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Motorola

Originally posted by cr2sh
I don't remember ever seeing a thread on any forum that read something like: "The new Macs are too fast and my electric bill is too high... can Moto please do something about this?" WTF is the point? Seriously, who cares? What is moto doing, developing a chip at lower speeds with lower consumption.. and then handing it to Apple and saying "Here, find some use for this... we dunno either."

:p

I have to believe that there's a reason for this chip. Dual Powerbooks, Quad PowerMacs, iTablet.. love of god something, PLEASE!
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That's the whole point - Motorola builds these chips for routers, Tivo's, DSL modems, etc... Apple is small potatoes to them.
 
So what's with this "Year of the Notebook" then?

What is Apple Marketing (or Steve) doing with the whole "Year of the Notebook" slogan? Seeing all this news about possible future CPUs for PowerMacs wouldn't lend to its validity at all - unless Motorola's little announcement tells true, and we don't have ANY new procs til next year at this time -- which could spell a slow death for Apple. More positively, it means we'll have the PowerMac 970 in July - PowerMac updates have come in pretty consistently -- biannually. Don't get me wrong. I would be ecstatic at the announcement of the new PowerPC from IBM, but this whole "year of the noteook" thing doesn't ring true. Perhaps it's just a sales thing, though, with Apple wanting to meet that special percentage of notebook sales. Suggestions?
 
Re: So what's with this "Year of the Notebook" then?

Originally posted by fred_lj
What is Apple Marketing (or Steve) doing with the whole "Year of the Notebook" slogan? Seeing all this news about possible future CPUs for PowerMacs wouldn't lend to its validity at all - unless Motorola's little announcement tells true, and we don't have ANY new procs til next year at this time -- which could spell a slow death for Apple. More positively, it means we'll have the PowerMac 970 in July - PowerMac updates have come in pretty consistently -- biannually. Don't get me wrong. I would be ecstatic at the announcement of the new PowerPC from IBM, but this whole "year of the noteook" thing doesn't ring true. Perhaps it's just a sales thing, though, with Apple wanting to meet that special percentage of notebook sales. Suggestions?
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From the sounds of it, and judging from Apple's past, I personally won't be expecting PPC 970's in PowerMacs any earlier than Jan. 2004. Steve did say YEAR of the laptop, not "6 months". If the PowerMacs came out with a 970 in July, I think it would certainly take away the spotlight. These new moto G4's could be the ticket for the PowerBooks this year, maybe even finally shift the iBooks to a sub-GHz G4? Maybe that's a bit too optimistic for this year...
 
Re: Re: So what's with this "Year of the Notebook" then?

Originally posted by Hemingray


From the sounds of it, and judging from Apple's past, I personally won't be expecting PPC 970's in PowerMacs any earlier than Jan. 2004. Steve did say YEAR of the laptop, not "6 months". If the PowerMacs came out with a 970 in July, I think it would certainly take away the spotlight. These new moto G4's could be the ticket for the PowerBooks this year, maybe even finally shift the iBooks to a sub-GHz G4? Maybe that's a bit too optimistic for this year...
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Well if you were to look at it as a fiscal year (that is how Apple looks at it). The 15" TiBook was revised midway through the 1st quarter and the AlBooks came out at the beggining of the second quarter. The end of the fiscal year is some time around July. If I'm mistaken I know someone will correct me.
 
Re: Apple's Fiscal Year

Originally posted by Dave Marsh
I believe Apple's fiscal year runs October - September.
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See, I knew I made a mistake. Though I did mean to say sometime around August. I was thinking maybe the first of September and that is why I meant to say August.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
 
Catfish_Man:

AMD is tiny, they don't own their fabs
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Yes they do own their own fabs (hopefully I don't have to tell you this too many more times). AMD is making some of the fastest chips in the world, certainly right up there for top dog on the desktop.

Abercrombieboy:

Look how Moto had to increase pipeline stages in the G4 to increase Mhz. IBM is still building the G3 as a 4 pipeline stage processer and it is running at 800Mhz in the iBook and probably could be running at 1Ghz easily if Apple did not have to cap it.
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Yeah, but the Moto chip does 1.42ghz on 7 stages on 180nm tech, whereas the 750fx does probably a little over 1.0ghz on 4 stages, on 130nm tech. The 7447/7457 will pretty much clean up on on 750fx.

