Sculley on Apple and Intel

[macphoria]

Had Apple gone over to Intel processors, could people have used Macs installed with Windows? Or PC's installed with Mac OS? That's story for the alternate universe.

"Think Different" really has been what Apple stands for. I'm glad they didn't go to Intel.

 

[MacFan26]

What is John Sculley's purpose in saying this? "'Apple took another path and ended up a different kind of company', Sculley said." What's his point? I don't understand why he would make this comment after not even working there for so many years.

 

[roy_dan]

Um, just my last food for thought.

An Intel chip designed to Apple architecture wouldn't run Windows.

Apple's only source of chips will be coming from one fab at IBM. Is it smart to put all of your eggs in one basket?

That's really what this is about, with Moto punching out of the semi business and IBM redesigning the company every few years doesn't make me feel comfortable with Apples future.

Intel has a worldwide virtual factory model with at least a dozen fabs with tens of thousands of employees within their TMG dedicated to one thing, making chips. I like the odds better.

 

[Gyroscope]

Originally posted by macphoria
Had Apple gone over to Intel processors, could people have used Macs installed with Windows? Or PC's installed with Mac OS? That's story for the alternate universe.

"Think Different" really has been what Apple stands for. I'm glad they didn't go to Intel.

Had Apple done so they would have seen their market share erosion even back then. People would have been able to use any x86 based OS on Apple box instead of MacOS(with little or no tricks)Heck OS/2 was years ahead of MacOS and DOS based Win 2.0+ but lost battle on x86. With Apple making Motorola CPU/MacOS combo once you bought Mac you had to stick with the OS . Remember kids everything that arrived on x86 eventually just got killed by Microsoft . BeOS,OS/2,NextStep,GEM.....and many many others.

Sculley can eat my shorts.

 

[Snowy_River]

Originally posted by roy_dan
... Is it smart to put all of your eggs in one basket?...

See this post for further comments on the 'Apple shouldn't rely on one chip maker' issue.

 

[macphoria]

An Intel chip designed to Apple architecture wouldn't run Windows.

No, Mac OS would have been revised to run on Intel processor if Apple wanted to go to X86. That would have opened can of worms.

 

[Analog Kid]

Originally posted by ChoMomma
That's a huge heatsink not a emulator.. i know it's deceptive.. but it's just a heat sink.

 

[kaneda]

new lithium battery for G5 powerbook?

http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/news-releases/2003/renew-energy-batt/betterlithium.html

 

[AhmedFaisal]

Naah Sculley-boy, you being Apple's CEO was the worst mistake...

You and that other Monkey that drove Apple down the drain until Steve-O came back, that was the worst for Apple.
Cheers,

Ahmed

 

[Doraemon]

Re: Sculley on Apple and Intel

Originally posted by Macrumors
Sculley claims,"That's probably one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made, not going to the Intel platform".

No way! His biggest mistake was to allow Microsoft to use MacOS GUI technologies for Windows!

some history (in 1985)

 

[pigwin32]

Isn't macosx already running on Intel?

I have a vague recollection that Apple was rumoured to already have a version of macosx running on an Intel chip, and realistically it shouldn't be too difficult to achieve. But there are sound economic reasons involved in not going down that path, a number of which I think have been mentioned here previously. Like, if windows and macos ran on the same hardware, Apple would have to ditch the hardware business and compete with Microsoft for software sales. I guess we would then all be buying our hardware from Sony, or some backstreet solder monkey.

Also, the cisc v. risc debate is getting kind of stale these days, they have a lot more in common than they used to. I think the single biggest handicap Intel has had to cope with is backward compatibility with the x86 chips. How big an albatross is that to have strung round your neck?

 

[Analog Kid]

CISC vs RISC

Originally posted by Dippo
I still think RISC is much better than CISC. CISC is reaching it's limitations while RISC still has some ground to go.

That's just my opinion, no real scientific data to back it up with.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if CISC made a comeback... x86 is a dog because of all the cruft, but the design goals of CISC may have benefits for different reasons.

CISC was designed in an era when memory was really expensive, so instructions were encoded to be dense. Compile a program for RISC and CISC and the CISC binary will be smaller.

RISC came around because the memory cost was starting to fade, but it was hard to speed up the CPU core. The simpler instructions meant a much simpler and more predictable execution core that could be optimized and clocked up.

