The Switch to Intel
Posted by Whitney Young Thu, 17 Nov 2005 02:10:00 GMT
I imagine that the transition should go fairly smoothly. Rosette seems like it will work pretty well for many applications that can’t compile right away for x86. By that I mean that from reports it seems like users will be able to run the applications without noticing too much of a speed lag if any at all.
From reports around the internet it seems that Apple might be ahead of schedule. That’s all just speculation, so it’s hard to say one way or another.
Anyway, my plan at this time is to release universal binaries for each of my applications around the time that the Intel machines start to ship (or possibly sooner). I’ll hope to be able to make all of the universal binaries run on the same PPC platforms that they do right now. The information to target different settings for different architectures was buried deep in Apple’s documentation, but it looks like it should be possible to get universal binaries that can work on all systems down to the ones that are currently supported. I don’t have a way of testing on Intel machines, so I’ll have to rely on community feedback (I have recieved a report that Senuti runs just fine on OS X for x86 when compiled for the x86 machines and don’t know how it does under Rosette, but that shouldn’t be an issue).
I’m posting this to give anyone who strongly objects the chance to do so, but I don’t see any reason that anyone would.
