Intel Inside For Apple?

iomud writes "Bear Stearns analyst Andrew Neff predicts that there's a better than 80 percent chance Apple will make the jump to Intel in two to four years. As the relationship with Motorola seems to be weaning the question may be what chip would you like to see in next-generation Macs and why?" It seems important to note that Bear Stearns owns shares of Intel and Dell, and has a banking relationship with Dell and HP. Oh, and even if it didn't, that I can't see any reason why anyone should care what Andrew Neff says. But that doesn't mean it can't be fun to talk about!

Comments

"Performance Boost" a result of the MHz myth?

[Theaetetus]

"Neff, for instance, predicted Apple, which uses chips from Motorola and IBM that currently top out at 1GHz, will switch to Intel, whose chips run at 2.5GHz, to get a performance boost and gain more customers. There's a better than 80 percent chance Apple will make the jump in two to four years, he said." This seems to imply that the 2.5 GHz P4 is 2.5 times as fast as the 1 GHz G4... Which is a joke. However, a lot of people (primarily the ones buying their PCs at Walmart) are great believers in the MHz Myth and will compare the two chips based just on clock speed. This indeed might make more gain in terms of customers for Apple, but at what cost? Chips that run hotter and process fewer instructions simultaneously? How about instead of advertising chips in terms of clock speeds, start marketing them in terms of calculations per second (start comparing gigaflops... in which case, last I checked, G4s were way ahead of Pentiums). -T

Re:"Performance Boost" a result of the MHz myth?

[Golias]

The tougher fact is this: The 2.5GHz P4 is significantly cheaper than the 1GHz G4. You can buy 1GHz G4's in top-of-the-line Macs. You can buy 2.5GHz P4's at Costco.

The ratio is, literally, "bang for the buck". At some point the bang for the buck for Intel will so outstrip the PowerPC that Apple simply won't have any choice but to make the jump. Thankfully, once Apple's got everyone on board on MacOS X, the procedure isn't too evil. NeXT did it once already.

P4's are cheaper to buy, yes. However, they consume more power and run hotter, which makes the G4 a vastly superior choice for laptops (even in bang for the buck comparisons).

As for the notion that the gap will widen and Apple will be forced to switch, keep in minds that in the desktop market the x86 archetecture has always had a ! for $ edge over any Motorolla/Apple system (with the exception of the original Apple ][, in which Woz chose a Moto knock-off over Intel chips because they were cheaper). I'm fairly sure that no Mac has ever given you more flops-per-dollar than whatever the prevailing Wintel box of the day was... Not so much because the chips are so much more expensive (although the do cost a little more), but because Apple's superior operating systems have let them sell their boxen with a much higher profit margin than companies like Compaq (RIP) and Packard Bell (Ditto), who had no way of really making their computer stand out from the budget systems from your local neighborhood screwdriver shop (or the no-name vendors who get all their sales from good scores on Pricewatch.com).

So yea, Apple could (in theory) save about $50 a system (their cost) by moving everything over to Intel. But they would also end up increasing the odds that somebody could reverse-engineer their ROMs (as Compaq once did to IBM), and suddenly all those "Pricewatch Special" shitbox PC's and PC Mo-Bo kits (and I say that as a big fan of "Pricewatch Special" shitbox kits) will be able to run OS X after a simple chip-mod, and Apple would die a horrible death shortly thereafter, making version 10.5 (or whatever) the last Mac OS ever.

Nobody can make enough money to sustain a company by writing operating systems for commodity PC's sold by other vendors. Microsoft doesn't; they make the big bucks selling their Office Suite (which is MS's Real Monopoly if you ask me). Red Hat also doesn't; they sell and support an OS that they did not have to write or buy, and is being constantly dev'd by people they don't pay. Remember when we were told in the pages of "In the Beggining Was the Command Line" that Be would be the wave of the future? Be is gone. Remember when they tried to revive the Amiga OS? Remember when Gateway bought it to port to x86? Remember when the chumps they sold it to were going to release something?

Apple learned the hard way during their 1-year attempt at "clone" licensing that the only way they can develop a desktop OS and make money doing it is if they sell every single computer that runs it. By using a chip that is not a commodity part, they raise the barrier of entry to somebody that wants to copy their ROM settings and make a rival motherboard. Switching to an x86 archetecture jeopardizes that plan. Some think that this is part of the reason why Apple became interested in StrongARM technology last time their relations with Motorolla became strained. If they were to drop Motorolla, I'm guessing that they would be far more likely to contact some other chip maker (i.e., IBM, Siemens, TI, Lucent, AMD, whoever) and contract them to make another non-x86 chipset for them... maybe even one that already understands the existing G3 instructions. For that matter, buying those high-performing G3's that IBM is already making for their servers might even make more sense than moving to Intel.

Still, I can't help but think that a lot of these rumors get started by Apple turf-layers, who are hoping to light a fire under the asses of Motorolla engineers.

Re:"Performance Boost" a result of the MHz myth?

