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Pentium-Based Macs The Future of Apple?
seek3r writes "Found this interesting article on BusinessWeek.com regarding Apple's potential switch to Intel chips. I wonder what the implications this might have for Apple with regards to market share and software support. Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Intel?"
when the G4 comes out... Apple has too much of a commitment to Motorola (since 1982?) and IBM (since 1992?)
Palladium/TCPA/DRM support?
I think it was the lack of competition in the Mac arena that left Motorolla high-and-dry when being compared to Intel now. I know you can't just measure MHz to MHz, but competition in any arena is better than none.
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
This is an old rumor. It won't happen. Let it rest.
basically it'll mean we won't have to pay exaggerated prices for Macs to be able to use OS X!!
...Or am I missing something? the G4 chip has been around for a long time...
In terms of hardware site fanboy numbers, sure. But we're hitting the point where few people [*] can tell the difference between 1GHz and 2.8GHz and even hardware engineers are starting to realize this, so maybe it Just Doesn't Matter.
One thing I respect about the PowerPC chips is that the power consumption is drastically lower than for x86 chips. Drastically. It would be a shame to lose that and have everyone using 100 watt processors a couple of years down the road.
[*] Those few people are disproportionately loud.
I bought my first PowerPC-based Mac during that short, happy time when we could actually claim, without a hint of guilt or fear of reprisal, that G3 chips were "pentium crushers."
Unfortunately, despite my love for the mac platform, and my desire to claim that our hardware is "just as good"... it's not. RISC vs CISC stopped being an issue when Intel chips became RISC chips pretending to be x86's. PowerPC's still do more per clock than Pentiums, but the differences in clock speed, bus speed, and sundry other ephemerals has finally gotten to the point where for 90% of tasks, intel chips are just faster.
Don't get me wrong, I don't plan to switch until they pry my computer from my clenched, arthritic hands... but I can no longer look a computer-newbie in the eye and tell him that "Macs are just as fast". Better experiences, maybe... but as fast? No.
Of course, for most people, we're close to that point where chip-speed stops mattering... (maybe 1-2 more cycles of Moore's Law ought to do it.) How many people think about the speed of their computer while surfing, emailing, word-processing, or any such thing? (I know, I know, it's a cliche, but cliches are cliches because they're _true_.)
I think, business-wise, a switch to intel would be near-suicide for Apple. But Motorolla is dead in the water, desktop-computer-wise. Perhaps this theoretical IBM chip is the future... who knows?
Sun's got great hardware architecture, and they were the first guys out there with a decent 64 bit Unix. They also have a better proven track record when it comes to multiple CPUs.
And to think, IBM ALMOST chose the 68000 chip for the original IBM PC. *sigh*
Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Intel?
The short answer is no.
A while back while I was making the argument for the switch to Intel (Pentium or Itanium) I went back and plotted the performance ratio between Moto and Intel and it has held steady around 2x Mhz since 1989.
The real reason is: Microsoft.
That's right folks. If OSX works on PC hardware, it has suddenly just become a competitor to Windows. What happens then? No more Mac IE, no more Mac Office. Suddenly Macs are nothing more than expensive linux boxes with a groovy desktop.
Apple can't "test" the waters by having some PPC boxes and some Intel boxes, they just have to jump head long into competition against essentially Dell for hardware and Microsoft for software. It'll never happen.
How many times to people have to bring up this tired, talked-to-death speculation?
basically it'll mean we won't have to pay exaggerated prices for Macs to be able to use OS X!!
You will never see MacOS X running on a generic x86 "beige box". Apple developed MacOS X for the sole purpose of selling hardware, that's where they make all their money, despite charging for Jaguar. (Sun are the same with Solaris). In addition, the "just works" ability touted as a major Mac selling point would cease to happen once they could not guarantee with any certainty exactly what hardware their OS was running on - this is the real problem faced by Microsoft, most Windows crashes boil down to needing to have drivers for every conceivable piece of hardware supported, and being unable to prove them all.
An x86 based Mac will have sufficient custom hardware on its motherboard that you will still only be able to run MacOS on Apple hardware.
If Apple was to do Intel (read Px) based hardware, would they then go for a standard PC? Probably not as this means that their users can go to Win or *nix too easily. As they then would have to develop their own special little system, they would still have performance problems (fewer bucks spent on HW development) and expensive hardware (monopoly, or close to).
Since this rumour has been around for a long time without anything actually happening, I'd say that Apple will keep on building proper RISC based machines. We can all agree that it would be a step backwards to go from PPC to x86 from an architectual point of view, can't we.
It was pointed out that this guy was the same guy that, 5 years ago, predicted the merger of HP and Compaq for all the same reasons that they used today.
Personally I know very little about Mac's, but I can't see why moving to Intel would be a bad thing in any way.
I often found (in the old days, and were talking 8 years ago) that a Mac always appeared to run slower than the same speed PC and was substantially more expensive. I don't know if this is the same these days (having never used OSX - merely looked) but if it's true, anything that can reduce the cost and boost the speed must be good.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
An x86 Mac does not imply a PC clone. Apple can have it's complete proprietary design and merely redesign it around an x86 rather than a G3/G4. Best of both worlds this way, more marketable CPUs (GHz, price, brand name recognition, more developers/tools, etc) and it's hardware sales and quality (no cheap flaky clones) are still protected.