Telomar:

SPECint and SPECfp really aren't the greatest benchmarks to be perfectly blunt.
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The usual cry of whoever is behind. SPEC is by far the best cross-platform benchmark I know of, and the performance of Apple's pride and joy does not change that.
 
Originally posted by eric_n_dfw

That's the whole point - Motorola builds these chips for routers, Tivo's, DSL modems, etc... Apple is small potatoes to them.
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I am not so sure about Apple being small potatoes to them. I believe Apple pays higher prices than the rest because to Apple those chips are important in higher clock ratings and also at the beginning of their life cycle (early production units will fetch higher prices). Apple can probably afford a slightly higher price for those chips because they will transmit the cost to consumers (high-end machines). Lower clock-rated chips will make their way to embedded appliances, where you don't need to push frequencies and need only to get reasonable price/performance/power consumption compromise.

So early processors (in more expensive production lines) can make their way to Apple computers even before Motorola start shipping 7457's and 7447's for the EMBEDDED market.

And even if (that's an enormous IF) the medium-term future of Apple computers lies with the 970 from IBM (when ??), Apple still needs to get upgraded chips from Motorola until then. So for me, if the 7457 and 7447 make their way into Macs soon enough, that will be good (no mobo redesign, etc...).

NicoMan
 
Yes, Macs will still be behind the x486 world, even after Apple adopt the 970. But the point is that the gap will be a lot smaller. Tthe 970 and its successors have a lot of room to grow, and I think it's safe to say that the 970 will be on a much faster development path than the G4. So yes, we'll still be behind, but the prospects of catching up are good. If the 970 comes out in late summer or early fall and delivers the performance level of a 3 ghz P4, I'll be super happy.

Why am I putting such faith in IBM and the 970? My reasons:

1. IBM will be using the 970 for their low-end linux servers, and they seem serious about making inroads into that market. Apple and IBM's interests are much more aligned here than was the case with Moto.

2. The 970 and its succesors are based on the Power line, which is important for IBM. As long as IBM's Power business stays strong, the trickle-down effect should ensure that the 9xx line also stays strong.
 
IBM Powerchips & Apple's Enterprise

Since IBM is a good system integrations team, and has the Power series chips to run with... wouldn't it be interesting to see IBM ditch their proprietary AIX OS in favor of MacOS X running on their humongous P Series servers... *evil grin*

That might bring Steve's pixar back into the fold... :)

Dharvabinky
 
Re: Apple's Fiscal Year

Originally posted by Dave Marsh
I believe Apple's fiscal year runs October - September.
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I could be wrong, but I was pretty sure that we are currently in the 4th quarter of the Apple fiscal year. I seem to remember that their fiscal year ran one quarter later than the calendar year.
 
Re: AMD and IBM to Jointly Develop Advanced Chip Technologies

Originally posted by MacQuest
FWIW:

This was originally announced and reported on here at MR on 1.8.03.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~65496,00.html
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Motorola inked a similar agreement over a year ago with AMD. This is how the Athlon moved to a copper process. I'm not sure what the implication is here, but this in no way has anything to do with the shareing of x86 or PPC technology... only fab technology. :)
 
Megahertz War is (unfortunately) over

I think the IBM's 970 is Apple's greatest hope to jump to the next level of performance. Hopefully multicore versions of the multiprocessor will make apple's specs more competitive. Motorolla is not really competing with Intel in the megahertz wars. They make excellent RISC processors for the embedded market like cell phones and routers and cars which value power consumption and size over raw speed. These new 7457s should do fine in laptops, however. They might perform nicely in the powermacs in multiprocessor mode, say using 4 processors. I'm not sure if Photoshop 8 will be written in cocoa and if apple engineers will push adobe to tweak/develop altivec and multiprocessor-aware coding. These types of things make real-world use faster. Dumping OS9 compatibility and carbon should speed up system performance too. I'm sure there's a lot of flabbiness and nonoptimization in the video drivers too, affecting performance.

If Apple isn't going to deploy the 970 or it somehow is still foolishly counting on Motorolla, then they really are in trouble. If they want to compete in the megahertz wars, they should immediately adopt AMD microprocessors. If they don't, the only speed improvements we'll see will be from multicore and multiprocessor configurations of slower, cooler chips. With only a 4% market share at best, Apple doesn't have much leverage to get a cutting edge 4 ghz processor developed by any chip manufacturer. The profit incentive just isn't there.

