Behind the Apple-Intel Deal, IBM Surprised

[tdewey]

Ownage Issues?

And if Apple can ramp up the speed of changeover, don't you think they will?

Very interesting point. I think once the Yonah PowerBooks are introduced and their pwnage over the G4 PBs becomes widely known Apple may need to speed the changeover to prevent a serious Osborne effect.

 

[DeepIn2U]

Oh The Horror, lol.

1st SiliconAddict, I love that humorous line! I really needed that, and hope those still even mentioning the Cell in using computers recognizes.

* Maybe IBM COULD advance the G5 line... but it would cost a lot more than they once expected. Enter Intel, who has fast chips coming based on the Pentium M.

I strongly disagree, IBM has been spending time researching their SOI and manufacturing processess with Toshiba, Sony, AMD and others for their respective cpu designs. There is no excuse that IBM can give about not advancing the PowerPC 970 any further than it has for the last 12 months, Kelly III "We have a roadmap that is going to knock your socks off" , seeing how it has gained vast knowledge about cpu's during this time or even longer.

I wonder how recent sales & development helped to increase Kelly III's pay?!!

IBM essentially gives two excuses: First, the Apple PC market wasn't large enough. Complete BS. IBM isn't a small naive company. They did their due diligence. They had Apple sales figures and projections before the agreement took place and knew precisely what they were getting into. Second, cost. Again, complete BS. Besides the reasons noted above, their cost couldn't have wavered from projections unless there were major technical problems on their end requiring additional resources (expenses) to resolve. Frankly, if that were the case, that's their problem. But I see IBM has made no such admission.

The fact is, IBM made promises and they didn't deliver.

I totally agree. IBM isnt stupid nor is niave. The enter into any kind of contract anymore without first planning and seeing all possible avenues open to THEM. Their excuses, for technical issues of advancing the PPC 970 - after gaining recent knowledge of other advances their working on - I wont buy into. They helped AMD when they were stuck, look at their cpu's now! Apple worked with them and came up with an amazing asic for the PPC 970 - Apple engineers did their part. So IBM has made no such admission for issues with cpu advancement other than going from 130 to 90nm process. The entire Industry had this issue; Jobs had to be the front man to mention this, not IBM's Kelly III. However Intel has already overcome this - without working with cpu designs with Toshiba, Sony, and AMD!! I truely begin to realize why Jobs made his decision for the FUTURE - yes not immediately, but the future of Apple's cpu's in a step by step implimentation process. Why cant people see that this is a step by step course of action. They still haven't mentioned what CLASS of cpu their going to use - educated guesses & speculation yet nothing proven as of yet. We'll see by 3rd or 4th qtr next year.

Arn great job on finding more info regarding this. This must be causing family enjoyment issues for you and serious lack of sleep. I for one am very greatful & hope that your family can understand and support you.

 

[MagnusDredd]

PPC, Cell, x86 (part 2)

2) Intel

Intel's history before the Pentium Classic is immaterial to this discussion. Intel's Pentium Classic (P5 architecture) was nothing special in it's time and still isn't. However the original replacement for it, the Pentium Pro (beginnings of P6), was a pretty nice upgrade to it. However there was a great deal of legacy 16 bit code still in use and the PPro sucked at running it. Enter the Pentium II, which was the first iteration of the P6 architecture. The P6 architecture basically brought about having the ISA (commands the CPU takes) not neccesarily the same as what the CPU uses internally in order to get the job done. So while the nasty legacy instructions from the 286 still worked, they were not used by the CPU to crunch numbers. The Pentium 3 was an evolutionary upgrade, basically just another revision of the P6 architecture. The P3 series chips while beginning to run pretty hot, don't compare with the space heater P4 models. The P4's (Netburst architecture) basic idea was that you take a little bit of data at a time, but make a long line of it and make it process a little at a time, but damned fast. Intel felt that they could simply keep upping the clock speed (which is what many people think makes a CPU fast), and reap the benefits of the Mhz-Myth while getting more and more performance. The price of this was that the CPUs were retardedly hot, and performed up to 40% slower than the Pentium 3 it replaced when run at the same clock speed (Mhz). The original idea was that the Netburst architecture would be adjusted from time to time, but clocked up to 10Ghz before it ran out of steam. This couldn't have been farther from the truth.

