Hackers Patch Mac OS X 10.6 to Run on Intel’s New ‘Sandy Bridge’ CPUs

Intel has officially introduced its newly redesigned “Sandy Bridge” processors at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, effectively allowing those who had signed a non-disclosure agreement to start testing them against Mac OS X, and post their findings.

Codenamed "Sandy Bridge," the new line of processors from Intel is the first to combine visual and 3D graphics technology and microprocessors on the same chip.

The chips feature new Intel HD Graphics on each 32nm die for a significant boost in performance.

It is widely believed that Apple will be among the first to take advantage of the new hardware, with the introduction of upgraded versions of its existing Macintosh models.

Hackers, however, were keen to see how the newly architected chips would handle the Mac maker’s Snow Leopard operating system.

“Today Intel lifted the Non-Disclosure Agreement on it's new Sandy Bridge LGA Socket-1155 next generation performance chipset and CPUs,” the folks at tonymacx86 wrote yesterday.

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

On the down side, “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,” the hackers note.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was installed on a "Hackintosh" running the Intel Core i5-2500K CPU, with a clock speed of 3.30GHz.

The system achieved a Geekbench Score of 8874 and an Xbench score of 282.40.

The high score was mostly due to the 6MB of L3 cache in the Sandy Bridge chip.

As for Intel’s own impressions of its new hardware… "The new 2nd Generation Intel Core processors represent the biggest advance in computing performance and capabilities over any other previous generation," said Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager, PC Client Group, Intel.

"The built-in visual capabilities enabled by these new processors are stunning. This combined with improved adaptive performance will revolutionize the PC experience in a way that is obvious for every user to see and appreciate – visibly smarter performance," Eden added.