[swichd]

What is the difference between New World Macs and Old World Macs (besides the colorful cases)?

[Thilo Ettelt]

Originally posted by swichd:
What is the difference between New World Macs and Old World Macs (besides the colorful cases)?

The New World Macs have

• an Open Firmware
• an UMA (Unified Mainboard Architecture)

I hope the words are self descriptive enough
If not then somebody else plz help.


- Thilo

[swichd]

Open Firmware is IEEE 1275, right? What is UMA?

[reader50]

UMA = Unified Macintosh Architecture - all this means is that the different Mac models shared a common chipset. In theory, this speeded up the development of new Mac models while lowering the development cost. In practice, I hope it lowered Apple's development cost, because new Mac models did not turn up any faster.

[swichd]

Thanks

[Thilo Ettelt]

Originally posted by reader50:
UMA = Unified Macintosh Architecture - all this means is that the different Mac models shared a common chipset. In theory, this speeded up the development of new Mac models while lowering the development cost. In practice, I hope it lowered Apple's development cost, because new Mac models did not turn up any faster.

I did a bit of research on the UMA definition. And I found out that it actually means Unified Memory Architecture, which is a PC standard and is not related to this. The terminology related to the Mac was made up by rumor websites according to Accelerateyourmac.com (search for "UMA" using Safari's find method). I don't want to start a big discussion about it, but I am 100% sure it is an abbreviation for "Unified Mainboard Architecture", but unfortunetely Google didn't spit anything out, except this article by the german computer magazine C't with high reputation.


- Thilo

[Lateralus]

Google shows over 11,000 results for Unified Motherboard Architecture, which is the only variation of the UMA definition I have ever heard used.

[Partisan01]

Originally posted by Thilo Ettelt:
The New World Macs have

• an Open Firmware


- Thilo

This is not entirely true, Old World Macs also have openfirmware, but just a different version, not nearly as mature as the OF in New World Macs.

An excellent technical discussion of Old World Open Firmware can be found
here . This is on the OpenBSD-PPC mailing list.

[tooki]

Originally posted by Thilo Ettelt:
...• an UMA (Unified Mainboard Architecture)

Originally posted by reader50:
UMA = Unified Macintosh Architecture - all this means is that the different Mac models shared a common chipset.

Originally posted by Thilo Ettelt:
I did a bit of research on the UMA definition. And I found out that it actually means Unified Memory Architecture

It was well-documented in Mac publications (not rumor sites) that it means Unified Motherboard Architecture. Note "architecture", not "model" or "design". What it means is that all the Macs based on UMA have a common design, as far as software is concerned, making OS development easier, and one basic architecture, which means developing one main electrical design rather than as many as 5, as Apple had done in the past.

This made it possible to reduce cost and, above all, improve stability, compatibility, and performance. (Hence my Pismo being every bit as fast as my B&W G3. In the past laptop designs had lagged significantly in performance behind similarly-equipped desktops.)

Of course, conflicts of acronyms happen all the time: UMA does mean uniform memory access (in contrast to NUMA: non-uniform memory access, which was initially mistakenly hypothesized to have been employed in the Power Mac G5). Or Unifom Memory Architecture. Or Unified Memory Access. Or Unified Memory Architecture.

tooki