I never liked CISC Prossors, I much rather have RISC chips running my systems. I find that RISC chip run smoother then CISC do. Basicly I dont see any real advantage for apple to really switch to Intel. Their Systems wont be cheaper, you wont get OS X to run on your PC Box. I dought that there will be much of a noticable speed increase. I like the earler roomers of the 64 Bit Power PC Prosessor or an Ultra Sparc chip. So if Apple goes to Intell I guess my Next system will be an other Sun WorkStation.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think if Apple were going to go the X86 route it would make more sense to move to X86-64 than use a P4, It would probably be easier to sell to the Apple zealots if it wasn't an Intel chip as well.
Anyway, when Amiga releases it's new hardware......
Nevermind.
This is probably the reason the new G4 towers are dual-CPU, but perhaps Motorola or whoever does the PPC chips Apple use are secretly working on a new chip that will blitz everything.
Now, speaking from my limited experience with OS X (only had my iBook for a couple of months) I suppose that with bundles a move to x86 would be seamless to the user, provided x86 binaries are included in the bundle.
The main reason I hope Apple don't switch to x86 is because PPC is different (different is good) and frankly, x86 is a fucked up architecture - it's a 20+ year old architecture that's been kludged over and over.
Now, I shall return to playing with my iBook. =]
Also, why bother to port to a 32-bit architecture? 64 is right around the corner, you might as well aim for the future, not the past.
Anyways Apple is gonna use IBM's Power4 derivative, and it's gonna kick ass!
The bottom line is people will pay for Mac hardware. And that means non-Intel chips (whatever they may be) at whatever price,as long as they're somewhat competitive in the price arena.
OS X is just a delivery for Apple's real cash cow - hardware. They have no reason to 'switch'. Also, with PPC, they prob have a lot of say, since they're pretty much the only company using them, in what goes into the architecture, etc. With Intel, no way. Esp. with the recent trusted computing stuff going on.
Nope, Apple will stay non-Intel. They don't have to worry about cheaper chips cuz the end users will always pick up the tab.
Macs aren't necessarily about the chips inside. The G4's go fast enough for the tasks the box was intended to run. Macs are about the OS, and making sure the things you plug into the box work without a hundred install-reboot-blue screen cycles. Macs are about a lot of things, least of which is the chipset it is based on.
Sure, you can never have a fast enough chip, and Apple can choose whatever chipset they want to run Mac OS. Will it make a difference in terms of what makes a Mac, a Mac?
I just don't see how.
-- clvrmnky
For one, this has been rumored countless times before. Has it happened? No. Here's why.
One: Apple's revenue comes from it's hardware sales. If people can go out and buy plain vanilla PCs and install MacOS on them for significantly cheaper than they can buy a Mac, Apple's income will drop a great deal.
Two: As others have said, Apple's been with IBM and Mot. for a Very Long Time (tm). There have been rumors equally as valid as this one about apple developing it's *own* chip for fabbing at IBM (a company, unlike Mot., who can actually get decent yields).
Three: Again, as others have said, it's more probable that Apple will go with IBM's next-gen 64-bit desktop CPU. IBM makes good chips. They're not big in the desktop market, but the Power4 has been a big server chip for a while now, and with good reason. It was one of the first dual-chip-on-die procs that actually made public usage (afik), and did a large amount of ass-whipping.
To conclude: Apple going x86 would be stupid.
Have a nice day.
What? You want a sig?
Apart from Apple's "rumored" port of OSX to x86 architecture, there's little chance of this happening.
Apple makes it's money from the hardware it sells, not from the OS. That's why the move to OSX was a bit of genious. Now they have dramatically reduced their OS costs, but their OS sale price was always around $100.
Now if they had to buy x86 from Intel, that would cripple their big revenue stream; hardware. Apple has had a history of hardware innovation (SCSI, Fire-Wire...) I just can't imagine they're seriously considering dumping what they do best.
Look at the x86 market. How many people are pushing the high end hardware? Not many. x86 is all about big CPU's mated to low end subsystems.
The DTP community won't like it because they're so proud that they're not using Intel clone's
Sure the G4 architecture is probably much better than the P4's...
The problem is the cost. The PA-RISC has a great architecture, and a great performance/clock ratio, so has the Alpha. The problem is that both these chips are damn expensive. The same holds true for the G4. Don't underestimate the cost factor. I'd really like to have a mac, I love the G4, but it's way too high a price/performance ratio.
This article chronicles some of Apple's challenges.
But on the topic. So Apple has 3 choices:
1. Wait for Motorola to get their act together. All the code optimization in the world won't make OS X as fast as it could be. Jaguar, for example, made my B&W G3 REALLY responsive compared to 10.1.5. But it occured to me, that's probably the last speed boost from software. You can only go so far.
2. Get the new IBM chip working. Hey, fine, it'll probably work. But it'll take a year or more to get it ported, documented, and in production. It won't be cheap, most likely. It will most likely be fast and powerful, but Apple walks a fine line WRT price.