So during the transition to 90nm (the width of the wires in the CPU), and after far more revisions to Netburst than had been anticipated, and getting stomped by Opterons in performance, Intel took it like a man, and admitted that Netburst was done. All this time, the P6 architecture continued to evolve and Intel realizing that they had the answer they needed already, abandoned their roadmap containing Netburst and replaced it with one using dual core P6 chips. The Penium-M or P4 Mobile isn't really a P4 at all. It's an updated, modernized P3. Centrino laptops all use this chip. The Pentium M has not been updated to the point where it has the same FSB or high clock speeds of the P4, however another site recently showed that a Pentium-M can compete with a P4 favorably in gaming benchmarks even though it only uses 25% the power of the P4 and has much slower memory access and clock speed. An updated (modern FSB, etc) multicore Pentium-M is an attractive CPU indeed.

Furthermore Intel's main business with these chips is to supply Personal Computer vendors for laptops and deaktops. This means that Dell, HP, Gateway, Sony, Toshiba, now Apple, and tons of other computer makers all share the costs of paying for Intel's development of desktop/laptop chips. Intel has bet their business on being able to compete in this arena, and while they don't always have the fastest or cheapest x86 CPUs, they are cheap enough, they are fast enough, and they can make enough to meet everyones needs with chips to spare...

From the software side of things, everyone and their brother is familiar with x86. Many people, when they talk about programming in assembly, seem to forget that x86 assembly is simply one of many assembly languages. It's so pervasive that many developers have x86 assembly gurus in house to hand optimize code for their programs. Futhermore GCC's Intel output is better due to the fact that so many more people work on making it better. And if that's not enough, according to Apple, Intel's compilers will be made to work with Apple developer tools at some point. Intel's compilers are much better at outputting x86 optimized code, because they don't have to support anything other than x86 if for no other reason. Also since Intel lives or dies by their CPUs, it's in their best interest to make Intel compiler generated applications FAST.

Applications ported to MacOS X for Intel from Windows should be able to take advantage of the hand coded optimizations for x86. While this will not affect the ability of an app to run on both platforms, it will help to make them faster on Intel Macs. In the future, OSX games that are ported from windows when run on Intel Macs will kick the crap out of their PPC brothers due to this. This effect will not be immediate, but should probably crop up a year or so after the Intel machines begin shipping. I don't expect Photoshop to run as fast on an Intel Mac for some time to come. If I were a graphics/publishing house, I'd start buying machines about now, or perhaps wait for discounts. I wouldn't buy a rev 1 Intel-Mac as a publishing house, especially given that the G5 Macs are still competitive as is true with many other apps that have been suitably optimized for PPC. I'm also not sure how long it will take for Final Cut Intel will take to reach comparable performance. The G5 really kicks ass with Final Cut Pro. It will take a while to optimize the non-ported applications for the Intel Platform.

 

[Abstract]

I think Steve is an idiot.

Maybe he shouldn't burn ALL bridges the way he does. I mean, his software works on both PPC and Intel with universal binaries, so if Intel DOESN'T deliver, a transition back to PPC couldn't be too difficult. However, they shouldn't screw relationships up before leaving. Its not good business. Now I know some of the Mac faithful will say, "He's Steve Jobs and you're not, so what do you know?" Well, it seems that he probably doesn't know much more than others out there.

Moto and IBM would take Apple back as clients, but I'm sure that's only when Steve is gone from Apple.

 

[MikeTheC]

And, given the transition timeframe, I'm going to do what was unthinkable before this transition was announced - take a real look at Longhorn and evaluate moving back to Windows. I think it's likely I'll stick with OS X, but I would probably not have even given Windows serious consideration without this move by Apple. Hopefully (for Apple) I'm more the exception than the rule, but I think this was the wrong time to make such a transition.

