Pentium M and Yonah Processors in Upcoming Macs?

[sacear]

It was odd to me when Apple went with IBM chips, with the 1984 commercial and all. And Steve feelings about big brother at that time.

It's just the nature of the beast.

Steve wasn't at Apple when they went to PowerPC.

Plus, I think, Steve Jobs does not live in nor hold on to the past. The "Big Brother" thing was appropriate and fun through 1984, yet once 1985 came, then "Big Brother" became passé.

I think Jobs truly wants what is best for Apple now and in the future (Apple is his baby), regardless of what has happened in the past.

 

[sacear]

Macintosh being renamed?

Apple's been emphasizing Mac stridently over the past year (not even Macintosh). The new line will probably lose the Power designation.

I noticed that also. Over the past several months, references to Macintosh have become Mac on the Apple site.

 

[Deltan]

I don't know if this has been posted yet, I apologize if it has. Anyone doubting the Pentium M's prowess should really check out this article. Pentium M takes on the other top CPUs out there. Athlon FX 55 and Pentium 4 EE CPU's.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/index.html

In short, the Pentium M whoops all kinds of ass over the P4 and Athlon FX. Imagine a dual core version of this CPU with a memory bus faster than 533Mhz. Wewp!

 

[bishopdante]

I thought that apple were crazy... until

Until I realised that this plan is genius. No.1 Macs can soon be as cheap as PCs, doubtless they'll be round about the sony vaio price. Not a problem. No.2 You'll be able to run windoze on a mac. Now there's no reason not to buy a mac. Use iLife for managing your emails and stuff, and use Windoze for the stuff that isn't out for Mac.

Apple aren't scared that the platform will die off as a result of mac users migrating to windoze. Oh no. Spyware, worms and Microsoft's ridiculously bloated approach will put paid to that. Given the choice, any sane person would choose OSX. And there's all the software that Apple owns: Final Cut, Logic etc.

I think we might have seen the end of the 'elitist' high price pro only mac market. Welcome to mass attack.

So we'll be seeing an even cheaper, even slicker Mac Mini that runs windoze too. It'll be just like the iPod. Yeah, so it costs an extra hundred dollars for what it is on paper. But look at it! I want it! I want one of those. You know the story. Apple stuff these days is cool like James Bond is cool.

And it'll never have been easier to switch. You can do it at the touch of a button. Of course, Apple won't help you when windoze goes wrong, and it will. And you won't be able to get OSX to run on a PC without some serious slashdot style abuse. I mean those guys got it running on an Xbox. That's obscene.

Steve Jobs isn't mad at all. He's going to give Bill Gates a good going over with a stick. He's now in the position of ultimate power. Either keep the mac as a restricted hardware platform with OSX or windoze. Or if the hardware racket starts to suck, then just open it up to everybody and sacrifice some reliability. And that's where Microsoft will really start to **** themselves.

Longhorn is going to be a while. And Tiger is already running on Intel. Uh oh microsoft.

I was losing sleep until I had this dream. Hardcore PC heads buying apple computers so that they can get their hands on Final Cut Pro or Logic. And then realising what they've been missing. And never looking back. Because they've still got a PC for what OSX can't do.

Watch out for the Itanium Xserve. I think that people might be enjoying the security.

 

[bishopdante]

And then...

Welcome to a new market. An exciting market. The Mac hot-rodder market. Macs have been closed boxes for too long. Get tinkering. But remember to keep a fire extinguisher handy.

 

[dontmatter]

Until I realised that this plan is genius. No.1 Macs can soon be as cheap as PCs, doubtless they'll be round about the sony vaio price. Not a problem. No.2 You'll be able to run windoze on a mac. Now there's no reason not to buy a mac. Use iLife for managing your emails and stuff, and use Windoze for the stuff that isn't out for Mac.

Apple aren't scared that the platform will die off as a result of mac users migrating to windoze. Oh no. Spyware, worms and Microsoft's ridiculously bloated approach will put paid to that. Given the choice, any sane person would choose OSX. And there's all the software that Apple owns: Final Cut, Logic etc.

I think we might have seen the end of the 'elitist' high price pro only mac market. Welcome to mass attack.

So we'll be seeing an even cheaper, even slicker Mac Mini that runs windoze too. It'll be just like the iPod. Yeah, so it costs an extra hundred dollars for what it is on paper. But look at it! I want it! I want one of those. You know the story. Apple stuff these days is cool like James Bond is cool.

And it'll never have been easier to switch. You can do it at the touch of a button. Of course, Apple won't help you when windoze goes wrong, and it will. And you won't be able to get OSX to run on a PC without some serious slashdot style abuse. I mean those guys got it running on an Xbox. That's obscene.

