Replacement Intel motherboards in G5's years from now?

[awediohead]

Just wondering if this is remotely likely or even possible?

Obviously people like Gigadesigns now make CPU upgrades for G4's, presumably at some point G5 CPU upgrades will also become available for G5 based machines - but with the switch to Intel it's no longer as question of just upgrading the CPU is it?

Of course unless something pretty drastic happens at Apple to make them do a U turn policy wise, they're not going to be offering these for sale - but can you envisage third party companies doing so? - what will companies like Sonnet, Gigadesigns etc be doing a few years from now if they can't offer an upgrade path from PowerPC to Intel?

I guess this revolves around lots of things that are presently unknown - such as just how hard Apple are going to make it to run OSX on motherboards that are - except for a couple of Apple specific tweaks - identical to those Intel sell to everyone else and what licensing arrangements might be put in place.

Sorry if this has already been done to death - I'm aware of the threads in various forums discussing hacking/cracking OSX to work on PC's - but this is a different question about legitimate upgrade paths that don't involve buying an entire computer for the sake of it's motherboard some years from now.

cheers

[TonyBelmont]

Originally Posted by awediohead

Just wondering if this is remotely likely or even possible?

Obviously people like Gigadesigns now make CPU upgrades for G4's, presumably at some point G5 CPU upgrades will also become available for G5 based machines - but with the switch to Intel it's no longer as question of just upgrading the CPU is it?

Of course unless something pretty drastic happens at Apple to make them do a U turn policy wise, they're not going to be offering these for sale - but can you envisage third party companies doing so? - what will companies like Sonnet, Gigadesigns etc be doing a few years from now if they can't offer an upgrade path from PowerPC to Intel?

I guess this revolves around lots of things that are presently unknown - such as just how hard Apple are going to make it to run OSX on motherboards that are - except for a couple of Apple specific tweaks - identical to those Intel sell to everyone else and what licensing arrangements might be put in place.

Sorry if this has already been done to death - I'm aware of the threads in various forums discussing hacking/cracking OSX to work on PC's - but this is a different question about legitimate upgrade paths that don't involve buying an entire computer for the sake of it's motherboard some years from now.

cheers

Very unlikely and probably impossible....

[FFTT]

I guess a few years from now we might see a few interesting upgrades come along through XLR8yourmac.com, but they've never done motherboards before.

I can certainly see a market for AGP to PCI-Express motherboards, but have no clue how that might be doable or if such a major upgrade would be at all cost effective.

Years from now most of us will be deciding on which Quad Core and Octa Core processors are best for audio.

[Reptil]

herd your G5s and Intels into a group and you can start a farm

(yehaa)

[FFTT]

Of course by that time Longhorn( aka Vista ) might have finally figured out a way to get it's hooves out of that stinking pile of manure.