple, their core unique value, is their appealing design and the attenion they spend developing a well integrated system. Even if Apple switches to Intel, there's no reason any of that has to change. (Anyway, they could still do something pretty unusual, like putting a Pentium M in a desktop).
Lots of new stuff in Tiger like CoreImage uses AltiVec a great deal.	CoreImage actually compiles dataflow graphs to native hardware at runtime, picking the approach that runs best on the target hardware. CoreImage could well compile to x86/SSE2 (or whatever else). That means that even a PPC binary running emulated on an Intel Macintosh could have access to full speed CoreImage services compiled to SSE2.
This will alienate existing PowerPC customers.	Why does it have to? If their emulation works well enough, Apple could easily introduce Intel hardware and retain PowerPC as the standard binary format for a while. The common case for ISV's would be to continue developing PowerPC binaries and selling into both the x86/OSX and PPC/OSX markets. The only 'schism' would be arise for software vendors who had to have full performance on x86/OSX. They'd have to worry about shipping some kind of fat binary that ran on both platforms. There still, PPC/OSX customers wouldn't see a difference.
Will Windows run on an Intel Mac? Won't that make it easier for Microsoft to drop Office for OS X?	Apple could easily make it virtually impossible to run Windows on whatever hardware they sell. With respect to Office for OS X, Microsoft doesn't really care what the target archicture is: they just want to sell licenses to Office. They'll go where the money is, and that might end up being an OSX/Intel port.

Now that I think about it, the switch to Intel would basically boil down to the same story Apple told in 1993, when it initially switched from the Motorola 680X0 to the PowerPC. Apple pulled it off well in 1993, and now they have the benefit of experience (they've done it before), better emulation technology, and an already more standard hardware platform. It seems plausible to me. The only thing that's left is to figure out why they'd do it, and I have some ideas there too:

• They could finally move their laptops to a faster chip than the G4.
• x86 is not going away and it's not going to end up marginalized any time soon. This could be a 'final' switch.
• If IBM is growing cold on the desktop CPU business (and who could blame them), Apple's hand might be forced into switching away from PPC. Right now, IBM is the only high performance CPU story Apple has.

Anyway, let's see what Jobs says...