Steve Jobs isn't mad at all. He's going to give Bill Gates a good going over with a stick. He's now in the position of ultimate power. Either keep the mac as a restricted hardware platform with OSX or windoze. Or if the hardware racket starts to suck, then just open it up to everybody and sacrifice some reliability. And that's where Microsoft will really start to **** themselves.

Longhorn is going to be a while. And Tiger is already running on Intel. Uh oh microsoft.

I was losing sleep until I had this dream. Hardcore PC heads buying apple computers so that they can get their hands on Final Cut Pro or Logic. And then realising what they've been missing. And never looking back. Because they've still got a PC for what OSX can't do.

Watch out for the Itanium Xserve. I think that people might be enjoying the security.

would be nice, but...

unlike many PC companies-

-Apple spends a lot on R&D
-Apple's been selling not at cost, but at a profit
-Apple still can't buy major chip volume
-Apple spends a lot on advertizing
-Apple's hardware costs help pay for software costs... which are necessary to sell the hardware (ilife is excellent and damned cheap for a reason, you know)...

All of which leads me to believe-apple won't be making cheaper PCs. However, it'll be harder to sell them for more, because they can't explain it all away by saying PPC makes all the numbers look bad, but they're really good. Of course, they won't have numbers that look bad, either. It will cut both ways-If they do have a competitive product, it will be apparent. If they don't, it will be aparent.

Given the lack of money being made by most of the PC industry, and the lack of software and R&D costs... apple will have to be damned clever to make nice margins and have competively priced machines.

Then again, they've always made up for non-off the shelf componentry by only having a couple of versions, while everybody else has a plethora of PC options. this could save some major dough.

 

[ShnikeJSB]

The Pentium-M FLIES!!!

I just recently purchased a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2, which comes with a 2.13GHz Pentium M, and it is FRIGGIN' FAST!!! ESPECIALLY next to the PowerBook G4's, which suck so badly, and is what made me jump ship to Windows in the first place. The thing I do miss on it is Hyperthreading, but Yonah/Jonah will take care of that... TIMES FOUR!!!! Yeah, think about it: dual-core, each with Hyperthreading = 4 "logical" processors! I really wish that by then that Yonah/Jonah will be using DDR3, but that isn't gonna happen. Apple Yonah/Jonah's will rock hard, and if it comes with, say, a Geforce 7600/7800 GO , 1920x1200 screen, and one of those new 160GB+ perpendicular recording hard drives, I will sell this XPS in a heartbeat and happily use Apple once again. -JB

 

[DeepIn2U]

There's never been a real reason for a longtime Mac user to want to get into the guts of his (recent/current) Mac to be tinkered with. OS X, even OS 9, ran smooth and sweetly. Sure the odd machine displayed some serious discrepancy's but nothing that warranty couldnt resolve. Tinkering with your machines hardware - overclocking cpu/gpu/replacing liquid cooling - is the stuff for selling current x86 machines and their aftermarket parts. If Windows wasnt running so bad on those machines there wouldn't be a need; oddly I still have never overclocked a gpu - and for what >30 fps more in an already impressive 142fps video game??!!! Common I dont want to play just to throwup; thats why I stopped drinking.

I still feel that Apple machines shouldn't dual boot; Apple's somewhat successful sales of the Mini says that users looking to upgrade or buy a computer already have one - Windows OS - and that machine had keyboard/mouse/monitor. So just ship with Mac OS X don't further help your competitor without getting more money for it!

As for

Interesting article. The Author points out that the Intel & Apple working together is really a move to topple Microsoft

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609.html

Unless Apple beefs up iCal, Mail,iSync to glorious heights, of BlackBerry or GoodLink wireless sync, multi-address book lookup (local, network, wirelessly) - with public & privacy filters/support. Then work with these two top company's along with Miscrosoft for Server 2003's push mail, and bring in support for RIM/Goodlink (Palm/PocketPC)/Symbian (UIQ or Series60) also for address lookup/pushemail/automatic search of iCal/AddressBook/Sharing controls of private/public or even inter-office (Head Corporate Office, then regional head offices), etc, then Apple OS X alone, even using Intel cpu's wont topple Microsoft.

I'd really like to see this happen with the next major push in XServes & XRaids co-existing with iMacs/PowerMacs in any major corporate office. I want to see a major pilot push with a fairly large upstart company - a company that'll actually rock the world with what services/products they have to offer. Something like what Apple does with that district in the US with a particular school; still cannot remember. But with everything is Mac; research, editing, advertising, design, production, webhosting, portable communications, etc.
If Apple could prove very efficient, useful, and mostly competive in qtr to qtr cost to M$; then thats prime!!!