Now silicon is cheap, and CISC architectures put a layer in front to break up CISC instructions to run on simpler, more optimized RISC hardware so it can be clocked up (and RISC architectures break up RISC instructions to run on even simpler RISC hardware).

As silicon gets faster, and more and more parallel execution units are placed on chip, execution through the core is no longer the limiting factor. In most cases, memory bandwidth is becoming a bottleneck.

With the limitation becoming how many bytes you can push through the external bus, denser instruction sets have an advantage again. You can get more done with less memory fetches on a CISC architecture.

One way around bandwidth limitations is cache-- but cache is expensive like system RAM used to be so denser instructions have an advantage here as well (smaller programs fit better in cache).

The one major disadvantage that most CISC architectures have is variable length instructions-- they just don't align well with fixed length bursts out of modern memories, or fixed line sized caches.

None of this is meant to imply that Intel would be a good option (I'll address that separately), I'm just pointing out that the old "RISC is better" argument isn't as simple anymore...

 

[claytonbench]

Re: What's wrong with Intel? Intel GOOD, Microsoft BAD

Originally posted by roy_dan
I hate to see guilt by association and that is what's happening to Intel nowadays. Yes, they have a strong partnership with Microsoft but that is only smart business. Trust me, they don't share the same philosophies as MS.

I worked at Intel for almost 5 years (blue collar) and can tell you first hand it’s a great company that takes care of the employees and customers. Much like another company we all appreciate, Apple. Intel and Apple have more in common than we may think.

Who says an Intel enabled Mac would be on IA32? I'm sure if Steve Jobs gave Intel the go-ahead they would have a PPC compliant product to manufacture in parallel to the P4's on their awesome manufacturing process. I have seen Itanium, PIII, P4, Celeron, Chipsets, and Strong ARMS all in the same factory in Chandler, AZ.

Whether by buying a license or inventing an ingenious workaround, making PPC's would give them one more edge on AMD and Sun and that's what Intel really cares about.

With Motorola soon to be out of the picture and IBM concentrating on G5's I can't think of a better company to fill in Apple's 32bit gap. Heck, I wouldn't mind Intel making both 32bit and 64bit CPU's for Apple.

Comparing a Mactel to a Wintel is still inconclusive. One of Apple's biggest strengths, IMO, is the fact it's one company engineering the whole system. Sun has it too and look at whom they are starting to buy CPU's from! I would even argue that a Mactel system would be cheaper than a Wintel system. Who’s around to over-charge for the operating system license? The smart buyers look past GHz vs. GHz and choose productivity. Ever wonder why Mac users seem smarter than Windows users? LOL That’s not always true.

Never fear, Wintel will forever be inferior because of all the corporate boundaries between making just one system. It's worse than government red tape.

Reevaluate Intel and think about what will carry Apple into the next 20 years. It’s not going to be a foundry fab at IBM.

He is exactly right. Let me add something to this, when your computer breaks 99% of the time it is not the processor heck most of the time its not hardware its winblowz but my point here is intel could make the g5 just the same as IBM or intel could redesign a chip specifically for Apple. If Apple switches to intel they are not neccesaraly going to switch to a P4. Thanks for reading this post and please correct me if i am wrong.

 

[Swift]

Dead Wrong

Sculley means this: if I had only chosen Intel, our colored water would have taken over the market from their colored water because we're "hipper." Only we wouldn't have been. Everybody in the corporate world thought that Jobs' sealed box was the wrong idea in the '80s. Commodify, went the mantra. Only, were are all the computer makers now? Dead, all dead. Just Dell and a few struggling dinos, and Apple. Having a sealed box and a price high enough to pay for developing a new OS means we don't have the infections that Windows has. Our closed box allows us to communicate using open standards. They have had to resort to monopoly tactics to keep their OS and tied apps running on commodified PCs. We would have gone the way of HP and Compaq and IBM and Gateway if we had gone to Intel.

 

[Booga]

Originally posted by Gyroscope
It has to be remembered that when Apple introduced original Mac in 84 Motorola MC68000 was running circles around best Intel offering at the time(80286 aka i286). Five years down the track (late 80's) Motorola MC 68030 was still runing circles around i386.

This is true, and is an excellent reason for Apple to have chosen the 68000-68030. However, the 68040 was extremely late and did not compete well against the 486. The Mac has never been the definitive speed king since. The PowerPC might have pulled ahead if it weren't for the fact that 50% of the OS was emulated at the time, but it too gradually fell significantly behind Intel in almost every measureable performance comparison until a few weeks ago.