On the otherhand, I don't know if processor speed is going to be as much of an issue in the future for regular or even moderate power users like photoshopers and DV editors. Sure we want 3 ghz 970s, but what we really need are bigger L2 and L3 caches, faster buses, and much more RAM (8 gigs would be nice in the towers). For the biggest power users, the 3d renderers and animators, I don't think Apple will be able to compete in their raw number crunching arena. Steve Jobs' Pixar, did just after all buy a Linux based Intel Xenon rendering farm, pretty much admitting that those were the best tools for that job where time and money are crucial.
 
Re: Re: So what's with this "Year of the Notebook" then?

Originally posted by Hemingray


From the sounds of it, and judging from Apple's past, I personally won't be expecting PPC 970's in PowerMacs any earlier than Jan. 2004. Steve did say YEAR of the laptop, not "6 months". If the PowerMacs came out with a 970 in July, I think it would certainly take away the spotlight. These new moto G4's could be the ticket for the PowerBooks this year, maybe even finally shift the iBooks to a sub-GHz G4? Maybe that's a bit too optimistic for this year...
Click to expand...
Steve has also said that Apple has some exciting things planned for their desktop line this year ('03) as well... Could be that we'll see portions of both of Apple's pro lines sporting PPC 970's before the end of the year.
 
Re: So what's with this "Year of the Notebook" then?

Originally posted by fred_lj
What is Apple Marketing (or Steve) doing with the whole "Year of the Notebook" slogan? Seeing all this news about possible future CPUs for PowerMacs wouldn't lend to its validity at all - unless Motorola's little announcement tells true, and we don't have ANY new procs til next year at this time -- which could spell a slow death for Apple. More positively, it means we'll have the PowerMac 970 in July - PowerMac updates have come in pretty consistently -- biannually. Don't get me wrong. I would be ecstatic at the announcement of the new PowerPC from IBM, but this whole "year of the noteook" thing doesn't ring true. Perhaps it's just a sales thing, though, with Apple wanting to meet that special percentage of notebook sales. Suggestions?
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No offense, but Duh! of course its a marketing thing. Remember when Steve said that the CRT is dead and then turned around and announced the eMac? There's plenty of time over the course of an entire year to have major announcements with regards to both desktop and portable Macs.

My prediction is that we'll see PPC 970's introduced in certain desktops and PowerBooks at the same time, call them Pro-Extreme machines, then over the course of 12-18 months we'll see the 970 in the rest of Apple's machines.
 
Apple's Fiscal Year

Apple Computer Sees FY03 Capital Spending $160 Million Versus 174 Million
Thursday December 19, 6:27 pm ET

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- Apple Computer Inc. (NasdaqNM:AAPL - News) said it expects capital expenditures of $160 million in the fiscal year ending Sept. 28, 2003 , compared with $174 million in the fiscal year ended Sept. 28, according to the company's annual report filed Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission...

Source: http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cach...tml+Apple+Computer+fiscal+year&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
 
IBM fiscal year

The Fiscal year for IBM ends December 31st, so if the 970 is due Q3'03 we can expect it between June 30th and September 30th.

[edit: dates]
 
Re: So what's with this "Year of the Notebook" then?

Originally posted by fred_lj
What is Apple Marketing (or Steve) doing with the whole "Year of the Notebook" slogan?
Click to expand...

Steve said "Year of the portable" so there is quite a bit of scope for lots of small products. I don't think it rules out a PowerMac with a 970 in it.
 
Originally posted by Telomar
The POWER4 has lower spec scores than the current Itanium 2 or PIV for that matter but I can tell you when you match a 2 way, 4 way system or an 8 way system of each or virtually any multiple you feel like the POWER4 considerably outperforms the others in most applications. SPECint and SPECTfp really aren't the greatest benchmarks to be perfectly blunt.
Click to expand...


I also seem to recall a tech discussion on the IBM chip that I think I read at Arstechna that said that the 970 had a lot of performance design compromises built into it that allowed for making the chip a lot cheaper, etc.


What it all seems to be saying to me is the question of which is the better business decision:

Option 1) pay $500 for a fully-optimized chip that will give you 1.00 performance,

Option 2) pay $300 for two 80% optimized chips (ie, $150 each) that will give you 1.60 performance.


If you like #2 as much as I do, then you're willing to allow the 970 to not be a "Killer" chip, if the design trade-off's allow them to be made cheap enough to be down at at "2 for 1" prices. Afterall, Apple already has practicee in making DP systems...