 

[lazyrighteye]

It's amazing how little class some marketing department goons have. If Apple has any of that type I'm sure they get spankings from The Boss on a regular basis.

Well someone's not getting spanked enough. 'Cause whomever is responsible for making the Apple logo pop up in iTunes should be FIRED. So annoying. So harsh. So corporarte. So lame.

Now, if there were a way to disable that feature...

 

[Mr Maui]

Or vote the directors out at the annual shareholder meeting when their term is up. Assuming the company isn't run into the ground by that time (generalizing, not Apple).

Unfortunately, for Apple Stockholders, your scenario will not work as I believe that the Board of Directors holds the majority percentage of Apple stock.

 

[Mr Maui]

I like Mactel. Short. To the point. Sounds like a phone company. What could be better?

um ... MAC !!!! Otherwise we should have had MacMotos and MacBlues or Mac Business Machines. A Mac is just a Mac. If you want something that sounds like a phone company ... try Cingular or T-Mobile.

 

[ruud]

The thing I do miss on it is Hyperthreading, but Yonah/Jonah will take care of that...

Hyperthreading is a trick to compensate for the inefficiencies in the Pentium 4 / Netburst architecture. It's basically a way to utilize otherwise idle cycles due to branch mispredictions and cache misses inherent in the Netburst architecture with its insanely long pipeline.

Hyperthreading on the P-M architecture won't have as much benefit. That doesn't mean intel won't implement it, though.

 

[ailleur]

Hyperthreading is a trick to compensate for the inefficiencies in the Pentium 4 / Netburst architecture. It's basically a way to utilize otherwise idle cycles due to branch mispredictions and cache misses inherent in the Netburst architecture with its insanely long pipeline.

Hyperthreading on the P-M architecture won't have as much benefit. That doesn't mean intel won't implement it, though.

That was the main goal, but it actually didnt enhance performance in many cases, and in some, it decreased performance. But the general concencus of HT users (me included on my old cpu) is that the machine "feels" smoother. Your mouse never locks or lags when your doing a big task, you never have to wait when switching task for the window to draw when the cpu is really busy.

I believe ive read HT will only be implements on the Extreme edition of the dual core pentium-m derievative for the desktop and not the consumer cpu.

Im sure you knew that already, but its for the benefit of all the other readers.

 

[mandis]

I totally disagree. I think it's much easier to scratch a "polished" plastic surface like the iBook's than to dent an anodized aluminum one (my 7 months old PB has only a really tiny dent on it (no bigger than the tip of a needle), and my iPod mini's aluminum surface is still perfect; on the other hand, my PB charger has a really nasty scratch on it, plus a lot of smaller ones, and the clickwheel on the iPod is very scratched). Besides, the aluminum enclosure of the PowerBook just feels much sturdier and smoother than the iBook's plastic one (and I can compare often since a friend of mine has an iBook). I think it's something worth paying more for, and I'd hate having to go back to plastic.

I totally agree with you! I don't understand how so many people buy ibooks when they are so easy to scratch and break. One of the main reasons i got my powerbook was the amazing aluminium enclosure. I purchased it almost 10 months ago and it still looks new. Heaven forbid if apple stops selling aluminium powerbooks!!!!!

 

[j_maddison]

um ... MAC !!!! Otherwise we should have had MacMotos and MacBlues or Mac Business Machines. A Mac is just a Mac. If you want something that sounds like a phone company ... try Cingular or T-Mobile.

I was just about to post the same, you beat me to it! Now I so hope people will drop the mactel rubish!

If you want to be fancy, just say Apple mac instead of Mac Or Macintosh, or Applemacintosh! I think we have enough variations as it is.

Just a quicky, not sure if this has been asked before, but is it possible that OSX as an operating system will run faster than XP on an intel chip?? Is the OS capable of being more snappier and faster just like I've been told Linux is?

Jay

 

[j_maddison]

I totally agree with you! I don't understand how so many people buy ibooks when they are so easy to scratch and break. One of the main reasons i got my powerbook was the amazing aluminium enclosure. I purchased it almost 10 months ago and it still looks new. Heaven forbid if apple stops selling aluminium powerbooks!!!!!

Easy, they dont have the money to buy a Powerbook. It isnt rocket science.

Jay

 

[SPUY767]

It's amazing how, in the course of one week, any posts regarding intel go from an overwhelming negative response, to an overwhelming positive one.

 

[mandis]

Easy, they dont have the money to buy a Powerbook. It isnt rocket science.

