I’ve said it many times, I’m totally addicted to QuickSilver, AppRocket is also nice for the poor folks with Windows machines. There is a GNOME application for Linux, but my POS workstation doesn’t have an updated enough version of GTK+ to get it to compile. And my Gentoo installation on the work laptop is still dead, no time to fix it any time soon.

The Apple Blog » Quicksilver Changes Everything

I really might switch to Firefox just because of Greasemonkey.

AMD’s got plans to go quad

We know Apple just annoucned they’re going Intel, but AMD would just like you to know that by the time Apple’s moved over to x86 in 2007, they’re planning on having quad-core CPUs on the market;and we ain’t just talking dual-core Hyperthreaded devices. Later plans include scalability to up to 32 processors in their devices, but since most applications still aren’t multi-threaded and won’t take advantage of such systems, we’re hoping they’ve got some tricks in their bag for making faster really mean faster.

Well, in the very least, you get what I call “Application-Level Parallelism”, you multi-tasking in OS X and now each CPU will have only around 1/4 the number of processes, this will definitely speed things up, maybe not 4x, but definitely more than double. 🙂 IIRC programs like Photoshop already takes advantage of multiprocessor with a plugin, at least this is true for CS, maybe CS2 got that integrated already. OS X also has SMP support. Maybe they would even add NUMA support in the future. 🙂

The Core Image algorithms are already optimized for the dual G5 PMacs also.

Nivi : The Next ?Killer App? Will Be Developed on Apple?s OS X

Interesting insight, but it’s hard to say. I use and love OS X myself, and most of my friends who are great programmers also use Macs as their personal computers. But I don’t think companies will be moving from Linux to OSX as their development platforms. Cost is one of the reason, but it’s not as important as ISV software support. The tools I use at work from Synopsys or models from Denali don’t work in OS X. It’s a catch-22, ISVs won’t support OSX until a majority of their customers want it, but their customers can’t buy Macs instead of Dell (that runs Linux) before the ISVs support OS X. For software companies, they also won’t switch to Macs unless their customers use them, similar situation there.

So if the next Killer App will be a home-grown or open source software, and there were some successful ones like Napster, this might be true. Or it would take a startup focused on OS X to do this. (hmm… I need an idea…)

Not that many software impress me anymore, but I really liked Groove. It was the coolest thing in 2001 when I was able to browse the web with my friends at Trilogy to decide where to go eat, share files, etc etc. I guess Microsoft likes it too and they’re going to integrate something like Groove into Outlook. It never took off as a Killer App though.

Oh yeah, I met Chunka Mui at a Diamond Technology all-hands and got a signed copy of the Killer App book. (I seriously considered joining that firm at one point)

Good stuff: Jobs? blueprint for success in the PC business

Intel set to go quad core early too: Nice! I would pay good money for a quad-core PowerMac! 😀

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

Apple will switch to X86 processors

More news about Apple switching processors… BUT they said x86, not Intel specifically… I guess Mr Job got really frustrated they couldn’t cool the G5 enough for the PowerBooks… hehe… I want a dual-core Intel or AMD mobile chip in my next PowerBook, please!!

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. 🙂