Official Sandy Bridge support comes to all processors or...?

[mjgunn]

This is my first attempt at a hack, and I have to say, I'm hugely impressed with how far the community has come from when I first thought about doing this 2 years ago. I bought an off the shelf dell and with minimal hassle have a fully working macintosh that is remarkably stable.

I have one question concerning official Apple SB support though. Obviously it will come via the imac at some point, at which time we'll be able to use the regular kernel instead of the hacked one we're using right now to get SB running (correct me if I'm wrong here, I'm learning as I go). My question is what if Apple delays SB imacs until summer time to launch shiny new machines alongside Lion, and by then intel has released new variants of SB chips, an i7 2700 and an i5 2550 or something like that, and Apple uses those chips. Will those of us with the 2600/2500, etc, be using a hacked kernel forever, or would supporting the basic architecture be enough for us to be on the stock kernel even if Apple isn't using our exact chip?

 

[Say Heading]

I´m not competent to judge whether basic architecture support would be enough.
But I have a different approach to your problem:
If I ever should require to have an unpatched kernel I can still change the processor to match the new design. The motherboard layout (socket and chipset) shouldn´t be effected so far.

 

[Implied]

A. Apple wouldn't release iMacs + Lion together, they like to do things separate. More income if you buy new iMac and then buy the Lion upgrade 2 months later. Yes, some people actually end up doing this.

B. Don't worry, there's no new Sandy Bridge Desktop Quad-Core Processors (excluding Xeon Server Processors which won't be used in iMacs, only Mac Pros) due out this year. Following these come Ivy Bridges in late 2011/2012. You can find release dates for all SB Processors on Google and various Sites.

Only Desktop Processors left to launch are the 6 and 8 core "Extreme Processors" in late '11 (which won't be used on any Macs AFAIK) and the low-end Duo-Core Processors in February up through Quarter 2.

The Ivy Bridges are maintaining the same LGA 1155 Socket the Sandy Bridges have, so no need for a Motherboard change. That's as far as anyone knows, not much information on Ivy Bridges out yet.

 

[mjgunn]

I thought they released new hardware alongside Leopard and SL, but I could be mistaken. But, I'm glad to hear about the no new processors, I had seen the leaked roadmap but wasn't sure it was accurate, thanks for the help.

 

[alux]

Take a look at this
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/inte ... -20100816/