Apple Punishes ATI For Leaking The Cube?

Ruddy writes: "According to this story at InsideMacGames and an even juicier one at AppleInsider, graphics card company ATi leaked sacred knowledge about Apple's soon to be unveiled products (the new G4 Cubes) in advance of the MacWorld announcements yesterday, effectively stealing some of Steve Jobs' coveted keynote thunder. The leaked info spread quickly over the Web during the peak of rumor-Cube-mania. In retaliation the Fearless leader apparently then pulled the plug on the Radeon's rollout at MacWorld, all but publicly spanking ATi for its indiscretions and replacing the Cube's flashy Radeon card with the more mundane and stale Rage 128 Pro (talk about spite and noses!)." This story just keeps cracking me up.

Comments

Give me a break

[ink]

For sure, Radeon will ship in the Cubes within 2 months from now. You can bet that, since the machine is already up for order, there are actually quite a few already in the pipeline that have the Radeon cards inside.

Step back and listen to yourself. The whole notion that Apple pulled the Radeon is ludicrous:

• The Radeon JUST CAME OUT -- you can't even buy one yet; they'd at least have ramped up production by now (and have a bunch sitting around) if they were planning on putting them in the Cube. Not to mention that Apple would need at least a bit of time to make sure the drivers work with MacOS 9.
• The Cube has NO FANS. The Radeon DOES. The Cube was built to dissapate heat using convection and this requires using COOL components; a 64MB card doesn't qualify -- you may NEVER be able to put a heat monster in the thing without modifying the case.
• The Radeon would make an appearance in the most expensive Macs first. Apple always does this with the highest tech.

I think this whole story is ridiculous.

The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

Pictures, Pictures

[disarray]

For what it's worth, here's a picture of the Cube's innards, with the Rage 128 card exposed:

http://www.go2mac.com/image.cfm?image=images/shows /MWNY2k/wednesday_2/cube_guts2.jpg

Can it be swapped for a Radeon? There's no point in me engaging in idle speculation--just judge for yourself. Eventually, Apple will post developer specifications and clarify exactly how the card's connected to the motherboard.

Re:That's one of the reasons why I stick with PC's

[angelo]

I am a PC weenie too, but I think some people are really giving Apple an unfair shake in not catching up on facts. As far as untested hardware, and Apple staying in a "safe zone" I say Phooey.

1. They are running a chipset that is not Intel or even AMD. It is RISC, and it is a 64 Bit chip.
2. They were early complete adopters of both firewire and USB.
3. They have actually made computers stand out. While not a technological limb, it is one the walked out on and stood proud. The real slow-pokes are in the wintel clone market.
4. Not only do they have these foreign Motorola chips putting them in a niche, they also now have 2 models with Multiple Processors as standard systems. I see very little companies in the WT market offering this.

As for Jobs, he is a jerk that gets things done. It is highly doubtful that he "spanked" ATi other than omitting them from the keynote. The radeons will not be ready next month. End of story.

That said, I can see where Apple is falling behind. The need to:

1. Run the system bus at 133MHz
2. Light a fire under IBM and Motorola. (Think G4e @ 600mhz)
3. Get OSX out the door to take advantage of the MP

Even this proprietary connection can be good, save for the fact Apple will have a solution "next month" for those who just want to buy a monitor for an older G3 or G4. It is all relative. It really is apples and oranges

I don't buy it...

[CMiYC]

I don't buy this. Why? Because it doesn't make sense really. I don't think ATI is in a position where they are seriously hurt if Apple doesn't ship their card. It seems to me that Apple is shooting its own foot (in terms of performance) for going with a lesser card. So why would they do that? It seems to me, they would use the other card because its cheaper. Besides, did Jobs really lose that much thunder? I mean, if anything people were waiting to see if the stuff was real or not.... you know, maybe even made people want to hear his keynote to see what was going on.

