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I am asking here for the sake of completeness. I've had fun asking this on various sites, each time having it closed, following peoples' recommendations, having it closed... It's been closed on StackOverflow, closed on SuperUser, closed on programers.stackexchange... perhaps it's found its spiritual home here?

I'm reading 'Mac OS X Internals' but it was published in 2007. It has an extensive section on Mac hardware (table of contents for Chapter 3) and I want to read it all ... except it's for PowerPC not Intel architecture and I would probably be wasting my time.

  • How much of the chapter is still relevant?
  • What's the best place to gain the equivalent knowledge about the Intel architecture? I basically want an Intel equivalent of that chapter.

I don't want to actually do any hardware tinkering, I just want a solid understanding of the hardware as a programmer.

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Oh man... you had a lot of "fun" asking this question. I hope you've finally found right place (SU guys are strange with their rules). – Peter Štibraný Nov 8 '10 at 10:06
By 'fun' I do of course mean 'not fun'. It would be really nice to get an answer! – Joe Nov 8 '10 at 12:10
I understand... I wanted to express my sympathy for not giving up :-) Unfortunately I cannot help you with answer, but I would be interested in reading such document/book myself. – Peter Štibraný Nov 8 '10 at 12:22
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The question is, what do you want to know about Intel Hardware in particular? Do you want to know how does a CPU work? Do you want to know what is FSB and how does it work? Do you want to know about the RAM, the IO? I mean, a Mac has a lot of components interacting and tho they follow similar rules (in terms of electronics/electricity/physics/etc) they are very complex. (The same goes for other Intel computers and other architectures…) – Martín Marconcini Nov 8 '10 at 15:18
The answer is, I don't exactly know. I'm just reading a book and the author thinks it useful that I know this stuff. I agree. I'm reading the book as a whole, not just to find out about how the hardware works. I gave a link to the TOC for that book and I'm after something that would give me the same level of understanding my Intel machine as I would have had had I a PowerPC. I didn't want to copy-paste the TOC itself. – Joe Nov 9 '10 at 12:35
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I'm sorry that you've had such a difficult time asking this question on Stack Exchange. I haven't been able to find a better/more up-to-date book, but most of Mac OS X is CPU architecture-independent anyway, and the book you're reading does contain an appendix that discusses Mac OS X on x86 hardware and the corresponding similarities and differences between PowerPC hardware:

Appendix A, "Mac OS X on x86-Based Macintosh Computers," highlights the key differences between the x86-based and PowerPC-based versions of Mac OS X. Besides this appendix, the book covers the details of several key x86-specific topics, such as EFI, GUID-based partitioning, and Universal Binaries. Most of Mac OS X is architecture-independent, and consequently, the majority of the book is architecture-independent.

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