[BUGS] Greetings (once again)

[Andrew Reilly]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2007 at 09:30:36PM +1100, Jerahmy Pocott wrote:
> The switch to intel was a surprise, but I guess IBM wasn't making fast
> enough cpus any more..

Well IBM has never been particularly interested in making
laptop CPUs, and Motorola is more interested in the embedded
market.  But Apple would have been aware of the PASemi
(http://www.pasemi.com) processors, which would have made lovely
laptop processors (it's what they were designed for).  I suspect
that a bigger reason is that going with Intel means that they
don't have to keep designing their own motherboard chipsets:
they can just OEM the whole computer and get someone like Acer
to built it for them.

> The intel macs use Xeon processors, so they
> are still better than just regular PC cpus..

Not really.  Some of them have larger caches, but there's not
much in it for desktop software.  Most of the laptops use
regular Core2-series chips, same as everyone else (which is the
point, I think.)  If you were going to buy a desk-side
workstation box and spend what Apple wants for theirs, you'd
wind up with Xeons or Opterons too.

> Does this mean no more worrying about endian? Everyone just uses
> little now?

No.  The real reason that you don't have to worry about
endian-ness any more is that compilers have become sufficiently
advanced that the ugly type-punning (that was the only way
to really see endian issues) is now too dangerous, even on
processors of the same endianness.  Once you have to accurately
specify a wire or disk format, and write a parser to suit it
that will get past gcc4.2 without the -fnostrict-aliasing
switch, then your code will pretty much work with either
endianness.  The widespread use of XML and UTF-8 is helping with
that too.  Bytes are endian-agnostic :-)

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew