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Sat 04 Mar 2006
On Intel and Loving It
Category : Technology/Intel.txt
I've moved my development work totally to Intel. This is DNS Enabler, WebMon, MailServe, Luca, and even Postfix Enabler, all tested working on my Intel iMac Core Duo. The Intel iMac is fast and I'm loving it. Luca is a sizeable project and takes about three to four minutes to compile from a clean build on my iBook. It takes less than a minute on the new iMac. I love how everything just works. It's easy to forget that the Mac's got a totally new processor underneath. It just works like a Mac should. Even the performance of the applications under emulation, like the Adobe apps and Microsoft Office, is at least as fast as on my iBook and may even be faster. They just feel zippier. Maybe it's because the Finder seems to be a lot more alive and responsive on the Intel iMac. So back to the testing of my own applications. What can I say? They all work, as they should. Even Postfix Enabler, which surprised me because I did nothing to it. For all the others - including MailServe which is a rewrite/clean-up/enhancement of the Postfix Enabler code - I had written them with the idea of moving to Intel in mind. And I've compiled them as Universal Binaries. So I wasn't surprised that they work, though it's good to be able to say for sure. But Postfix Enabler? Maybe I was hoping that there would be a glitch and people would have to upgrade to MailServe. But no such luck. It works on Intel, too. Apple's got to be congratulated for having pulled this off. They've really commoditised the processor, exactly the opposite of what Intel intended with "Intel Inside". If they can do this, they can move back to PowePC, switch to AMD, or Sparc, or Itanium, and I wouldn't care - so long as their machines continue to get faster and cheaper and even more fun to use.
Posted at 3:18PM UTC | permalink
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