switching to intel why...

[MongoTheGeek]

According to El Reg the new paxville chip idles somewhere around where a g5 runs flat out so Apple is going to Intel chips why again?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/20/intel_pax_bench/

 

[iMeowbot]

Don't worry about it. Paxville is trailing edge Netburst stuff, a stopgap until the new stuff arrives.

 

[caveman_uk]

Why?

Look at the powerbook. I think you'll find your answer.

There isn't a problem on the desktop with IBM and PowerPC. The problem is notebooks.

...and I think Steve Jobs has been jerked around by IBM and Motorola enough to REALLY piss him off.

 

[GroundLoop]

Don't worry about it. Paxville is trailing edge Netburst stuff, a stopgap until the new stuff arrives.

This is correct. Paxville will never find its way into a Mac. The first processor that will likey show up is Yonah. Look up the information on this processor ad you will see exactly why the switch is occurring.

Hickman

 

[cubist]

Even Yonah is crap, really. Two cores on a chip that have to communicate off-chip? Stinks.

Switching from PPC to Intel is like switching from Mercedes to Hyundai. It has nothing to do with quality, performance or power consumption. It is Apple saying "good enough" and going for the mainstream, increasing market share.

 

[strider42]

Even Yonah is crap, really. Two cores on a chip that have to communicate off-chip? Stinks.

Switching from PPC to Intel is like switching from Mercedes to Hyundai. It has nothing to do with quality, performance or power consumption. It is Apple saying "good enough" and going for the mainstream, increasing market share.

I completely disagree. IBM obviously has no interest in making chips for apple at a competative level. Intel is offering a much better roadmap with some great technology. Just because its fashionable to hate intel doesn't mean it isn't a good idea to switch. Lets face it, PC's are faster than macs in most every day tasks. If apple hadn't been offering dualies for so long, they would have been in a lot of trouble. Intel has much better mobile processors too. Plus they have lots of other chips liek the xScale chips apple may want to use in the future. you can bet that stuff was all considered.

But to continue your analogy, hyundai is a much more reliable care than a Mercedes, and still does the job just fine. And it costs less and gets better gas mileage. Oh sure, there are some thing the Mercedes just kills hyundai for, its certainly sexier, but that' doesn't mean its a smart decision to mortgage your future for one.

 

[lasuther]

Pentium M chips have 2MB of Cache and 533MHz of FSB. Compared to the PowerBooks 512kb Cache and 167MHz of FSB. And the PowerBook processor has topped out. The Pentium chips will be getting better and faster.

No one wants to get run around in their Mercedes by some kid in a Hyandia Elantra. Its just embarissing and its about time Jobs did something about it. I'm tired of the professional line of laptops meaning the book that's silver. Intel will bring the Power back to PowerBooks and I can't wait.

lasuther

 

[solvs]

It's all about the G4, and the future of the G5. For now, the G5 is fine. By 2007, who knows. Supposedly Intel has something really good coming for desktops. Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it too, but there it is. And the portables are going nowhere fast.

 

[Quixcube]

Even Yonah is crap, really. Two cores on a chip that have to communicate off-chip? Stinks.

Switching from PPC to Intel is like switching from Mercedes to Hyundai. It has nothing to do with quality, performance or power consumption. It is Apple saying "good enough" and going for the mainstream, increasing market share.

Yeah, Yonah is a bad joke. I mean, off-chip communication with its second core! Thank goodness the G4 doesn't have to communicate with its second core off-chip.

I mean, it would be a real disaster because of the G4's 167MHz bottleneck-bus and all.

It sure is a good chip though, the G4. And updated so frequently with important improvements.

Wait, the G4 doesn't even have a second core?

Well, it must still be better than that Intel "crap" because, um, because Intel is the bad guy. Yeah.

 

[minimax]

I completely disagree. IBM obviously has no interest in making chips for apple at a competative level. Intel is offering a much better roadmap with some great technology.

Are you on acid or what?? The new dualcore G5 will show the fastest Pentium D / Xeon D all corners of the room. This is consumer retardism in full effect. (or was it called RDF 🙄 )
Have fun working on your new quadcore Intel Roadmap processor 😎

You bet it was from a marketing perspective. In case you didnt know, Apple is a school example of a marketing driven corporation (it's a popular case study @ technical management faculties around the globe).