An x86 Mac would have been exactly like a PowerPC Mac, only it would have run significantly faster the last five years, while being cheaper. Who can argue with that? Yes, it would also use more electricity, but I honestly don't care much about that.

Remember, x86 is NOT the same thing as PC platform... it's just a CPU, not a whole chipset/BIOS combo. It is unlikely you would ever have been able to run Windows on an x86 Macintosh.

The G5 is nice because, while being a little more expensive, is at least competitive again with what Intel and AMD have to offer-- but we'd have it already if we'd started with them in the first place.

I think Sculley is right on the money with his latest analysis.

 

[tbdavis]

Originally posted by roy_dan
If I understand it correctly, IBM is making G5’s out of one of its foundry fabs. Just like TSMC, they are leasing out manufacturing resources time to companies who can’t make their own chips. IBM is only a design partner so it’s not like they can’t drop the whole product line at a heartbeat. There are other companies who will fill in the business for IBM. It’s scary to think it, but what if there were catastrophic failures in IBM’s leadership, business model (again), or earnings and they had to start shedding overhead. If for what ever reason IBM sold that fab like Digital did in Hudson who would Apple turn to? That’s really where I’m coming from by advocating for Intel.

Not quite. The PowerPC instruction set is a subset of the POWER-4 instruction set. IBM uses POWER-4 chips in their mainframes. And IBM uses the 970 (G5) in one series of its blade servers. So no, they can't drop the whole product line "at a heartbeat."

And because IBM has structured its microprocessor business on an internal foundry model, they must not only keep up with the latest fabrication techniques, they must be a leader in the field. And Apple benefits. And because IBM is producing whatever its chip customers buy, that puts Apple in the driver's seat.

Intel processors generally use at least twice the power to achieve the same performance as a PowerPC chip. That means that a laptop would need a battery twice as large to achieve the same performance. The Al Powerbooks could not exist on Intel CPUs. And given that Apple's market share of laptops jumped almost 2% with the introduction of the Al Powerbooks, it looks like Mac OS on Intel would have been Apple's death knell.

 

[Analog Kid]

Re: What's wrong with Intel? Intel GOOD, Microsoft BAD

Originally posted by roy_dan
Who says an Intel enabled Mac would be on IA32? I'm sure if Steve Jobs gave Intel the go-ahead they would have a PPC compliant product to manufacture in parallel to the P4's on their awesome manufacturing process. I have seen Itanium, PIII, P4, Celeron, Chipsets, and Strong ARMS all in the same factory in Chandler, AZ.

Whether by buying a license or inventing an ingenious workaround, making PPC's would give them one more edge on AMD and Sun and that's what Intel really cares about.

I'm glad to hear that Intel treats their blue collar workers well, at least in Arizona. They don't tend to treat their engineers well in Santa Clara. The greatest thing Intel has done for Sillicon Valley is bringing a bunch of top-notch engineers from all over the world and then treat them so badly that they leave to lend their talents to other companies...

As an engineer, Intel is a good place to start or end a career, but mid-career it's a wasteland. Intel looks good on a resume for a young engineer, and they treat their senior architects well, but everyone else is treated as cogs in the machine.

I'm sure Intel would be more than happy to fab PPCs for anyone, until no one else did. As someone who has worked with, rather than for, Intel, I can say that they are hardly an altruistic partner.

I've been duped into designing around their flash components only to have my allocation disappear because I wasn't using their processors... Wouldn't even sweep the factory floor to give me the 20 parts I needed to populate my prototypes....

Sure, they'd build PPCs to bring in a customer and then phase out the product line to move everyone to x86-- their bread and butter. More volume on x86 is good for Intel, customers be damned.

Yeah, they fab StongARMs/XScales but that's only because they can't figure out how to get x86 into a low power embedded product like a cell phone. They tried for years...

Intel means x86. They want Apple as a customer so badly because Apple is constant proof that there are other viable architectures.

 

[Analog Kid]

Personally I think Scully is disappointed about not moving Apple to Intel because it's the only way he had left to do more damage to the company and missed it...