Please, spare us. Apple changes the CPU and simultaneously impliments everything necessary to ensure we users won't notice a hiccup and that's going to push you into looking at Windows? Why, because your next Mac may well be x86 based?

I personally look forward to the change. I like the fact that Apple's setting themselves up to take advantage of Intel and, whether they ever try it or not, AMD as well. I mean, technically, they're in the same processor space as AMD, so competition between Intel and AMD will now directly benefit Apple, in addition to the hypothetical capability for Apple to use AMD CPUs after all is said and done.

You use Mac OS X. You're running, by definition, a UNIX-based OS. It's more stable and has a broader base of developer support (due to it's BSD heritage) than Microsoft. It's written by people (in and out of Apple) who take pride in what they do. And you honestly think Microsoft's going to top that? Given their history to date, can you be sure they'll ever produce an OS that's technologically superior to what's available elsewhere?

 

[~Shard~]

I think Steve is an idiot.

Maybe he shouldn't burn ALL bridges the way he does. I mean, his software works on both PPC and Intel with universal binaries, so if Intel DOESN'T deliver, a transition back to PPC couldn't be too difficult. However, they shouldn't screw relationships up before leaving. Its not good business. Now I know some of the Mac faithful will say, "He's Steve Jobs and you're not, so what do you know?" Well, it seems that he probably doesn't know much more than others out there.

Moto and IBM would take Apple back as clients, but I'm sure that's only when Steve is gone from Apple.

I wouldn't go so far as to call Steve Jobs an idiot. I think he has a unique business style which could be considered questionable, even arrogant at times, but I definitely wouldn't call him an idiot. It's just the way he operates, and in the end, he sees results and holds strong to his convictions. Stubborn? Perhaps, but that can be a good thing or a bad thing...

And I'm not saying it's the right way to do things, but it seems to work at the end of the day. I guess the same could be said for Gates and Elison though too - it doesn't make them right, but makes them the leaders that they are, like them or not... 😎

 

[MagnusDredd]

PPC, Cell, x86 (part 3)

3) AMD

This will be the easiest part. AMD only really started becoming interesting with the Athlon. The Athlon Series is a great set of chips, that athough hot, have been very performance competitive for whatever Intel has made at the time. The x86 CPU performance crown has been traded back and forth between them for a while. Skipping to the current situation, AMD has one hell of a CPU with their current Opteron and Athlon 64s. Onboard memory controller, NUMA support under certain OSes, 64bit x86 instructions, nice chipset features, expandability, and unbeatable pricing. What they don't have are three major things. They don't produce a platform, meaning they really don't market a full approach setup, meaning board, video, sound, chipset, CPU, etc all designed to take the best advantages of each other. They don't have anything that can compare to the Pentium-M's power conservation, which doesn't really sacrifice speed. While a mobile Athlon 64 can make a great gaming laptop, it runs too hot and consumes too much power to really work in a Powerbook. Lastly, AMD simply does not have the manufacturing reserves that Intel does. While they may at times kick Intel's butt at the high end, and they certainly kick Intel's butt for price, they cannot guarantee a large enough volume of chips to not make Apple nervous. That and the lack of a suitable laptop solution are deal-breakers.

Note: My gaming rig is an Athlon, I had planned on building an Athlon 64 gaming rig soon and giving the old rig to the wife for Sims 2 (which runs like crap on her machine). Not sure what I'm going to do now, but I wanted to point out that I'm certainly no AMD basher.

 

[MikeTheC]

We were basically Motorola and IBMs love puppets for years, about the only thing they didn't include with their promises was a tube of KY Jelly.

ROFLMAO!!! How true, how true!

 

[solvs]

The G5 did the doubling?

I think scu meant the lack of new G5s are going to cause the doubling. As in, Apple moved to Intel because it had to thanks to IBM's incompetance (or whatever). They looked at their options, none were sufficient. The Cell isn't as great for regular computers as we armchair engineers thought, Freescale's going nowhere, and IBM is not only dropping the ball but also wanting to charge more. So we move to Intel, get some decent CPUs in a timely manner, and maybe even grow some market share.

