BM: The product that we are going to ship is going to be much better than OSX from Apple
I sure hope he's talking about core technology, not user interfaces. Old-fashioned UNIX is ideal for Apple's vertical monopoly, compared to more flexible VP techniques that can be licensed. Hardly anybody has the budget to compete with Apple's glossy graphics, and casual users care more about style than substance, anyway.
TOT: Will OS5 be a 64-bit OS, i.e. run on 64-bit CPUs, with a 64-bit address space? What about memory protection?
BM: I would prefer not answering this at this time.
Why not?
BM: The Cell processor is used by Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii (stupid name by the way), and Playstation 3.
Bill is not a hardware guy.
BM: There are numerous other high end graphics and multi-media devices coming out in the coming months that use Cell, and Cell is PPC.
Cell is not PPC, it merely contains it.
The power of Cell is not in the PPC core. The PPC is a [rather weak] controller that feeds the coprocessors that actually do the work. Making a CPU-agnostic VP core would be ideal under this situation, thus reducing the significance of the PPC architecture itself.
Making software that runs on lowest-common-denominator hardware is easy, and Java owns that game. The money is in coprocessor tools that fully exploit unique hardware features while still making software fairly portable (DirectX, for example -- Windows would be dead without it).
