I read an article recently in which it was stated that IBM was going to be offering 4U PPC 970 systems for $3500.
Given that a 2U system from Apple is $3000, what's to prevent me from buying the IBM machine and slapping OS X on it? Is there some kind of firmware check? Of course, I'm assuming IBM would sell a single 4U system to an individual, which may be a big assumption.
I think a 4U PPC 970 with OS X, AIX and Linux installed in a triple-boot configuration would be pretty cool. :)
Re:PPC 970 dreams
djberg96 on 2003-07-22T03:39:56
Oh? Well in that case, I'll just shut up now.:-P
-sam
Re:The CPU is the same, but...
djberg96 on 2003-07-22T03:42:08
I doubt Apple would ever port it for the same reason they won't port to x86 - it would cut into their own hardware sales. That's too bad, though.
From what I've read, they are releasing them as blade systems, four machines in a 4U (4 * 1.75" tall), two in a 2U.
But you won't be able to install OSX on these. You can't install it on the Amiga G3 based boards. There's custom wonkery involved on the mac boards.
That said, I'm sure it will be only a matter of time before Mac On Linux will run on these. It already runs OSX on the Amiga boxes. MOL is an amazing piece of work. Though the real question is why you would actually WANT OSX (or Mac OS X as I believe pudge wants us to call it) running on one of these. They're decidedly not a desktop, and I can't imagine why I'd want Darwin and/or OSX on them instead of Linux or Free/Net/OpenBSD.
