XLR8 has announced support and compatibility with the soon to be released OS X for its Carrier ZIF, MACh Carrier and MACh Speed G3 & G4 Z Mac processor upgrade products.

"Apple has generated tremendous developer support for OS X and our customers will be pleased to learn that their processor upgrades will support the new operating system," stated Jack Kolk, VP and General Manager of XLR8. " We have big plans for utilizing some of the core features of OS X, such as symmetric multi-processing (SMP), and will support OS X across all our current product lines. Current customers should visit our website at http://www.xlr8.com/ for software upgrades and additional information later this year."

The following Power Macintosh machines and configurations are covered by this announcement:

XLR8 Carrier ZIF Adapter with G3 cpu installed:
Apple Power Macintosh 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8600, 9500 and 9600, UMAX SuperMac, S900 and J700, DayStar Millennium and Genesis MP 720, 800, 900 and 932 systems PowerCC, PowerBase, PowerTower (&Pro), PowerCenter (&Pro) and PowerWave.

XLR8 Carrier ZIF Adapter with G4 cpu installed:
Apple Power Macintosh 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8600, 9500 and 9600, UMAX SuperMac, S900 and J700, DayStar Millennium and Genesis MP 720, 800, 900 and 932 systems PowerCC, PowerTower Pro and PowerWave.

XLR8 MACh Speed G4 &G3 Z:
Beige, blue and white and G4 desktops machines that utilize ZIF socket upgrades.

For additional information on OS X compatibility, visit:
http://www.xlr8.com

Late last month, Robert Farnsworth, President and CEO of Sonnet Technologies, Inc., announced that Sonnet's Crescendo PCI and Encore ZIF G3 and G4 processor upgrades will definitely be compatible with Mac OS X.

This is great news for anyone with a PCI based Power Mac who has been holding their breath in hope that they wouldn't be shut out of the OS X experience by incompatibility. Sonnet's announcement does not mean, of course, that OS X will be officially supported by Apple on upgraded older machines (to the best of my knowledge, the exact support cut-off has not yet been firmly announced, but it could be the 233 MHz G3, which would include the early beige G3 Power Macs and the Revision A/B iMacs, as well as all of the G3 Series PowerBooks).

When I recently bought a UMAX SuperMac S 900 six-slot PCI machine, I hoped that the upgrade folks would come through with OS X compatibility. Now two of them have. Thanks folks!

Charles W. Moore

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July 04, 2008