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Did Apple Do The Right Thing in Moving To Intel From PowerPC???
- Thread starter rashdown_online
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well,
- the g5 is a performance, not a power-efficient part. it's like saying that the xenon would have never worked in the portable arena.
- i've never felt short of computational bits for desktop tasks (given there is SIMD), and very seldom run out of address-lines bits. i don't see that changing soon, not until the paradigm shifts significantly.
- both ibm and moto have been unreliable vendors - that i won't argue about, but..
.. i cannot agree with the above. if somebody was waiting for top-of-the-crop performance from the G4 line instead of moving on to the G5 then, well, their loss. and i've never played the MHz game (pardon, GHz) - actual performance and overall responsiveness of the platform are way more important for me than some figures on a sticker/cpuid test.
Actual performance is very important and trust me, I've argued the same point about the megahertz myth, however there was a significant time between 550mhz and 1.5ghz and the G5 doesn't work in smaller machines because it's essentially a Xenon. That's the problem, the G4 didn't have a road-map that showed a fast portable chip and the G5 couldn't become portable.
Actual performance is important and my MacBook Pro kills the G4 Powerbook of the same period in various real-world tasks.
Of course, the "average" purchaser out there still buys a Windoze-based box and has trouble distinguishing between the "modem" (the computer tower itself, not their actual DSL or Cable modem) and their monitor, so really what is it you were expecting?
shrug
Intel rules, IBM suck, AMD need to make better graphics cards, and Apple needs to widen their audience to cater for the hole between iMac and Mac Pro, and this hole is not just for gamers. I think Apple should make something that is not an all-in-one that is less expensive than a Mac Pro, but still as customisable. Basically, half a Mac Pro. I'll even give an opinion of what should be in it.
-> Quad core ~2.6-2.8 GHz, with option of going up to ~3.2 or down to 2.4
-> Four RAM slots for non-ECC RAM. 2GB stock.
-> Two hard disk bays for a maximum of 2 TB, 500GB stock.
-> If Apple wants to try SLI/Crossfire support, that would be awesome. If not, then the 8800GT in the Mac Pro would be fine as a top of the line. Something like an 8600 or 2600 as stock.
So, this would be much more powerful than an iMac, but far less powerful than a Mac Pro in terms of CPU.
Cost? I reckon it should be priced at around the same as the 24" iMac, because you are getting a much better computer, but you have to go and buy your own screen from somewhere.
NOTE: An Australian dollar buys around 90 US cents, so why is there almost exactly a 50% price increase for Apple products in Australia when compared to US stores?
I would like to see for a gaming Mac in a Mac Pro case:
2.4GHz Core 2 Quad standard
ATI Radeon 3850 standard, ATI Radeon 3870x2 option and Crossfire/SLI support
2 hard drive bays only
2GBs of DDR2 RAM
250GB Hard Drive Standard
$1799
Excuse me? IBM is still one of, if not the, foremost R&D companies in the world. Building CPUs is not there only field of interests but agreeable they haven't been doing well on the the consumer part of the later. Crunching out a high end monster like the POWER6 is impressive though. Apple & IBM were a prestigious combo but helas both would play in a different market as to be really advantageous to each other.
Very true. I know that IBM are putting lots of time and money into carbon nanotube research, is Intel doing the same?
Carbon Nanotubes will probably be the next massive leap forward in computing power. If Intel isn't already, they need to make sure they aren't left out in the cold when IBM figure out a way to make a super efficient, super small super fast CPU that makes anything Intel or AMD has look like a 30 year old Cray. Huge, hot, power hungry and loud, but unusably slow today.
Running a search on "nanotubes" on Intel's website returns 10 results. Running it on IBM's website returns 455.
And it will be out next Tuesday.
IBM and Motorola lost Apple's business because they could not deliver when promised or with as much as they promised.
And it will be out next Tuesday.
IBM and Motorola lost Apple's business because they could not deliver when promised or with as much as they promised.
OK, point taken, but it WILL be invented sooner or later.
To answer the question- yes. It seems that the development of PowerPC was lagging very much behind, and as holding back the Mac platform as a whole. Intel seems like a very, very enthusiastic partner for Apple, and they are reaping the benefits, not to mention preferential treatment. Moving the Mac to Intel also allowed for Macs to run Windows as well, leading to PC World (or similar) to declare a MacBook Pro the fastest Windows machine... Also many more software titles may move over to Mac as well as Windows since companies no longer have to re-write the entire code for a title.
Cider is also going to help bring gaming back to the mac, provided Apple starts to get serious about helping gamers with better graphics performance and easier upgrades.
Cider is also going to help bring gaming back to the mac, provided Apple starts to get serious about helping gamers with better graphics performance and easier upgrades.
IBM is pushing the boundries, but isnt very good at dealing with selling the product to consumers. They are still amazing at R&D but they can't really produce consumer-level processors. Look at their computer lineups- they all use Intel. I think IBM will push the boundries for the next generation of processors, then licensce that tech to chip makers like Intel, who will market and produce the consumer versions. Makes more sense for IBM at this point- their PC's in the past decade always fell short of the competition.
