Has anyone given any thought to how Apple's change from Power PC to Intel processors will affect PearPC?

Will it make it redundant?

Has anyone heard from the developers on this?

_________________
Once you've made something idiot proof, they go and invent a better idiot!

I think we will be looking at a generation of emulators that can transparently access the CPU, like Virtual PC does on the x86 systems and boot (hopefully) MacOS natively.

The switch would probably cause PearPC to slow down a little, but it will remain, and join the "club" of SheepShaver and Basilisk II, serving as an emulator for an older machinve. Besides, there will still be Linux/PPC.

btw Yellow Dog Linux would probably slow down a lot more than PearPC.

the "ring 0 sharing" approach is the only right one if there is no way to do a multiboot on non-apple x86

as maconlinux or colinux r doing right now
they r transparent layers between the guest os and the host one but no hardware is emulated and it's all natively run
guest os cannot touch the hardware directly
but hardware calls is intercepted by the layer and then putted on the "queue" of hardware requests

virtual pc or vmware are virtual machines that totally emulate the x86 architecture, hardware etc
so it's very heavy



i agree

I'm still confused about this whole Macintel dealy. Does this mean that they will be making no hardware of their own anymore, or just opening up the market to a new audience? If that's the case, then pearpc will have nothing ot worry about. Also, I doubt that this would stop the project, as they are not doing it because Mac OS X does not run on an x86 or that you cannot compile binarys. They are doing it, simply to see if they can do it, and to say that they did do it. I strongly doubt it will hinder any progress or slow it down.

They're doing it because IBM wouldn't supply enough PowerPCs and/or laptop-worthy processors. And they will continue to make hardware of their own, they would just use Intel CPUs instead of IBM ones.

> btw Yellow Dog Linux would probably slow down a lot more than PearPC.

maybe, but after all, they still make a Linux for 68K's...

> Does this mean that they will be making no hardware of their own anymore

no don't worry, it will still be the exact same thing as before, except that instead of having a CPU made by IBM, it'll be made by Intel. As PPC digger said, it's been for years (i think since the G4) that Apple had problems to get enough CPU's from IBM, now IBM does its CPU's for consoles. for the average mac user, it's not a big deal. It's as if Ferrarri was taking another brand of tires for its F1 cars. of course it still leaves opportunities of running Windows on Mac and Mac on Windows

now, is there an already existing product that will let us run Mac OS X on Windows when the x86 version will be released or will it take a new un-existing yet virtual machine software to be written?