Freescale CEO on Apple, Intel and IBM

[Fukui]

IBM screwed up. They should've had the foresight - they sell boxes with G5s in them(w/ higher margins than Apple's, IIRC). IBM's customers don't want improved power efficiency and/or more computational power per-rack? I find that hard to believe.

Never-mind the 3Ghz miss.

Its likely also a conflict of interest. Imagine if the 970 was way more powerfull and also more effecient than the Power 5/6, then they cant sell chips for U.S $10,000 a piece anymore.

The chips for video games can be faster because they are extremely specialized and therefore have a limited use to the customers of the power series... its kind of like intel delaying xeon to 64-bit cause they wanna sell itanium... its thier baby.

 

[rayz]

A custom chip design, sure. However, we're not talking "custom chip design" in the traditional sense - more like an optimized version of existing designs which should've been in the works from the beginning.

No matter what you call it, its custom design work. The chip that's powering the new XBOx360 is a derivative of the same PPC technology, and Microsoft still had to pay for it

IBM screwed up. They should've had the foresight - they sell boxes with G5s in them(w/ higher margins than Apple's, IIRC).

If IBM believed that Apple would ever sell enough machines to make the development worthwhile, then they may have been a little less reluctant to foot the bill. I mistakenly believed that Apple was a major IBM customer, but apparently only 2% (though some sites say the figure may have been as high as 5%) of the PPC revenues. So it's very unlikely that IBM was going to do free work for that ... :-/

IBM's customers don't want improved power efficiency and/or more computational power per-rack? I find that hard to believe.

Well, yes they do. An IBM will continue to provide that for paying customers. The vast majority of PPC chips end up in embedded systems, so I imagine that lower power/high perfomance is a requirement.

Remember that Jobs never said that IBM wasn't capable of doing it; that may be a lie that may or may not trip him up later on. What he said was that Intel offered a roadmap that was better suited Apple's plans, and this is perfectly true.

Cheap fast chips that Apple can buy off the shelf. Much cheaper than custom design work.

[Never-mind the 3Ghz miss.

Well to be honest, everyone missed their target this year, which is one of the reasons that Intel decided to sweep MHz under the carpet and go for a power/performance measure instead. MHz is a pretty meaningless measure anyway.
As an aside though; IBM was actually closer to achieving their stated target that Intel; they also had a greater %age increase in MHz than Intel too. But they did miss 3GHz, yes.

Now about that promise of hitting the magical 3. Can anyone find which IBM executive actually SAID they would do it? I can find lots of references fore Jobs saying it; but IBM seemed to have been pretty silent on it.
I find it a little odd that IBM would have agreed to continue development at that point in time, without having gotten an agreement from Apple to pay for it.