[Hes Nikke]

But the main problem with this test is that he's testing a dual processor G4 against a single processor Pentium in a multi-threaded app doing highly parallelizable work!! How can we make sense of those results?

easy, it is 2 off the shelf systems, you plug it in and see that one system performs better then a diffrent system. (last i checked, there wern't any dual P4 systems avalible.) this test shows that apples high end system beet out sony's system (i'm asuming it's their high end system but i didn't read the artical)

the test i'd like to see is apples high end system up against a high end athlon system 1, 2, 4 CPU's it doesn't matter, the athlon will smoke the apple in perfomance, but the apple will smoke the athlon in usability.

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple likes to build cool stuff. Noise is not cool. I don't think we'll see Intel based Apple machines any time soon unless there are drastic strategic changes at Intel.

What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why think about this now? Apple just moved to a totally new operating system in which only 20% of their user base has switched.

Additionally, the size of the Mac user base has steadily eroded but there are marked decreases around both the introduction of System 7 and the PowerPC chip. To switch now would be suicide! Apple may indeed want a different processor, but doing so would probably mean that applications would have to be rewritten and we all know how long it took to get Photoshop out the door and many people are still waiting for Quark.

If they do switch, then good for them. History would suggest they should wait a while before undertaking such an effort and in the meantime this is just intellectual masturbation, IMHO of course.

Unfortunately this gentleman raises no good points other than the disparity between the processor speeds. Don't get me wrong, I am not someone who has been blinded by the MHz Myth as brought to you by the Reality Distortion Field, but his arguments are nonexistent. The fact that he has predicted a few other industry actions is anecdotal at best and irrelevant at worst.

Short version: Take this guy worth a grain of salt. Wait a year or two and see what the processor landscape looks like.

Re:What's the point?

[BitGeek]

Additionally, the size of the Mac user base has steadily eroded

I don't think you can say this. I'm aware of no information that expresses the size of the mac user base.

you often see the "%5 of the market" figure, but that is actually %5 of NEW PC SALES, (so it ignores the fact that People turn their PCs over every 18 moths, but macs are performance competitive a lot longer) oh, and these numbers also ignore most mac sales. So even saying "%5 of new sales" is a lie-- they count Dell, Ingram Micro and CompUSA. They ignore the Apple store, the Apple stores, and the hundreds or thousands of independent apple dealers around the world.

Put a better way, Apple has %5 of the Intel PC market- - because that's the market they count-- and of those people, %5 of the pcs they sell are actually apples!

The total addressable market-- that is, Macs out there in active use-- is much larger, probably %20.

Last time I had any reliable numbers, it was %30, but that was because they were the only company selling CDROM drives for computers and so you could look at the number of those sold and know how much market share apple had... so that would have been the early 90s.

I'm not saying I know what the TAM for Macs is, I'm just saying I've never seen any reliable figures, and the %5 one is clearly unreliable. ( But makes for good copy for those with "Apple is dying" stick who want to beat that dead horse.)

Not clawhammer

[Perdo]

Sledgehammer. Opteron. Whatever.

Not Itanic.

Not Pentium 4

Not C3 (heh, I just benched a C3 800. It performed about as well as a 266 PII except with the P4's weird imbalanced interger performance. the numbers looked about like a P4@500mhz)

Stick a few Opterons in an Apple and you take Apple back to the good old days where their hardware actually outperformed the x86 boxes and was still somewhat unique.

Let Apple shine again... not just on the outside, but on the inside too!

Switch and die

[jpt.d]

if ([apple switchTo intel])
[apple killSelf];

What creds does this guy have?

[gmhowell]

Okay, he's a staff writer for 'news.com.com'. What journalistic credit does this guy have? "Hi, I own shares of Dell and Intel. Can I write a 'story' that would pimp their stock prices?" Gimme a break. Perhaps the 50 page report has more info in it, but this is incredibly lame.

Apple has historically gone to great lengths to be compatible. First they could read PC floppies. Then fat binaries let 68k machines last for a long time after they were no longer sold. There is the compatibility layer in OSX. The idea is simply absurd.

I know next to nothing about compilers, but doesn't it stand to reason that Apple would have to redevelop most/all of their libraries, to say nothing of the compilers themselves? Particularly if they go off for some 'pseudo-x86' architecture like some are suggesting.

At that point, what will be the difference between Mac and Windows? Would companies even bother with MacOS ports, or would they just make some bit of middleware, so that the same binary could use the ABI of either system? (I'm talking way beyond my knowledge, so if it sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't.)

What would be gained by this? Go from 5% market share to 6%? Not worth the effort. Having access/drivers to PCI/AGP slots, USB, IDE, etc. makes sense. Not for the main architecture.

Hell, even Transmeta makes more sense than this sort of malarky. Get it to emulate PPC for old apps, ia64 for new stuff, or something like that. But straight Intel hardware? I think not.

Remember, even though they don't say it, the Mac is the 'computer for the rest of us'. While it's no longer the company line, don't doubt for a minute that Steve likes being a member of the elite. He likes it that cool Hollywood types use iMacs for computer scenes. He likes it that the kids of yuppie hipsters carry iPods.

Steve is not a commodity guy. Ask the owners of StarMax machines.

