It has been officially announced that the Mac platform will be moving to Intel processors.
I’m still thinking about what this means for MalcolmHardie Software and SQLEditor and I have been reading about the transition to find out more.
Some useful points culled from publicly available documention:
- Mac OS X on Intel doesn’t use Open Firmware (at least not currently). Does this mean that it uses a conventional BIOS or something entirely different?
- Rosetta (the translation environment) does not run Applications built for Mac OS 8 or 9. Does this mean that the Classic environment will run them, or are these applications dead?
- Rosetta doesn’t handle code written specifically for AltiVec
- Rosetta must run the whole application, you apparently can’t mix some bits of native code and other bits of emulated code, even with plugins. (I suspect inter-application communication might work here though)