In article <3gr18rFcobl4U1@individual.net>,
Ilgaz Ocal <Ilgaz@spamcop.net> wrote:
We all miss something, this type of transition from one CPU family to
other has NEVER happened in IT history.
Rubbish. It's happened to VMS twice. VMS started out on the VAX
architecture, moved to Alpha, and finally it has moved to Intel
Itanium2. Who knows, it may have to move again if Itanium2 fails.
It's happened to Sun machines to. Very early Sun workstations were
based on the i386 processor, and only later moved to SPARC, and then
again to UltraSPARC.
It's happened to Silicon Graphics machines; some of the varieties of
MIPS processor are *very* different from each other.
It's happened to DEC UNIX machines. They started out with some on i386
and some on MIPS, and then moved to Alpha.
In almost every part of the computing world *except* the PC world, major
architecture changes are quite common. They're usually pretty painless
in the UNIX world, because UNIX apps don't talk to the hardware
directly, and so a simple recompile is all that's required. I run Linux
daily on six different architectures - Alpha, two very different
flavours of Itanium2 (SGI Altix and HP rx4640), x86, x86_64 and PowerPC.
And all my software just compiles and runs without modification on any
of them.
Don't get hung up on processor and architecture changes; if the OS and
software are written right, and I think that's the case (at last) with
OS X, then it really doesn't matter at all.