While X86 based products have dropped significantly in price, Apple products have maintained a consistent price. Mihocka suggests that this break in the curve represents the benefit to consumers brought about by the competition between AMD and Intel. Heat generation is of lesser importance for Intel and AMD, because fans are used regularly. IBM and Motorola have not responded to this desktop competition, perhaps because their offerings need to meet the power consumption and heat generation requirements of the embedded market. However, the curves of processors from AMD and Intel showed a steep break around the point where AMD began competing directly with Intel.

When curves were drawn connecting all of a company’s processors over time, the point was clearly illustrated.

Additionally, stiff competition has made these lower priced products rise in performance more quickly than the PowerPC.ĭuring his MacHack presentation, Mihocka drew a chart where he plotted the prices and performances of processors from Motorola, IBM, Intel and AMD. Mihocka believes that the competition between Intel and AMD has resulted in far lower comparative prices for X86 processors. This will allow the company to emulate the Mac OS up to version 9.1.

However, the company is working on a software PowerPC emulator for X86 processors. This limits the product to emulating Mac OS software that does not require a PowerPC processor. Emulators’ flagship product, SoftMac, emulates the Mac OS as a standard Windows application.Ĭurrently, SoftMac emulates a Motorola 68K processor on X86 processors from AMD and Intel. President Darek Mihocka boldly suggested at the MacHack conference that low prices and the considerable power of X86 processors make it more attractive than ever to run the Mac OS on X86 hardware instead of Apple hardware.

Mac 68k emulator