michaelstone - Sep 12, 2005 04:19pm

AMD sucks.

AMD does, in fact, not suck.  Compaq on the other hand does.

My condolances to your mom.  She got ripped off.

My sister had one, it’s now a doorstop.  It didn’t last a year.  The floppy broke, the charger broke, the battery would only hold enough charge for 10 or 15 minutes.  She also made the mistake of buying it with an extended warranty from Best Buy, who is under investigation in several states (for not honoring thier extended warranties among other things).  Result: $1,200 bucks poorer, Best Buy refuses to replace laptop, no laptop, no money to replace it.

Luckily for her, her Fiancee bought her another one, this time a Dell.

The funny part is that I told her not to buy a Compaq, and not from Best Buy.  And no, I did not tell her “I told you so.”.

AMD’s current dual core designs are in fact much more advanced than Intel’s.  I’ll decide what I think of Intel’s updated dual core CPU’s after they start shipping.  As a matter of fact AMD’s Athlon 64 and Opteron Server lines are quite a bit nicer than their Intel counterparts for raw speed.  This is not just my own opinion, and it’s not based on personal predjudices.  This is commonly agreed apon by the more technically minded.  If neccesary I can post a ton of links illustrating this.

What AMD, apparently cannot match Intel for, is low power/high performance CPUs.  The Pentium 4 is basically dead, thank God.  The replacement is far more scalable, and much more efficient.  Think Pentium M/Centrino.

stevievep - Sep 12, 2005 09:20am

Yes, I know this is pretty far fetched, but how much so? If it’s ever somehow possible to run OS X86 on non-apple hardware contrary to apple’s core philosophy, how much further would one or an organized group need to go to take it the next step. I only thought of this because my mom just bought a Compaq notebook with an AMD processor, and I hadn’t heard any speculation.

Just a notion…

...and a new forum member’s thinly disguised sweepstakes entry…

It’s extremely hard, not impossible, to guess at this point what the shipping version will be able to be hacked to run on.

There are a few issues with getting it to run on machines other than the Apple Developer Machines.  In rough order of importantance:

1) There’s a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip on the Developer Machine’s motherboard.  This is the major protection to keep OSX on x86 Macs currently.  Whatever parts of the OS address this module must be changed in order to not require it.

2) The CPU has to support all of the instructions that the OS/Programs use.  This means that if Quartz is compiled (the act of turning programming instructions into a program) to use SSE3, then the CPU must support SSE3 for that program to run correctly, if at all.

3) There must be drivers or support software for the hardware.  This means that if your motherboard uses a non-supported chipset (the controllers that allow the CPU to talk to the various parts of the motherboard), then you can potentially have major problems.  If the video card/graphics chip doesn’t have a driver, then video might not be displayed properly or at all.  This is also true for hard drive controllers, usb controllers, network cards, usb controllers, firewire controllers, sound card/controllers, and pretty much anything else you want to use.

So while you may be able to make it work at some point, it’s very hard to say how likely your getting it running will be.  What I do know is that a Compaq laptop is almost as far away as a PC can get from the Developer machines.

BigMac - Sep 12, 2005 07:14pm

Stevievep,
interesting idea.

Everyone else, let’s stay civilized please.

Good job Big Mac.

back on the subject, there was an article about this stuff today in macworld.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/09/15/intelvsamd/index.php?lsrc=mwrss

i think it’ll be possible to run OsX on a AMD based machine. but you might have disabled the power PC applications, which means no iTunes.

I have a feeling eventually Apple will use AMD chips (if only to keep Intel honest) but that is far into the future.

why not? they’ve been making processors that beat down intel’s for some time now, and have had lower power consumption as well. the exception is the Pentium M chips. the only thing that AMD really lacked in re: to a comparison w/ intel forapple’s business is a platform orientation. by in large they have made chipsets when they have to aid in developing a new motherboard, which other 3rd party makers use to build their own variants. this is also their greatest weakness in themobile market. all the while intel rolled out a complete solution designed to work together to limit power consumption in their centrino platform. it just happens that intel’s orientation toward controlling it’s product line compliments apple’s interests in doing the same. for the record, the competition amongst chipset manufacturers typically has been good for raising the bar on the performance of a platform, even to the point where 3rd party makers regularly make intel compatible chipsets which outperform intel’s designs. the same goes for AMD. as noted, the only area where there seems to be an issue is in the mobile sector for AMD where the competition has yet to yield a chipset that can really compete w/ the centrino bundle.

AMD is very good, and you get alot more for the money compared with intel chips.
AMD with SSE3 makes a good os x86 machine