SMP on a G3 or G4

[dogbert at clue4all.net (Brian Conway)]

>         I don't remeber who posted the question about the Dual G4's, but I
> just talked to a friend who told me that the new Imac's rolling off the
> line with the capibilty of being upgraded to dual or maybe even quad.  He
> got the information at www.macsurfer.com - another tidbit I heard was that
> they are going to began to manufacture dual proc video cards.  I think MAC
> be the RISC of choice for Linux users everywhere.

This is a great topic for a debate/war, so I'll just keep this as
incontroversial as possible for now.  I've heard many discussions along
these lines, and while it is arguable that Mac hardware could prolly be
considered superior to intel (and thus a great standard platform for
linux), there are a few problems that would come with the Mac being the
platform of choice.  The first of these (though not really that
important) being the extravagant price that often comes along with Mac
hardware when compared to intel is significantly more.  Another (also
not that important) would be the availability and diversity of hardware
that is available for the Mac platform as compared to our beloved
(kinda) intel.  Most importantly, however, is the fact that the linux
kernel development is done mainly on the x86 platform and then ported
and adjusted from there.  While it works quite well on others, unless
the mainstream development is moved, the other platforms will still be
playing catch-up and remain a bit buggy.  I have both an alpha and a
sparc box that I've done a great deal of work on and love dearly, but
even those platforms which don't require extra patching to get a
compiled kernel working are still a bit scetchy for use.  I have nothing
against Macs or any other platforms, and would love to pick up a nice
box if I felt confident that I wouldn't run into any problems using
linux on it for my main desktop.  Please don't start yelling too loudly.
;-)

Brian Conway
dogbert at clue4all.net

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
                -- Henry Spencer
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