If IBM end up being able to manufacture carbon nanotube CPUs, they could surely just take an existing architecture, like Power 6, or a future one, and use it. If you took a very power hungry and hot workstation grade architecture like this, and made it using carbon nanotubes, it would almost certainly be small, cool and efficient enough to fit in a notebook, if not a mobile phone, even after overclocking it to insane levels. The thing with carbon nanotubes is that they are so incredibly small and low resistance that their use would probably make any crappy architecture easily more than a match for the best silicon chips. I'm sure IBM would be able to use this technology to turn their exceedingly good workstation and server chips into incredibly fast desktop and mobile chips.
we sacrificed quality for speed and compatibility, 2 big issues over one which comes down to 200-300 dollar repairs every year or two, not bad
good move
good move
I'm pretty sure the problems it appears Apple is having at the moment (if there are any; vocal minority) it has absolutely NOTHING to do with Intel. Since when have people been sending their computers back due to nonfunctioning CPUs?
Um... if Macs were still on PowerPC's I think I wouldn't have even thought of buying a Mac. Alas, years ago, I placed money down for a Alienware machine because Mac OS was horrible compared to XP and they had the PowerPC processors (making anything I have incompatible).
And 200-300 in repairs? Um, AppleCare?
Hmm good point. But I'm not sure if IBM wants to play the consumer mind game. Intel has spent decades now courting the consumer- and it's paid off (except for gamers, people think AMD is some taiwanese toy maker or something) and IBM is very much known as a workstation and workplace computing name... it would be smarter for IBM to try and license the tech, when it becomes affordable, to Intel, and learn from Rambus and not charge awfully huge royalties on it...
Maybe taxes? Well, it's normal for US companies, especially tech companies with name recognition, to charge way more that necessary in other countries than in the US.
Solution? Next time your friends come visit Hawaii have them bring you all your Apple fixes from an Apple store at Ala Moana. Or even better, when they open the new "flagship" store in the Royal Hawaiian Shopping center...
I'm all for the switch, except for two things...
1. Their obvious intent to phase out Classic, which was made final and definite with the release of Leopard (even on PPC machines)... Did the Classic environment really affect anything in OS X? If you don't use it, don't install OS 9. This may seem insignificant to a lot of people, but ask anyone who's in love with their mac version of FrameMaker if it's a big deal.
2. (and this affects way less people) 99% of all new mac games REQUIRE an intel processor
oh and I'll sneak a third one in there... I bought a Dual 2.7GHz G5 about 2 months before the first Mac Pro's were released.
1. Their obvious intent to phase out Classic, which was made final and definite with the release of Leopard (even on PPC machines)... Did the Classic environment really affect anything in OS X? If you don't use it, don't install OS 9. This may seem insignificant to a lot of people, but ask anyone who's in love with their mac version of FrameMaker if it's a big deal.
2. (and this affects way less people) 99% of all new mac games REQUIRE an intel processor
oh and I'll sneak a third one in there... I bought a Dual 2.7GHz G5 about 2 months before the first Mac Pro's were released.
Yes and No
Yes and No is my feeling here.
Apple had to go Intel for the sake of its portable line. Everything else would have been fine to stay with the G5 processor line. In raw performance terms, Apple had to heavily optimise certain pro apps like Logic to show the Xeon-based MacPros outperforming the quad G5s (which they intentionally didn't optimise Logic for at all).
On the quality issue - there do appear to be some significant compromises now being made that weren't there during the G4/G5 era when Macs were comparably priced, but were cheaper to manufacture from OEM parts. In particular, the build quality of Powerbooks was quite a lot higher than the MacBook Pros. I have a feeling that this is to do with the high price of Intel logic board and CPUs in comparison to the relatively cheap G4, meaning that there's less headroom to build in quality casing. There's also the factor of thickness - I'd take the thickness of the 12" PowerBook versus the thickness of a MacBook Pro because it involves fewer compromises and makes for a more robust computer.
That said, there have been various Macs with inherent problems, whether Apple admits to it or not. Namely most G3 and G4 iBooks, all MacBooks, some MacBook Pros, the first G5 iMac, and the liquid-cooled PowerMac G5s. I'm in two minds about the whole thing. I certainly don't feel that the Intel machines perform noticeably better than a late G4 or G5 based unit in common everyday tasks.
Yes and No is my feeling here.
Apple had to go Intel for the sake of its portable line. Everything else would have been fine to stay with the G5 processor line. In raw performance terms, Apple had to heavily optimise certain pro apps like Logic to show the Xeon-based MacPros outperforming the quad G5s (which they intentionally didn't optimise Logic for at all).
On the quality issue - there do appear to be some significant compromises now being made that weren't there during the G4/G5 era when Macs were comparably priced, but were cheaper to manufacture from OEM parts. In particular, the build quality of Powerbooks was quite a lot higher than the MacBook Pros. I have a feeling that this is to do with the high price of Intel logic board and CPUs in comparison to the relatively cheap G4, meaning that there's less headroom to build in quality casing. There's also the factor of thickness - I'd take the thickness of the 12" PowerBook versus the thickness of a MacBook Pro because it involves fewer compromises and makes for a more robust computer.
That said, there have been various Macs with inherent problems, whether Apple admits to it or not. Namely most G3 and G4 iBooks, all MacBooks, some MacBook Pros, the first G5 iMac, and the liquid-cooled PowerMac G5s. I'm in two minds about the whole thing. I certainly don't feel that the Intel machines perform noticeably better than a late G4 or G5 based unit in common everyday tasks.
