Mac OS X Hacked Onto Intel's Sandy Bridge Platform

Earlier this week, Intel officially unveiled its next-generation "Sandy Bridge" processor architecture, marking a significant performance improvement, especially for notebook computers. Apple is expected to utilize Sandy Bridge in upcoming revisions of a number of its Mac computers.

115026 sandy bridge snow leopard 500

Unwilling to wait for Apple to make the move to Sandy Bridge, Hackintosh fans have already managed to successfully install Mac OS X Snow Leopard on systems with Sandy Bridge hardware. By using a patched Darwin kernel, users are able to bring Mac OS X to Sandy Bridge, although the technique is obviously officially unsupported and may result in system instability.

The good news is, we've already successfully installed Mac OS X Snow Leopard!

The bad news is, until Apple uses these CPUs, it's a bit of a science experiment, as you'll need to use a "patched" non-standard Darwin kernel in order to boot the system.

A report from early last month indicated that Apple is preparing to initially make the leap to Sandy Bridge on some of its smaller notebook computers, opting to use the all-in-one platform with much-improved graphics performance compared to the company earlier offerings. Unsatisfied with Intel's earlier offerings, Apple has continued to use older Core 2 Duo chips paired with custom NVIDIA integrated graphics in its smaller form factors where discrete graphics have not been an option due to space constraints.

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