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December 11th, 2005

Eating Windows from the inside

This is probably already obvious, but it came to my mind only the other day: Apple computers moving to Intel chips is the smartest move.
I figure that my computer-illiterate family would be much better off with a Mac, yet, software traps everyone !
My sister has to use AutoCAD for her studies. A cool new program comes out and it’s most likely to be running for Windows. As a developer, PC gives more opportunities… but most users are probably better off with the Macintosh.

Currently one can install and run some versions of Windows, using some emulator. However that’s also a CPU emulator. Something that sensibly degrades performance (forget using AutoCAD !).
On an Intel-based Mac, in order to run Wintel applications, emulators will simply have to implement the virtual machine functionalities, without the burden of emulating a modern CPU. This is something that VMware and Virtual PC are already doing, and I’m betting that at least VMware is already a Mac-Intel developer…

Posted by Davide Pasca in Uncategorized

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2005 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Eating Windows from the inside”

  1. rasty says:

    Yep, I doubt Microsoft will release a Virtual PC for Mac but you never know!
    Anyway I doubt anyone would use heavy graphical applications on a Mac running VMware, but on the other hand, the common Intel platform will surely make porting easier to some extent. Apple could even write a wrapper (similar to Wine) to aid developers do the porting.. if they haven’t already!

    It will be very interesting to compare prices and performance of MacIntels with PCs!
    And troll in Apple forums as usual… :D

    December 11th, 2005 at 10:39 pm
  2. Davide Pasca says:

    Why not for heavy gfx applications ?
    Mac is already using ATI chipsets. I think that currently VMware provides a way (some sort of custom made driver layer to install manually) to, for example, have Linux access hardware acceleration when running in a virtual machine under Windows.

    December 13th, 2005 at 12:59 am
  3. rasty says:

    Humm we should test it.. I’ve been running SuSE on VMWare and it’s really very good with 2D (games too), but I couldn’t get 3D acceleration to work (and software was too slow). Maybe there is a way, but I don’t know!
    Of course the fact I couldn’t get to install the VMWare tools on that virtual machine could be part of the problem, or maybe not..

    TRY!!!!

    then tell me!

    December 15th, 2005 at 6:24 am
  4. Davide Pasca says:

    Right VMware tools are that “sort of driver layer” that I was talking about. Also Linux by itself isn’t a champion of 3D.
    I think that with Windows it would be easier, if anything, because there aren’t too many current versions of it.

    Anyhow, I have Ubuntu on VMware 8) ..just wanted to try it.. but I can’t find much use for it !! Probably because I have already cygwin installed under Windows.

    December 15th, 2005 at 10:11 am
  5. rasty says:

    Yeah usage is limited but it’s ok as a test ground. I’m not sure the VMware tools provide hardware 3D acceleration but it’s likely that it will come sooner or later anyway.. so, once again, try and then tell me :)

    December 17th, 2005 at 7:11 am

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