I know notebook sales will increase, as the G4 is in even worse shape right now than the G5. And the next Pentium M should be even better than the one that's out now, which isn't all that bad (now the P4, on the other hand...). If Intel goes with a similar desktop CPU, they may even be back to beating AMD, which a lot of us like, but they have their own production issues. Luckily, if Apple wants, they can move between Intel and AMD if they wanted, a lot easier than PPC and x86. Though, thankfully, they have plpanned ahead, so even the PPC to Intel move won't be too painful.

I'm sure there are new Macs coming out in between now and then. For awhile, Apple will sell both PPCs and Intels. And they will continue to support PPC for sometime, though of course it's days may be numbered (probably in the years though). I'm sure people with older software to run will be buying, as will those who don't know (or care) the difference. Especially with some nice price drops (I hope).

 

[jhu]

"How could the PPC be better than Intel yesterday, but now Intel is so much better than the PPC used in the Mac"

Check the clock speeds. Do the math. Not hard to figure out; when clock speeds were roughly the same, PPC could be the same, but if the clock sppeds for PPC are half or worse than Intel, then Intel is easily better.

If you can't figure that out, then perhaps you ARE the simpleton you claim everyone else is.

ppc has been behind all the intel/amd processors for many years both in clock speed and performance. thus the marketing department over at apple has been lying and people are still willing to believe them.

 

[MikeTheC]

tdewey:

Regrettably, it will only prove that to those who care. (That doesn't make it less true, btw.)

* Edited to fix the quotation.

 

[aswitcher]

IBM have made Steve look publically stupid with promises of 3GHz. No surprise he negiotated things on the quiet.

Cheaper Macs with ability to boot into Windows...works for me. Should work for millions of wouldbe switchers...

 

[nagromme]

From what I've heard and read (yet politely correct me if I am misinformed), Jobs did not close the door on PPC (IBM and Freescale), in fact, seems he left the door open. Seems to me he simply added Intel to the CPU vendor list.

I am SURE Apple has not, in private, closed the door on PPC. They used Intel as a "just case" plan for 5 years. They can do the same with PPC--and it would be wise.

But publicly, the door WILL close by the end of 2007. Steve said that's when the transition to Intel would be complete. Any return to PPC would be out of necessity, and FAR in the future. (But obviously, it could be a very easy transition back. And it could end up with both CPU lines in the mix--but that kind of complexity is not the current plan. After the transition, starting by 2008, all Macs will be Intel--or maybe AMD and Intel.)

New apps will still run on PPC of course, due to universal binaries.

 

[MikeTheC]

IBM can spin it all they want about "cost", but they just don't have an answer for high-performance portable computing, where so much of the market growth is/will be taking place. Apple cannot risk falling even further behind in that space.

Everything else aside for the moment, this is absolutely true. I forget where I read it recently but I saw an article which stated that notebook sales have exceeded desktop sales for the first time ever. I have a feeling this trend is going to continue based on the fact that more people need portability of a general computing platform than those who need expandability, given the processing capabilities, integrated I/O set, and baseline graphics processing capabilities inherent in basically ANY computer.

Yes, I know there are a lot of hard core gamers out there in the world who will tell you they'd never own a laptop (certainly not as their main computer) and there are those out there who would be quick to add they'd never use a laptop because they have some kind of specialized need for expandability. However, the overwhelming majority of those people are Windows users. And, in my experience, the overwhelming majority of Windows users are NOT high-end gamers, etc., so I see them as being in basically the same camp as Mac users for this.

 

[Stella]

Apple have said there are PPC based products in the PIPE line. I think you could be pretty sure that apple will be developing PPC builds of OSX after the transition is complete - 'just in case'.

Additionally, Apple could offer machines based on Intel and PPC to suite people's needs and the processor at the time..