 

[strider42]

Are you on acid or what?? The new dualcore G5 will show the fastest Pentium D / Xeon D all corners of the room. This is consumer retardism in full effect. (or was it called RDF 🙄 )
Have fun working on your new quadcore Intel Roadmap processor 😎

You bet it was from a marketing perspective. In case you didnt know, Apple is a school example of a marketing driven corporation (it's a popular case study @ technical management faculties around the globe).

yeah, nice that apple has to use dual core to even keep up with intels single core offerings. When intel has dual cores working at faster clock rates, they are gonna spank the G5's, which still aren't at 3 ghz even, are they. And that's probably what apple will be using. You should also note that apple probably won't be using the pentium D derived chips, but rather than pentium M derived chips that are coming. Do you really believe that the G5's are as fast as intel's. Apple hasn't been faster than intel stuff in like 10 years. Certainly not at a comparable cost or with comparable chips.

You should buy apple stuff for OS X and good hardware integration. Buying them for pure power is ridiculous in most cases.

Edit: You are right though, apple is all about marketing. that's how they've convinced people their computers are as fast as intels stuff for so long. It just hasn't been true.

 

[GroundLoop]

Even Yonah is crap, really. Two cores on a chip that have to communicate off-chip? Stinks.

I believe that you are thinking of the Pentium D. That is essentially 2 cores crammed together. Yonah was designed from the ground up to be dual-core.

Hickman

 

[javiercr]

Lets face it, PC's are faster than macs in most every day tasks. I.

What PC is more powerful that Dual-Dual G5?

 

[GroundLoop]

What PC is more powerful that Dual-Dual G5?

Well, those dual-duals aren't even out on the market yet. But it is a very good value.

Hickman

 

[maxterpiece]

Apple hasn't been faster than intel stuff in like 10 years. Certainly not at a comparable cost or with comparable chips.

From about 98-2000, with a maturing G3 and early G4 processors, apple was faster than intel and was roughly comparable in the $/power category. The G5 was arguably more powerful than any pentium offerings when it was released... it was still more $/power though.

iMac G3 400mhz were great machines in their time.

Let's be honest here - Intel has a whole market of consumer PCs that it sells to. The only legitimate PC manufacturer that IBM was dealing to was Apple. That gives Intel a much bigger incentive to build processors that accomodate the PC market.

Furthermore, now you can run any of those little windows apps that you wanted/needed to run for work. No need to emulate. I'm looking forward to playing Civilization 4 on the first Mac that goes intel.

 

[javiercr]

Furthermore, now you can run any of those little windows apps that you wanted/needed to run for work. No need to emulate. I'm looking forward to playing Civilization 4 on the first Mac that goes intel.

First is not 'now' , second, you don't know if you are going to be able to run windows apps, probably and hopefully not, if you could run photoshop for windows in a mac and all the other apps then the mac would have really disapeared, not mac design guidelines or anything. Games is something else but I don't think we know.

 

[revisionA]

Even Yonah is crap, really. Two cores on a chip that have to communicate off-chip? Stinks.

Switching from PPC to Intel is like switching from Mercedes to Hyundai. It has nothing to do with quality, performance or power consumption. It is Apple saying "good enough" and going for the mainstream, increasing market share.

I have found that Albeton Live is a great judge of cpu horsepower.

My pentium 3.2ht is rated the exact same as my pro 1.8 G5 single. And using them side by side, the overall computing experience is smoother with the mac, web pages load a lot faster and I havent had barely any software issues.

I think that with rosetta running at 85% that means you need a 15% horsepower edge in memory controller and cpu to have a balanced transition. Thats why the developer macintel is a 3.6, to match a 2.0 g5 single's performance. Thats why a single 2.0 is the base for their on the fence performer, the iMac, clearly good enough for just about everything but not super fast. When there are dual core intel chips running at what equates to thier p4 dualcore running at 4.0ghz, then we have over 3.6ghz of G5 dual performance. Add that to a newer tigher integrated custom motherboard (to keep vista away), and the 2006/7 macs will be smooth.

There is also a consumer issue affecting all the r and d decisions, people want luxury feel over techno logic. They want computing to be simple, elegant and painless. Sometimes speed is not the only way to acheive that.

$#

 

[quagmire]

yeah, nice that apple has to use dual core to even keep up with intels single core offerings. When intel has dual cores working at faster clock rates, they are gonna spank the G5's, which still aren't at 3 ghz even, are they. And that's probably what apple will be using. You should also note that apple probably won't be using the pentium D derived chips, but rather than pentium M derived chips that are coming. Do you really believe that the G5's are as fast as intel's. Apple hasn't been faster than intel stuff in like 10 years. Certainly not at a comparable cost or with comparable chips.

