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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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    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…)
    – Martin Marconcini
    Nov 8, 2010 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, 2010 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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