I think you are quite right - the future will certainly be considered.

I am SURE Apple has not, in private, closed the door on PPC. They used Intel as a "just case" plan for 5 years. They can do the same with PPC--and it would be wise.

But publicly, the door WILL close by the end of 2007. Steve said that's when the transition to Intel would be complete. Any return to PPC would be out of necessity, and FAR in the future. (But obviously, it could be a very easy transition back. And it could end up with both CPU lines in the mix--but that kind of complexity is not the current plan. After the transition, starting by 2008, all Macs will be Intel--or maybe AMD and Intel.)

New apps will still run on PPC of course, due to universal binaries.

 

[Platform]

If this is true... does this mean cheaper Macs? 🙂 Or does Apple just make more money?

Proberly 50/50 😉 😛

 

[nagromme]

2) Intel

Thanks for the mini overview.

And I agree that the transition from "PowerPCs being fastest" to "Intel Macs being fastest" is not a sudden thing. And that it will take time for some big apps to be optimized for truly BEST speed on Intel Macs. But they may still outrun PPC Macs, simply because faster Intel chips will be coming.

 

[MikeTheC]

Exactly. From the looks of things, Jobs probably got fed up with IBM not giving Apple the upgrades in chips that would keep Macs in check with PCs. Every 7 to 9 months for upgrades wasn't cutting it and I think Jobs realized that if they wanted to make a dent in market share, it was time to move on. And I'm glad they did.

Well, even a 7-9 month cycle would have been fine if the jumps had been big enough. Obviously, they weren't.

 

[pigwin32]

Not much spam ... getting to read the news on nytimes.com is free once you register. it's a good place for news.

Check out BugMeNot.com, just enter the site name and get your free signon. Sweet.

 

[MagnusDredd]

PPC, Cell, x86 (part 4)

4) IBM

This is the last part and probably the most interesting. IBM's role in this has certainly been an interesting one. I'll skip to just before the introduction of the IBM PPC 970. IBM is a systems/support company. They excel at making solutions and then backing them up with the weight of the company. They have made and will continue to make some of the most incredible Big-Iron in the world. IBM is really at the heart of the AIM alliance since most if not a vast amjority of the Power and PPC instruction set was created by them. Before the advent of the PPC 970, IBM took the wraps off of it's Power 4 CPU, which was simply unbelievable for the time. The Power 4 is a dual core CPU, which takes loads of data at a time, the CPUs on the chip can communicate directly with each other, it has a built in memory controller, can access gobs of memory, 4 chips are placed in a chip carrier and each chip has a high speed channel to 2 or 3 others (I forget), etc, etc.... Truly the chip was a feat of engineering. It raged it's way across the benchmarks, with very little to equal it. The problems were that since the chip was only in serious hardware (and nothing Pentium or AMD based counts in this arena), and so few companies can afford servers that hardcore, IBM could not spread the developement costs among enough customers to drive the price per customer down. The CPU was also terribly hot, and not suitable for blades or small form factor rack mount systems. So the PPC 970 was born. It's a watered down single cored version of the Power 4 (oversimplification perhaps). The point is that now IBM had something that was suitable for sale in the millions of CPUs, which they could work on and find ways to improve their Power line of chips, keeping their Big-Iron business competitive with sales from the lower end. The 970 was perfect for this. It was a great performing chip with the ability to handle serious amounts of memory (much more than Apple systems can take), can run 8 to a board (no extra glue logic), has a badass FSB supporting a crossbar interface, etc. However it is certainly not a cool CPU. Futhermore sales weren't high enough for IBM to justify dumping the amount of money into it that would be required to make a serious low power version. To complicate matters the only major OEM selling 970s competes with them for lower end server sales (IBM sells a PPC 970 blade server). Not sure if IBM sat on their hands because of this, but it has been speculated.