You should buy apple stuff for OS X and good hardware integration. Buying them for pure power is ridiculous in most cases.

Edit: You are right though, apple is all about marketing. that's how they've convinced people their computers are as fast as intels stuff for so long. It just hasn't been true.

Great another person who thinks faster Ghz=better performance. A single dual core 2.5 Ghz G5 will be right up there with the 3.2 Ghz Pentium D or even beat it. The dual core 2.3 Ghz G5 already beats the dual processor 2.5 Ghz G5. So grow up. The G5 is still one of the best CPU's. I say 2nd only beaten by AMD's chips.

 

[DakotaGuy]

Do you really believe that the G5's are as fast as intel's. Apple hasn't been faster than intel stuff in like 10 years. Certainly not at a comparable cost or with comparable chips.

You should buy apple stuff for OS X and good hardware integration. Buying them for pure power is ridiculous in most cases.

Edit: You are right though, apple is all about marketing. that's how they've convinced people their computers are as fast as intels stuff for so long. It just hasn't been true.

Silly me...all along I was thinking the new Dual-Dual Core 2.5 Ghz G5 was going to be fast.

 

[wdlove]

The simple and succinct reason that Apple is deciding to switch to Intel, Steve made the decision. I trust his judgment.

 

[Mechcozmo]

Furthermore, now you can run any of those little windows apps that you wanted/needed to run for work. No need to emulate. I'm looking forward to playing Civilization 4 on the first Mac that goes intel.

OS X will never run Windows applications natively. NEVER EVER EVER EVER FOREVER NEVER. However, (it rhymes!) this will allow for extremely easy virtualization of Windows/Linux. Virtualization is like emulation, but it can access the CPU natively-- no need to translate instructions. This also allows for easy access to the video card, RAM, etc. It is tricky business, but doable.

The simple and succinct reason that Apple is deciding to switch to Intel, Steve made the decision. I trust his judgment.

Steve has proven to be correct throughout history... I hope he is correct this time. I did like PowerPC chips, though...

 

[iGary]

I have a brother-in-law who is an engineer at Intel (and no, I'm not trying to sound like a pompous SOB) who says very exciting things are on the way.

Doesn't excite me a bit until I get ready to buy a PB.

I wich Apple was staying with IBM PPC for desktops, but not reasonable, I guess.

 

[maxterpiece]

First is not 'now' , second, you don't know if you are going to be able to run windows apps, probably and hopefully not, if you could run photoshop for windows in a mac and all the other apps then the mac would have really disapeared, not mac design guidelines or anything. Games is something else but I don't think we know.

It is essential that any program like photoshop or word works like the OS it is being used in - there needs to be drag and drop between apps, clipboard integration. Save dialog boxes, menus, etc, all need to share the same metaphor that the OS uses to present software. Because of this it would be ridiculous for a company like adobe to only release a windows version of its software and just let mac users run the app through virtualization. It would be so much less functional. I don't see htis as being something you need to worry about.
Now a game doesn't need to integrate with the OS and there is very little that most games use that vary from OS to OS, so for this purpose I would be perfectly happy running Civilization 4 Windows on my mac.

OS X will never run Windows applications natively. NEVER EVER EVER EVER FOREVER NEVER. However, (it rhymes!) this will allow for extremely easy virtualization of Windows/Linux. Virtualization is like emulation, but it can access the CPU natively-- no need to translate instructions. This also allows for easy access to the video card, RAM, etc. It is tricky business, but doable.

So what you are saying is that OS X won't run windows natively, but with some extra software it could run them at almost native speeds and it would seem to the user that they run natively. Functionally speaking, what's the difference? It will still be humongously faster than VPC for mac is now. Finally, I'll be able to install windows on my mactel, so I will be able to get native performance that way.

 

[dmw007]

I have a brother-in-law who is an engineer at Intel (and no, I'm not trying to sound like a pompous SOB) who says very exciting things are on the way.

Doesn't excite me a bit until I get ready to buy a PB.

I wich Apple was staying with IBM PPC for desktops, but not reasonable, I guess.

Same opinion here:

Intel chips for 'Books- great! 🙂

Intel chips for desktop Macs- screw it, give me my PowerPC G5! 🙂

 

[quagmire]

I think some of the reason to the switch has to do with the iPod's success. Just read my whole writing about it.


http://homepage.mac.com/quagmire2/Personal8.html