Mac transition to Intel processors: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:32, 19 June 2005

Revision as of 18:39, 21 June 2005

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The Macintosh line underwent a similar transition in the [[1990s]], when Apple switched from the use of Motorola's [[68K]] series of chips to their [[PowerPC]] processors, developed jointly with Apple and IBM. This took several years, and was accomplished by Apple producing versions of the [[Mac OS]] which could run on either platform, fairly low-level emulation of the 68K architure by the PowerPC models, and third party developers releasing "fat binaries" that could run natively on either architecture.

More recently Apple has transitionedbrought the Macintosh line from the earlier [[Mac OS]] family to [[Mac OS X]], a [[Unix-like]] operating system with a different user interface. This transition also took a number of years (a small percentage of older Macintoshes still run the earlier operating system), and was facilitated by the inclusion of [[Classic (Mac OS)|Classic]], an evironment in which an instance of [[Mac OS 9]] could be run, permitting the execution of programs which had not been ported to Mac OS X.

A long-rumoured internal project within Apple, known as "[[Marklar]]" was designed to ensure that builds of Mac OS X were sufficiently [[cross-platform|portable]] as to compile for both PowerPC and x86-class processors. Jobs confirmed this, stating that every version of OS X had in fact been compiled for Intel processors as well as PowerPC. It is not known what other processors, if any, Apple maintains current builds for.

==Reasons==