Enter the Cell. The Cell is an incredibly interesting chip. It has a watered down PPC core, and 8 sub-CPUs that can accept streams of data. It's an embedded video processor designer's worst nightmare. The thing will probably chew through video encoding/processing like nobody's business. Once again IBM can use research spent on it to help them update their server chips, and they should have plenty of funding due to the fact they're in the next Playstation. While this is speculation, I'd imagine they'd destroy any processor on earth at running Seti@home or RC5. However those two apps don't work like the standard applications a home or office user runs.

Here's the catch. To make the Cell run at such a high clock speed and as cool as it does, the PPC core of the cell has been greatly simplified. This means that for normal usage the PPC core of the Cell would suck. This is due to a lack of decent branch prediction, support for out-of order execution, etc, etc, etc. Futhermore to make use of the SPE's (or sub-units) of the Cell, programmers would have to completely rethink the way they program, the core of an OS on the chip would have to be almost completely rewritten, etc, etc. As of right now there are no Cell programming gurus. And it will be some years before anyone has really gotten a strong enough feel for the way the chip works to really hand optimize code for it to the level of the G5's or Pentium's code. It has been suggested that the Xbox 360 have the same or less ability to run AI, or physics than the current Xbox due to how cut down the general purpose CPU (PPC 970) unit is. This is not something I want in my computer. Likewise due to these issues multitasking performance (running M$ Word with Norton Antivirus running) would probably be horrible.

 

[pigwin32]

Baloney. The Pentium M that we're more than likely shifting too runs at a much lower clockspeed than the Pentium 4 and beats it. The AMD Opteron runs at a lower speed than the G5 and generally beats it. I'd be surprised if a 2.5Ghz Pentium M doesn't beat the G5 also.

Clock speed isn't the only indication of performance.

Yep, sometimes I think when a major event like this occurs it's best just to bury your head in the sand for a couple of weeks until the clueless get tired of dribbling nonsense into their keyboards. Of course being a rumours site the signal to noise ratio tends to be low anyway. And when it's The Steve the formula becomes SNR = P(signal) / P(noise) - P(RDF).

 

[MikeTheC]

IBM essentially gives two excuses: First, the Apple PC market wasn't large enough. Complete BS. IBM isn't a small naive company. They did their due diligence. They had Apple sales figures and projections before the agreement took place and knew precisely what they were getting into. Second, cost. Again, complete BS. Besides the reasons noted above, their cost couldn't have wavered from projections unless there were major technical problems on their end requiring additional resources (expenses) to resolve. Frankly, if that were the case, that's their problem. But I see IBM has made no such admission.

Nailed this one perfectly.

The fact is, IBM made promises and they didn't deliver. The G5 updates have been nothing short of miserable, barely enough just to sustain the Powermac line since the it took the G5 badge. IBM promised a 3ghz G5 a year after the introduction of the 2 ghz model. It's still a no-show. No G5 of any kind for Apple laptops. All things being equal, had IBM actually kept it's end of the bargain, then their excuses might seem more worthy of attention, but it plainly obvious that they didn't. IBM is just employing a little game of misdirection. Shift attention away from it's pathetic performance with the G5, and simply exploit the general perception of Apple's low market share in hopes that everyone will just accept that familiar sounding song and not bother to closely examine how IBM actually performed under the deal. Analysts note that the impact for IBM is negligible because the Apple's G5 "only" accounted for 2 percent of the output from it's NY plant. Gee, that's interesting. What was the other 98 percent doing while Apple had to publicly postpone the introduction of G5 iMac for months due to the shortage of IBM's G5 chips? Yes, as another poster said, IBM is just playing games now.

'Nother home run. Way to go!

