Apple is known to squeeze their suppliers for every last penny. This article seems very plausible. In the end I think Apple squeezed a little too hard and IBM just said No. Jon Stokes raises the interesting question of who exactly promised Apple a 3GHz G5 within 1 year and why. If IBM engineers knew that 3GHz could not be realized on the current short-pipeline architecture and that a deeper pipeline design was simply not achievable within 12 months, then it raises a lot of questions. However,
1. Did Apple set themselves up by forcing IBM to promise something that could not practically be delivered (i.e. over-commit)?
2. If Apple is really interested in obtaining the best price from Intel, then it makes sense to purchase desktop, laptop, and embedded (i.e. XScale for iPod) CPUs all together to increase volume. Stokes' argument makes sense here. Apple needs the performance of XScale for video iPods.
In my view question 1 is questionable, but item 2 may well be the precipitating factor irrespective of the delay in striving for 3GHz or in keeping up with the performance-per-Watt race. Apple really does squeeze its suppliers -- including Samsung recently for flash memory. Suppliers are ordered to produce a large quantity, Apple only buys a little at a time, and if the supplier sits on un-purchased parts, Apple buys them at a further discount or the supplier ends up trying to dump them on the open market (e.g. Samsung may face this possibility if iPod Shuffle sales do not pick up).