This article (and the one 'proving' the existence of super-duper-top-secret military aircraft) prove that in the eyes of the editors, today was a slow news day. Not slow enough to answer the question "what happens when VA is delisted" but slow, nonetheless.

Re:The future

[feldsteins]

I see Apple making Mac OS XI for x86 but only allowing it to work on special Apple motherboards.

I think that is exactly right.

Apple won't hype the switch that much. They will instead sell some sort of VMWare-like or dual-boot stuff and market the x86 Macs as being able to run Windows at full speed.

Can't see it. What I do see is that Apple will make the switch when a next-gen Intel or AMD processor comes out - and they will wait for it for two reasons. 1. Presumably one of them will find a way to make their stuff a little smaller and cooler. Apple likes things like TiBooks and fanless iMacs. Can't develop shit like that with brick-sized P4 modules can you? No. 2. Apple won't want to pull a "New Coke" on their market. Mac users are loyal to their brand and to their processors. They won't like seeing a switch to a part that has been touted as inferior for so long. This effect will be lessened when a next-gen part comes out which doesn't have quite the history of being bashed by Apple as the current one's do.

Then someone will hack Mac OS XI to work on any motherboard, or some company will reverse engineer the special Apple motherboards and make their own Mac compatible motherboards, and Apple will call out the lawyers.

Apple would never, ever make such a switch unless they were supremely sure that this couldn't happen. If the ability to sell proprietary hardware for the OS went bye-bye then so would Apple itself and they are fully aware of this. It's not just a dinosaur clinging to the old ways...it really is at the core of Apple being able to innovate the way they do. They have to control the OS and hardware of the platform to do what they do. That is the only reason why Dell or Microsoft can't be an Apple. it's not because Apple is "cooler" or even "smarter." It's because they control the entire platform.

Hell, if I worked at Apple I would want to make damned sure that those crown jewels never got lost. I'd rather run the boxes with hampsters in plastic wheels than risk that.

In the long term, anything could happen, but...

[jht]

I don't see this as likely, especially in Neff's timeframe. Here's why. The G4 processor doesn't have the legs that the P4 has right now, but Moto is known to be making at least 1.4 GHz parts right now.

Apple also has a policy of running duallys at the high end, and given XServe, we know they have a motherboard/chipset in-house that supports reasonably modern features like DDR and ATA-100. And unless all the rumor sites are wrong, there's a new PowerMac due no later than Seybold in about a month - possibly this month.

So I figure a high-end Mac with dual 1.4 GHz G4 processors, DDR PC2100 RAM, and ATA-100 support is in the cards shortly. That's going to be a reasonably competitive machine for a while, though not quite up to bleeding-edge Wintel specs. There's also likely a little bit more leg in the G4, at least enough to get up around 2 GHz.

Beyond that, Apple's got some options. They can go to quad processors pretty easily, or by next spring they have a good shot of being up on G5 processors, which are reputedly now in sampling. Should they be making the move to G5, that'll probably carry them another couple of years, so we're talking 2005 at the outside before they have to have the next stop in mind.

A lot can happen in that time. The likeliest thing is that they jump to a 64-bit contender that emerges by then - possibly AMD but who knows? Migrating to the IBM POWER processors would be another logical move because minimal work would be required and the additional volume would drive IBM's own costs down significantly. Remember, Apple sells more RISC systems in a year than Sun, SGI (though they don't control MIPS anymore), and IBM do combined - yet all those companies see it as worthwhile to continue investing in alternative architectures. If Apple decided to move their volume systems to a slightly scaled-down version of one of these workstation chips it would have a major impact on cost.

Or Motorola could get serious and start working hand-in-hand with IBM again - IBM's fab capabilities are way beyond Moto's, and IBM could probably build the same G4 as Moto at a higher clock rate with better yields. There is one key reason, though, why Apple doesn't have to worry too much about PowerPC dying - it's huge in the embedded marketplace. Versions of PowerPC are used in all sorts of devices, and I believe it's pretty popular in automotive and networking. That gets your volumes up, too.

Want intel on mac? buy OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

aint going to happen until apple gets the majority of is base on to OS X. And even then, they probably would turn to IBM before intel.

Re:Serious question

[rjung2k]

Best answer is probably "the chip is good, the OS is immature." After all, we're talking v.1.1.5 of a new OS; it's going to take Apple some time before they get to the level of optimization and maturity that 10+ years of Windows (or even MacOS Classic) has reached.

Support for this comes from the early reports of the upcoming 10.2 "Jaguar" release; even without "Quartz Extreme" hardware acceleration, the OS is supposed to be noticably faster and more responsive, thanks in large part to optimizations, improved code, and the new gcc compiler they're using.

Give 'em time.

Re:The real question is...

[BitGeek]

I don't consider the "SPEC benchmarks" to be a very good citation-- there are a variety of benchmarks in SPEC, and they certainly don't reflect the instruction mix of modern applications.

For instance, penitums are really good at doing integer calculations but very poor at floating point, yet almost all applications that are CPU INTENSIVE use floating point. Yet Spec gives integer a much higher rating, and generally ignores floating point optimizations that are used in real world situations.