 

[dstorey]

Could Apple move in Intel now, but not in the way people think, Ie x86/Itanium. Moto is trying to split up or sell it's semi-conductor business right? What happens id shock horror, Intel comes along and buys it. It would be quite interesting IBM and Intel both compeating producing PPC chips, both for desktop and servers. Probably never happen though.

 

[hvfsl]

The reason a few people have been talking about Intel making PPC chips for Apple, is that moto will soon stop making PPC chips for Apple and Apple needs to get its lowend chips from someone else. IBM only makes G3 low end chips, which are not good enough to be put in the PowerBook/iMac (at least at the moment).

So the options are:
- Apple moves all its product line over to G5, which would mean a low power G5 would be needed.
- Apple goes to Intel to make a G4 to be used in its low end or low power computers like powerbook etc.
- IBM takes over the G4 production from moto and combines it with its G3 tec.

 

[EvilMole]

Originally posted by Gyroscope
Had Apple done so they would have seen their market share erosion even back then. People would have been able to use any x86 based OS on Apple box instead of MacOS(with little or no tricks)

False. Take out the PC BIOS, and it couldn't run Windows. It's perfectly possible to create a machine using an x86 series processor that doesn't and can't run Windows.

 

[Wyrm]

Re: Sculley on Apple and Intel

Well, if Sculley had been so effective he'd probably still be the chief exec of Apple - so we can take his words with a large grain of sodium chloride.

Quite possibly if Sculley had gone down the x86 path (cripes, they are talking 386-486 generation cpus - ug) - Apple might have gone to another different architecture. Quite frankly I'm glad he made that mistake - because the PPC just oozes elegance over the x86 (I've programmed/debugged both at a machine level, and I think I'm still learning x86).

-Wyrm

 

[EvilMole]

Re: Naah Sculley-boy, you being Apple's CEO was the worst mistake...

Originally posted by AhmedFaisal
You and that other Monkey that drove Apple down the drain until Steve-O came back, that was the worst for Apple.

Actually, that's not true. During the the Sculley era, Apple was consistently very profitable, and sold far more Macs than "Steve-O" has managed. He took Apple from a $1 billion corporation, and made it into a $10 billion corporation. He created the entire "lifestyle" marketing of Apple, without which it woud still be just another computer company, in the process turning it into one of the best-known brands on Earth. Jobs learned everything he knows about brand marketing from Sculley - it's one that that Sculley was actually terrific at.

Sculley made three mistakes: Not embracing licensing Mac OS at the right time, failing to get a handle on R&D costs, and allowing the company to drift into very poor management structures. The company wasted enormous amounts of cash on projects that were simply unfeasable. His other big mistake was trusting Mike Spindler, who was a poor operations guy and a very poor friend.

If you're going to talk about someone, you should at least know the facts. Sculley wasn't the best CEO in the world, but without him, there would be no Apple.

 

[EvilMole]

Re: Re: Sculley on Apple and Intel

Originally posted by Wyrm
Well, if Sculley had been so effective he'd probably still be the chief exec of Apple - so we can take his words with a large grain of sodium chloride.

Sculley was CEO for 10 years, which is the longest period of any Apple CEO. I very much doubt that anyone with any sanity would want to be CEO of Apple for longer than that.

 

[AhmedFaisal]

Re: Re: Naah Sculley-boy, you being Apple's CEO was the worst mistake...

Originally posted by EvilMole
Actually, that's not true. During the the Sculley era, Apple was consistently very profitable, and sold far more Macs than "Steve-O" has managed. He took Apple from a $1 billion corporation, and made it into a $10 billion corporation. He created the entire "lifestyle" marketing of Apple, without which it woud still be just another computer company, in the process turning it into one of the best-known brands on Earth. Jobs learned everything he knows about brand marketing from Sculley - it's one that that Sculley was actually terrific at.

Sculley made three mistakes: Not embracing licensing Mac OS at the right time, failing to get a handle on R&D costs, and allowing the company to drift into very poor management structures. The company wasted enormous amounts of cash on projects that were simply unfeasable. His other big mistake was trusting Mike Spindler, who was a poor operations guy and a very poor friend.

If you're going to talk about someone, you should at least know the facts. Sculley wasn't the best CEO in the world, but without him, there would be no Apple.

Yet another person that just goes by the numbers. I can name you a whole bunch of companies that became extremely profitable for a while when the CEO came in (cuz he leveraged it to death) and then died a slow death because the CEO didn't realize that profit is not everything.
Cheers,

Ahmed