Regarding the Intel vs PPC issue, it's a no-brainer. Apple biggest challenge going forward wasn't choosing a new CPU vendor, it was too assure software compatibility for both PPC and Intel. Apple has a reputation as being a smart company, and the plan they've come up with is effectively bulletproof. If there was a major problem, you would have heard about it by now from the developers, all of whom are conveniently gathered under one roof this time and thus easy to poll. Apple's major software providers have all come forward and signed on to the plan. In fact, virtually NONE of the software developers has come forward with a story that Apple's switch has presented major obstacles for them going forward. Thats a major (and thus far, hugely overlooked) achievement for Apple. Most of the attention has squared on the somewhat ironic fact that Apple is switching to Intel processors

Well, seeing how IBM did such a thorough job of screwing the pooch, it isn't all that ironic, as we'll see soon enough. The "osborne effect" is another issue that's dead on arrival. First, it assumes that Apple has pre-announced a product that has such tremendous appeal that it's entire computer line will be overlooked in anticipation of it. Apple hasn't announced any future products, in fact, they remain steadfastly tight-lipped about future products as they always have. Second, the switch away from PPC processors assumes that Mac buyers purchased Mac's because of the PPC processor. The fact is, blasphemous as it may sound around here right now, no one really cares about the processor. Most consumers don't even understand how a processor works, much less understand it's role is inside the computer (the megahertz myth). What consumers do care about however is the computer they buy - the box that they pay for, turn on and use everyday. I think any honest Mac user will admit that it's the combination of the OS, software, style, and machine speed (however the user may quantify it) that make up the reasons for buying an Apple box. If the OS is Mac, and the machine is fast, then it's all good. And that's where Apple wins.

All Apple needs to do with it's next hardware update, whether it's PPC or Intel, is to provide something that is roughly 20 percent faster than the machine it replaces. That's pretty much what they've done in the past and if they continue to do so, no one is going to care about what company makes the CPU inside or is going to complain.

Ding ding ding!!! As they say in Battlestar Galactica: TNS, "Full colors!"

I'm a dedicated Mac user. I use a Mac because it's a Mac. Because it uses some version of Mac OS. Because it isn't DOS (in ages past) or Windows. And while a CPU matters to me, it matters in the sense of it's functionality, feature set, and speed, NOT who's logo is stamped on it. And, frankly, if Intel has become "all that and a bag of potato chips", then that's fine and I'll hapilly use a Mac with one of Intel's CPUs stuck in it.

My only hope is that Apple can get done with Intel what it's gotten done from Microsoft's Mac Business Unit: Mac-First and Mac-Only performance and features enhancements. But even if they go with a standard Pentium whatchamacallit, that, too, has it's advantages.

But what about the "superiority" of the PPC design? Well, it is. Everything Apple said about the PPC is true. If I were in the market for a new computer and Apple happens to update with a faster PPC model, I'd buy it with no second thoughts. I got a faster computer than the one I had before. Good for me.

So what about all of that PPC goodness when Apple makes the switch to Intel? Two words: Moore's law. Intel has repeatedly stated the company is steadfastly committed to adhering to Moore's law. On the other hand, the G5 has only recently wheezed to 2.7 ghz, still no 3 ghz G5 and counting after a year after IBM announced it's birthday. In this case, Moore's law works decidedly in Apple's favor. When IBM's and Freescale's PPC runs out of gas (if they haven't already), along comes Intel to save the day and picks up the slack. The bottom line is the Apple customer always gets a faster Apple box, and the Intel vs PPC argument isn't going to stop it.

Absolutely right. And I'm glad to see Apple finally being able to take advantage of it.

 

[MikeTheC]

The entire 64-bitness is over rated in my opinion, 64bits alone don't give anyone any performance boost, you still need an OS that will fully take advantage of all the memory (4 GB and above) for it to make any sense, maybe this will matter in few years but right now I don't think it is a major issue, same as onchip mem controllers, benchmarks show how Opterons "rule" Intels offerings but those are synthetic nonrelevant benchmarks, in real world apps it doesn't make a whole lot of difference, processing times are basically similar, right now no one has any major advantage over anyone... Software hasn't catched on...

So I've read and been informed by knowledgable sources myself.

Intel is planning to go all 64bit by 2007 to the best of my knowledge (kind of fits with Apples transition, doesn't it)

Yathink?!?

Anyway, the more I read about Intel and Microsoft, the more I get a feeling that Intel doesn't like MS a whole lot, in fact they wouldn't mind of trying something new with a company that would offer another proven OS and the ability to quickly adapt to new technologies...

