Bad thought just popped into my head - does this mean the supply of PPC CPUs to the upgrade manufacturers will eventually dry up? I'm cruising the main mfrs sites now for any comment. If anyone has any links to concrete statements, plese post them here.
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There will be CPUs available for some time, and for folks who want to keep using PPC Macs, the incentive to upgrade will be even more compelling than before.
just my $.03
dan k
Heh heh, just had to pose the question so's I could answer it.
No way, never happen, the architectures are far too different!
dan k
What about a PPC co-processor card for the new boxes? Mmmmm, Universal Binaries with native Altivec...
EDIT: I'm tripping, right?
Not true at all! Have you seen the 'upgrade' for the G4 cube that turns it into a PC?
You're joking, right?? Could you prehaps provide a link for that upgrade? Sounds too good to be true...
I remember seeing it on one of the Applefritter user's websites a few months back.
I wrote to the XLR8YourMac website about this. I got a reply saying he'd written to each of the mfrs and had so far had no reply. I guess that means the mfrs are still working out what this all means to them. xlr8yourmac.com is the premier website for information on upgrades, so I assume they'd want to keep him informed.
The slashdot article linking to danaquarium about the planned g4 to pentium m upgrade was posted by me. I figured out about 3 minutes after posting it that all of the articles on the site are hoaxes. Great joke, though.
I think that PowerPC upgrades will be around for a long long time. There are a lot of us who will do whatever it takes to hang on to our beloved Power Macs. And the native PowerPC coprocessor boards sound like a lucrative market. It's only a matter of time before we see them.
The migration to intel will either kill the upgrade vendors, or help them tremendously. Sadly, I don't think we'll ever see G5 Processor upgardes, so those vendors were going to hit ground at some point anyway.
-iantm
Amigas ran combo 68k/PPC accellerator cards. They needed special driver and/or OS to work, but they could use both, IIRC. It was also possible (but rarely/never done) to use the Amiga BridgeBoard (x86 on a combo Zorro/ISA card) as a co-pro on the older Amigas. It is feasible to do an x86/PPC combo, but it is also feasible that Intel gets licensed AltiVec or they design their own setup and create a translation layer.