Tuesday, November 4, 2003Xbox to Switch to PowerPC. The chip that powers the Macintosh will soon be in Microsoft's gaming console. That's good news for IBM and a bad sign for Intel. By Leander Kahney.
(technical soapbox warning)
When I first looked into the Microsoft .NET environment and saw how it was layered. The fundamental part that struck me was that this was a hardware neutral platform. It has the concept of an intermediate level where all of the code becomes interpreted by the lower layers. This is kind of cool - but it's really a way to be hardware neutral. The promise at the time I saw it was that there would be Just In Time (JIT) types of interpretation which would generate native code when a function was called and that this type of environment provided all kinds of nice integration (common calls across all languages, blah, blah, blah...)
Given this hardware neutral code base, it would be possible to target any hardware. It also struck me that Microsoft could migrate a majority of their code into .NET, and then cut most of their ties to the existing infrastructure (i.e. particular CPU, old interfaces that they no longer want to support...). It'd be an expensive move... but it becomes possible once enough applications make it into .NET.
The fact that they'll use Virtual PC to emulate the existing XBox is just another example of how platform neutral it appears that they are becoming.
We'll just going to have to wait and see how this plays out in the next couple of years.
(stepping down from the technical soapbox now...)
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