---

A total lie

[drix]

This is just complete bullshit (much like the last "leaked Cube" story was - I'm really starting to lose my faith in these rumor sites) and here's why:

When Apple, or Dell, or Compaq, or any one of 100 other big PC manufacturers, picks a component for their system, it's not the same process as Joe Blow going over to Tom's Hardware, reading about the fastest thing on the market, and then ordering one of them. No. Graphics cards and the like are rigorously tested for hundreds and hundreds of hours to ensure a.) compatibility and b.) stability. Often times the overall design of the computer is influenced by the chip itself; if it kicks out too much heat it will be oriented a certain way, or the airflow in the case will be rearranged to accomodate it, etcetera. In addition, a lot of possible scenarios are thrown at the completed machine to make sure it's not going to crash. Building a mass produced PC (or Mac) is a lot more of a science than most of us who consider it erector set engineering give it credit for. A very obvious case would be the iMac, but even for G4's and G3's, a lot more thought goes into them besides slamming together a bunch of components and praying for the best.

With that in mind, I hope you see how utterly impossible this story is. Jobs cannot simply switch out the graphics chip without seriously delaying the product and causing massive engineering and supply headaches.

--

FUD **The cube has no fans-Silent.

[BoLean]

The cube is supposed to be silent. It has no internal fan. The Redeon requires a fan to keep it cool. Thus, there never were plans to put the Raedon in the Cube. Most likely the announcement was for a Raedon option for the high end Imacs. Someone misquoted the origional stoies for dramatic effect. Stating to be more and more common here at /. read yesterdays nVidia game cheater story. Another misquote. ASUS modified the drivers for cheating---NOT nVidia.

My God, what a silly thread

[Chris Johnson]

I can't get over the number of people who can't tell the difference between a Rage128 and a Rage Pro. One is a bit better than a Voodoo2 (and 32 bit), the other... is not ;)

That's as may be, and it's understood the Rage128 is not a 'super accelerator' chip like a Ge or maybe a Radeon. But there are some important issues including one that _nobody_ seems to be picking up on:

• If you were going to get a Radeon and go for total peak performance, you would get a full size dual G4, not an 8" cube. Why would you _get_ The Cube if you wanted performance over all else? It's another consumer/prosumer form factor, not a horsepower monster design. Get the full size dual G4- lots of extra space for goodies in that, plenty of fans and cooling etc.
• Nobody ever mentions this. Do GeForces have quickdraw and Quicktime acceleration? Rage128s do. I picked up one recently, after the prices came well down, and the QT acceleration is real and very effective. Quickdraw acceleration is part of what makes those Photoshop scores perform so well- the Mac screen redraw gets accelerated by the 128 card while the PC relies on the poor 'ol CPU for everything. If you are working with prepress graphics at huge resolutions this becomes a constant, in-your-face issue, and the Rage128 addresses it. I think very few PC cards accelerate Color Quickdraw ;)

Add that up plus the relatively humble cooling requirements of a Rage128 and it doesn't suck. Its _game_ performance sucks compared with the latest and greatest, but here's a secret from a mac geek who dabbles in programming- all Mac cards _but_ ATI suck for OpenGL! You just cannot get OpenGL to work properly on a Mac 3dfx card even though they can get better framerate- and Glide is kind of fading away. The Voodoo3 uses some very ugly hacks to come up with a render-in-a-window mode: not a problem with the 'suckier' ATI. I run X-Plane (killer flightsim- now only $79!) and changing from voodoo2 to ATI128 was huge- not only did all of Austin Meyer's OpenGL tricks (from 'city lights' overlays to the airplanes' landing light) suddenly work perfectly and look great, but the sim immediately got better framerate IN 32 BIT than it ever got from the Voodoo in 16. This is not entirely because of the Voodoo- it's because X-Plane uses OpenGL and the ATI supports it directly, the Voodoo2 (which has a comparable max framerate with the 128) had to go through Mesa...

Does anyone read the stories?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple was not cutting off its nose to spite its
face. The Mac Radeons weren't going to be available
until September anyway. What was cut off was ATI's
participation in the PR event, not ATI's participation in the Mac market, and that is at
least an arguably reasonable sanction for "spilling
the beans" about the PR event in the first place.

pulled from the SHOW, not the 'puters

[petard]

Read the article... the card was pulled from the spotlight at the show and ATI was pulled from the keynote. When the Radeon is ready to go (09/2000) it will ship with the computers. They wouldn't damage their product to spite ATI but still put another ATI board in there. It's simple: Steve thought ATI stole some of his thunder with their leak, so he declined to give any to them at the Expo.