Jay

It's a much better investment to buy a used Powerbook than a brand new ibook.
ibooks are just cheap plastic toys in comparison to Aluminiium powerbooks. As a matter of fact nearly every other laptop feels like a cheap toy when compared to a Powerbook.

 

[Yvan256]

Well Steve been goign back and forth lately anyways. First he hated flash MP3's now the Shuffle is out, and then this...

Steve never said he hated flash MP3 players. What he said was that the flash MP3 players were a joke since they could only store a few dozens of songs (remember that when he said that, most players were in the 32-128MB range). And he was right, too. Who'd want an MP3 player that can barely hold more than 3-4 CDs?

Now, there's only one thing missing on the iPod Shuffle: a "loop one/loop all" switch...

 

[Yvan256]

It's amazing how, in the course of one week, any posts regarding intel go from an overwhelming negative response, to an overwhelming positive one.

Intel may have a better roadmap (and Pentium M/Centrino), IBM and Freescale may not care much about Apple, but IMO x86 still sucks (PPC is so much cleaner by design).

A Pentium is just an overgrown Z80. ;-)

 

[gkarris]

POLL - Is anyone planning to buy a Mac or PC NOW?

I bought an iBook G4 almost 2 years ago - and am really happy with it. I was planning on upgrading my aging PC desktop with a PCI-Express system, and get a Mac Mini, but now I'm just waiting...

You think both PC and Mac sales will go down?

 

[Yvan256]

I bought an iBook G4 almost 2 years ago - and am really happy with it. I was planning on upgrading my aging PC desktop with a PCI-Express system, and get a Mac Mini, but now I'm just waiting...

You think both PC and Mac sales will go down?

PC users won't care (Macs don't have games).

Mac users that need to upgrade will simply upgrade. I don't see any PPC Mac problems for at least the next 5-6 years (Tiger runs on some G3 systems).

Some Mac zealots won't upgrade because they hate Intel. I'm curious about what they'll upgrade to: Windows Longhorn, Linux or BSD?

If your iBook G4 does the job, I'd say just wait. Or at least wait for the next Mac mini (rev.B) which will probably get an upgrade very soon (according to shipping delays on the stock models on Apple websites around the world, which just jumped to 1-2 weeks from what I've read).

As for your PC, if it's for gaming: wait the next generations of consoles (I know I'm getting a Nintendo Revolution no matter what its specs are: they've already announced Metroid Prime 3 for the system!) Whatever upgrade you do to your PC, anyway, won't be enough for Longhorn.

 

[zen.state]

I bought an iBook G4 almost 2 years ago - and am really happy with it. I was planning on upgrading my aging PC desktop with a PCI-Express system, and get a Mac Mini, but now I'm just waiting...

You think both PC and Mac sales will go down?

why not buy a new machine? its the intel based macs that will suffer this transition first. many apps will have to be emulated and the emulator is only equal to a G3. ppc macs won't start to suffer for at least 2 years and I bet as long as 3 or 4 even. you can be sure that many current G5 towers will still be running and well used in 4 years.

 

[Yvan256]

why not buy a new machine? its the intel based macs that will suffer this transition first. many apps will have to be emulated and the emulator is only equal to a G3. ppc macs won't start to suffer for at least 2 years and I bet as long as 3 or 4 even. you can be sure that many current G5 towers will still be running and well used in 4 years.

I even see the following happening at WWDC 2006:

"Well, you guys are amazing. The Intel transition is going very well and there's very few problems on the customers side. But you know, IBM and Freescale have been making real progress since last year. We now have mobile dual-core 2.4GHz G4s from Freescale and quad-core 6GHz PPCs from IBM at our disposal! Introducing the new PowerBooks and PowerMacs! The iBooks, eMacs and Mac minis will still continue on schedule with 3GHz Pentium M processors. So what we're now asking you is to simply keep making universal binaries like you've done for the past year. Apple is not switching to any architecture: we're now the only computing platform that's really architecture-independant. Keep those universal binaries coming, guys."

 

[AidenShaw]

LOL - more fanboi hardware theories

Hyperthreading is a trick to compensate for the inefficiencies in the Pentium 4 / Netburst architecture.

Then why did IBM implement it in the POWER5 - is POWER5 based on Netburst?

Then why did Digital design HT for the Alpha chips - were they the precursors to the Netburst?
_____________________

No, the simple fact is that all CPUs suffer from waits due to cache misses, memory misses, pipeline bubbles, mispredicted branches and the like.

HT is a very cheap way to let another thread use the execution units, rather than leave resources idle.