Intel and entire PC industry is crippled with standards of all sorts, ATX this, Parallel port that, Intel is kind of stuck because PC industry is afraid of moving at a faster pace and because of this technology is kind of crippled...

What I see with Intel and Apple, Intel has a partnership with a company not afraid of changes, not afraid of new alternate ways, and because of this I think that Apple might actually help Intel develop other better newer technologies, maybe even introduce a totally new non PPC non x86 architecture... Right now Intel has a partner that both can experiment and implement really what they really desire as Apple is the only company that controls its own hardware and software...

I am wondering about Altivec, Apple has a lot of experience with this, I wonder what it would take for Apple to help design with Intel another vector processing unit similar to Altivec on PPC...

Apple presents an opportunity for Intel to totally run away from its current designs and start from scratch with something totally new and actually implement it without MS (and PC standards) involved with it...

Oh yes, absolutely. Even the Linux world is saddled with this stuff, from what I've seen. Really, Apple's the only OS vendor in a position to do this. I have a feeling this may be a very synergistic relationship. Steve already said that Apple and Intel engineers are "getting along famously", and this may be helpful in a number of respects beyond what a lot of people suspect.

Here's the deal, as I see it: Microsoft doesn't rule the hardware, as such, so it's not like Microsoft's in a position to do theoretical hardware design testing and research and then put out a reference MB for the industry to use. Apple does, Apple is, therefore Apple can. What this means is that all those looking for an at least somewhat-paved R&D road for newer, better computers for which to write an OS (such as the Linux crowd) will be winners, too. Also, because this isn't all just about Apple and Intel but, as I've mentioned in an earlier post, Intel-AMD, Apple is also in a completely win-win scenario here, too.

Other than in a purely marketing and commercial sense, Apple's real competition is NOT Microsoft. It's Linux. The Linux community is (from the point-of-view of an average Mac or Windows user) quietly gathering up open-source equivalents (some darn good ones, too) of every major (and minor) app out there, and since the preference by-and-large in the Linux community is to use x86 hardware (basically because it's cheap and plentiful), they will be among the first to jump onto any new x86 platform that results in some form or fashion from Apple and Intel's development efforts.

Anyhow, that's a completely different tangent, totally off-topic here, but suffice to say many stand to benefit here, and amongst those who will benefit are ABSOLUTELY us end users.

 

[sacear]

What?

I think Steve is an idiot.

Maybe he shouldn't burn ALL bridges the way he does. I mean, his software works on both PPC and Intel with universal binaries, so if Intel DOESN'T deliver, a transition back to PPC couldn't be too difficult. However, they shouldn't screw relationships up before leaving. Its not good business. Now I know some of the Mac faithful will say, "He's Steve Jobs and you're not, so what do you know?" Well, it seems that he probably doesn't know much more than others out there.

Moto and IBM would take Apple back as clients, but I'm sure that's only when Steve is gone from Apple.

From what I've heard and read (yet politely correct me if I am misinformed), Jobs did not close the door on PPC (IBM and Freescale), in fact, seems he left the door open. Seems to me he simply added Intel to the CPU vendor list.

 

[SiliconAddict]

I think Steve is an idiot.
However, they shouldn't screw relationships up before leaving. Its not good business. Now I know some of the Mac faithful will say, "He's Steve Jobs and you're not, so what do you know?" Well, it seems that he probably doesn't know much more than others out there.

Nope I say he's human. I think most of us have wanted to burn a bridge here or there when we've left a job from time to time. Most of us have the good sense to hold our tongue. Most of us have the good sense that burning bridges keeps us from using those bridges again. In Steve's case (Note that I'm not a psychiatrist I just play one on the net 😉 ) the guy has displayed the inability to keep his emotions in check. Call it immaturity. Call it an ego thing. Call it whatever you want. I don't think its so much that he's an idiot as he simply lets his emotions run the show from time to time. This is doubtless a double edged sword from the business standpoint.