Author Archives: ayn

So it’s true! Apple going to Intel!

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Live from WWDC: Steve Jobs keynote – Engadget – www.engadget.com: Like I said in an earlier post, the processors don’t really matter much. Apple uses (an enhanced version of) GCC, so as long as GCC works with Intel chips (of course it does, what do you think GNU/Linux or *BSD were compiled with?), porting most apps will be pretty much a recompile.

I’m not sure what they’re gonna do with their 64-bit stuff, I sure hope they won’t be using the Itanium2 for that. Or maybe they have managed to cool one of those with a quiet fan in a PowerMac now???

Apps that take advantage of special instructions might take more time to port, but then almost all of those apps already have existing Windows ports so the assembly-level optimized algorithms should be easily ported. Theo Gray mentioned they ported Mathematica in two days. I’d imagine the graphics apps like Photoshop might take more time, but they’ve got very smart people at Adobe so they should have no problem. 🙂

Oh yeah, btw, I hope I won’t have to have an “Intel inside” sticker on my next Mac, I hate those things…

–Andrew

Happy birthday Fee-Fee!

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Today’s my dog Fee-Fee’s 4th birthday! Again we’re celebrating his birthday without his mommy… He didn’t like the groovy dog birthday cake last year (but he loved it the year before). I guess I’ll just bring him there and let him pick a toy and some treats this afternoon. 🙂

evolutionm.net – How to Swap Radio with Gauge Panel

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evolutionm.net – How to Swap Radio with Gauge Panel
I finally did this to my Evo MR today, way better, now I can actually read the boost gauge while driving, not just when I’m in the front straightaway. 🙂 The writeup is dead-on btw, only took me about 15 minutes to complete. I should’ve done this as soon as I got the car, but I guess I’ve been lazy with this… I did do the more important stuff like changing oil every 3k miles, brake fluids, etc etc…

Apple really, really moving to Intel chips?

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Apple really, really moving to Intel chips?

A lot of talk about Apple moving from PowerPC to Intel, I really can care less of what processor Macs use as long as it runs OS X. As John Shen once said in 18-747 (formerly entitled Superscalar Processor Design), RISC and CISC really don’t matter right now; they really aren’t much different in the micro-architectural level.

However, I’d much prefer if Apple adopts AMD instead of Intel. Probably coz I spent 3 years of my life at Newisys to work on a cache coherency (HyperTransport) router ASIC for the Opeteron. 🙂