-hh
 
Re: Megahertz War is (unfortunately) over

Originally posted by OSXconvert
If Apple isn't going to deploy the 970 or it somehow is still foolishly counting on Motorolla, then they really are in trouble. If they want to compete in the megahertz wars, they should immediately adopt AMD microprocessors.
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When you are refering to AMD, are you thinking AMD manufacturing x86 chips, Opteron, or an hypothetical PPC?
If you are thinking x86 AMD in Macs, there has been a lot of discussion on the subject already (Marklar...), and I think a lot of people agree that if they were to do it in the next couple of years, that would represent a GIGANTIC leap of faith from Apple that would probably alienate the Mac developpers (going from OS9 to OSX and then recompile and maintain 2 architectures for a very small user base, etc...). Possible I agree, but highly unlikely.
Most of those arguments apply to the choice of Opteron (or whatever AMD's 64bit desktop processor's name is). So then, same thing: feasible, but unlikely.
Now AMD with PPC? Hmm, on the one hand, AMD coming up with a PPC chip would take quite a while (you don't become overnight a specialist on a new architecture: look at how long it took AMD in the x86 world). On the other hand, AMD has signed agreements with Moto and IBM but to share manufacturing processes. Maybe there is something secret behind it that would bring AMD in the PPC alliance, but then one might ask what would be the point? Manufacturing processes are going to be shared between Moto, IBM and AMD, so no advantage here in choosing AMD. As for research and chip design, I think it is safe to say there is very little that IBM doesn't know. Now, motivation: the big problem with Moto is that they don't really care about desktops, they are mainly interested in embedded markets, and their needs are then very different from Apple's. But IBM, as it has already been said, will share some of Apple's goals, they need to make their UNIX/Linux server/workstations better with those new chips. Result: Apple better off with IBM than AMD.
Anyway you look at it, it makes little sense for Apple to ally with AMD now.

Anyway, that's my take on it.

NicoMan
 
Nicoman hit it in the bullseye!!Everything is pointing to IBM and the 970. If this dont happen not only will I be SHOCKED but a round of Beers for everyone on this thread from me! Of course you have to be of age so that leaves a few of you out. you know who you are
 
Originally posted by ddtlm
Yes they do own their own fabs (hopefully I don't have to tell you this too many more times). AMD is making some of the fastest chips in the world, certainly right up there for top dog on the desktop.
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Again AMD currently is either in the process of closing or has closed all their Texas fab plants leaving them with a whole 1 fab in Dresden. Increasingly they rely on external contracts for their parts. A fact I find pretty ironic given their comments of a few years back that only real men own fabs.

As for current AthlonXP processes the new 3000 is a step down from the old one (2800). Their numbering scheme increases but performance doesn't move and they've been out of the race for top dog since Intel hit around 2 GHz and especially after Intel started increasing FSB speeds. AthlonXP's major advantage was price/performance and it doesn't even cut it on that anymore.

Originally posted by ddtlm
The usual cry of whoever is behind. SPEC is by far the best cross-platform benchmark I know of, and the performance of Apple's pride and joy does not change that.
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Err no. I don't work directly for any major semiconductor producer and even if I did I have no invested interests in selling a product. It's a fact SPECint and SPECfp is a lousy benchmark for SMP applications and any program that relies on more than a straight compiler test though.

I have no problem with quoting them but you'd be a fool to take them as the best cross-platform benchmark test and leave it there.

As I said until you've looked at performance of high end servers like Alphas or POWER4s compared to the competition you just aren't aware of how misleading looking at those numbers can be. I rather expect your knowledge comes from theory rather than any experience in these areas though.
 
970 soon?

Perhaps the 970 is a way off yet. If the 970 was soon to be released in the X Server, would Jobs have moved from Sun to Intel for Pixar?
I would think that if the 970 (or G5) was coming out soon and was a rocket, wouldn't Pixar move to Apple?:rolleyes:
 
Re: 970 soon?

Originally posted by Tim Flynn
Perhaps the 970 is a way off yet. If the 970 was soon to be released in the X Server, would Jobs have moved from Sun to Intel for Pixar?
I would think that if the 970 (or G5) was coming out soon and was a rocket, wouldn't Pixar move to Apple?:rolleyes:
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It doesnt help them now while they are working on or between movies.
 
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