Apple on Intel - Lisp considerations
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
Geez, I only just finish stunning the world with news that my weblog
is
back up again and Steve Jobs has to go and upstage me by
announcing that Apple is going to start
using Intel processors in it's PC's! ;-)
Well, the Apple announcement has been just about analyzed to death
already (see
here,
here,
here,
here,
here), but only Brian Mastenbrook
examined the
crucial issue surrounding the Apple announcement:
"I'm sure the first thought on everybody's minds is: so what does this mean for open source Common Lisp on OS X?"He gives a good summary of what the implications are for SBCL and OpenMCL and finishes up with:
"Personally I'm a bit sad at Apple's lack of imagination, but I can understand their decision, as they were caught between a vendor who would rather design exceedingly simple PowerPCs for game consoles and a vendor who doesn't care about Apple's market at all. But they no longer have any edge on speed, which is a bit disappointing. I'm also a bit disappointed by the seeming back-step from a 64-bit architecture to a 32-bit one. They didn't mention E64M64T64TME or whatever Intel calls its clone of AMD64 during the keynote, and I wonder if Apple plans to support fat 32-bit / 64-bit x86 binaries at some point in the future."I'm also a bit sad about the apparent "back-step from a 64-bit architecture to a 32-bit one". However, there is not much detail in Apple's announcement as to what their plans are so it will be interesting to see which Intel chips they actually support.
