IBM, Motorola, and Apple each have their own trademark for the same technology and they all participated in its design. They have joint patents on some of its ingredients. The G4 (74xx series) and 970 have largely compatible implementations (a couple of minor, albeit annoying differences).
The VMX128 in XBox 360 has some very significant changes and is not backwards compatible even though it is very similar. Why would Microsoft care about compatibility with the existing VMX? It is not in their interests to be compatible with existing software, and not in their interest to have software for their platform trivially compatible with other platforms.
Oh Noes! I'll never run OS X on an XBox 360 unless iTunes is taking advantage of VMX128! A 3.2Ghz PowerPC with crap branch prediction and only 512MB of RAM? Who would want that when I could spend several times as much on a Mac mini which comes with Tony Hawk 4.
WTF is wrong with you nay-sayers?!
BTW, there has been lots of speculation that Nintendo will make their Revolution platform easy access for indie titles, or perhaps even open.
PS: Darwin is not a microkernel
PPS: OS X wouldn't require OF if Darwin didn't. You can always construct a device tree by other means.
Comments
Originally posted by Chucker
Motorola developed it; it's their trademark. Apple calls it the Velocity Engine. IBM -- who licensed it for their own CPUs -- calls it VMX.
Note that Motorola has since further developed the technology, which IBM doesn't yet make use of to my knowledge.
For some reason, I thought I once read that both Apple and Motorola developed Altivec. Thanks.
IBM, Motorola, and Apple each have their own trademark for the same technology and they all participated in its design. They have joint patents on some of its ingredients. The G4 (74xx series) and 970 have largely compatible implementations (a couple of minor, albeit annoying differences).
The VMX128 in XBox 360 has some very significant changes and is not backwards compatible even though it is very similar. Why would Microsoft care about compatibility with the existing VMX? It is not in their interests to be compatible with existing software, and not in their interest to have software for their platform trivially compatible with other platforms.
WTF is wrong with you nay-sayers?!
BTW, there has been lots of speculation that Nintendo will make their Revolution platform easy access for indie titles, or perhaps even open.
PS: Darwin is not a microkernel
PPS: OS X wouldn't require OF if Darwin didn't. You can always construct a device tree by other means.
Originally posted by FotNS
CNET says it will have 512MB.
You're right, sorry, I guess I misread. Ignore me.