3. Get Intel working. Hey, fine. Port OpenFirmware to an Intel-type mobo, then ship a computer that runs NONE of the software outside of the core OS. Wait for developers to buy one of these new machines to recompile their packages. This is where proprietary software bites you on the ass - you can't just wander between architectures with your source tarball and hope for the best. Oh, and of course, Classic won't work, and you're going to be stuck with whatever devices are already "cross platform". YOu can't just pick up a device from CompUSA and expect it to work.
The only plus I see to OSX/x86 is that the possibility for cheaper hardware might mean more people picking up an OS X box, and maybe some more drivers will be written. I'd buy one in a second, except... the majority of stuff in my Dock probably wouldn't be "ported" in the first year. So if it's under a grand, say, what good does it do me? No MacSQL, no EV Nova, no Remote Desktop... I need that stuff.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Why is this so? Having never done dev work on an Apple I am pretty ignorant, but doesn't Apple release a basic API that doesn't change even when the underlying hardware changes (apparently not)? And why not release free tools into open source, so piles of developers are writing software for Apple for free?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Motorola lagging behind Intel is really simple market perception due to the now "standard" performance benchmark being a simple "GHz" tag. So most users (and non-technical press writers) simply assume that x86 chips are faster because they run at a higher clock rate.
As any knowledgable engineer knows this is not the case at all (as a matter a fact, in some benchmarks the PowerPC architecture beats the x86 architecture even when running at a much lower clock rate; just try photoshop on both platforms).
However, I also believe that market perception is a very important part of our society, and if you don't play the game you'll pretty much be left out unless you come with a revolutionaty technology that clearly makes a 10Ghz x86 chip feels like a snail compared to your clock-less chip. So in this regard, yes, Motorola is lagging behind x86 chips, and if I were Apple I'd be VERY worried about this. Just remember, Joe Somebody who just bought a 1.2 Ghz Mac will feel a little weird when his friend just bought a 2.5 Ghz PC, even when in real-world ussage both would perform about the same. Perception.
The week after we hear of Apple trying to aquire the Altivec technology so that they can license it to IBM for G5 we hear yet another rumor that they are moving straight to x86. They haven't even gotten people to finish porting to OSx yet and you think they're going to force a port to a whole new architecture? Force every Mac user to choose between the old compatible version (again) and the new x86 one? They proved long ago that they could port Darwin to x86. Now who's going to force developers over. It may happen in 3 or 4 years when everybody has forgotten about the 9x to OSx port, but that would be one sure way to loose any market share they currently have with the developer community.
Oh wait, they would be taking it out.
I'm confused
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
I guess this transition should be easy enough for Intel. One thing is sure that apple will expect a Microprocessor which is not availaible generally in the market. The reason is that once you get an intel chip, you can put it in any intel compatible motherboard and voila, you have a low cost mac, which also runs windows.
That means that apple will require some special version of the chip, which probably OS X will check( maybe a hardware register or someting like this, or maybe the palladium technology) and only then it will run on that microprocessor. But what prevents people from running Windows on it as well? Would apple allow that to happen? I dont think apple would like to do that.
But to prevent that means that the CPU architecture has to be changed to suite apple. Now the question is that will intel do that??
What's under yellowstone?
But we're hitting the point where few people [*] can tell the difference between 1GHz and 2.8GHz and even hardware engineers are starting to realize this, so maybe it Just Doesn't Matter.
Definitely. PC manufacturers love to compete on Mhz, but a fast CPU is useless if it's starved of useful work by bottlenecks in I/O, memory bandwidth, etc. It's not unusual for a sub 1Ghz PC with good SCSI disks to handily outperform a 2Ghz+ machine with mere IDE.
Sun, SGI et al realized this years ago. Serious computing is limited not by clock speed of the CPU but by bus and memory bandwidth. That's why Sun sell systems with 300-400Mhz processors and gigaplane XB crossbar active backplanes. Nowadays with the increasing sophistication of consumer software (like the latest games), the same issues are recurring.
If you're buying a system in the near future, drop 500-1000 Mhz in CPU speed and buy faster disks or more memory with the money you saved.
Sadly, one thing that could 'break' Palladium would be the 'secret' x86 port of OS X. There are *many* people who would switch to OS X in a heartbeat (on their recent PCs). MS would at last be fighting an opponent with skill and product. Apple could put MS to bed.
I think that MS is really going for the total domination of hardware/software, and Apple is the only company that could stop it. Linux is great for many things, but Apple is *ready*.
Be careful what you wish for...
or does everyone else wish that apple would just say what they're looking into and what they're not looking into? and possibly why they are or are not looking into said type of processor? What little knowledge I have of apple is that they are quite secretive up until boiling point. This could of course hurt their sales so i could understand why. But we've already had comfirmation of a x86 version of OS X, so wouldn't it seem more likely they'd go to this than something out of the ordinary? Think of it this way, they probably have 2 versions of OS X, PPC and x86, if anything falls through with IBM, it'll most definately be x86 for the future. Since from what I know, Motorola and IBM are the only PPC chip manufactures, correct? I don't think they'd try to port it to more than 2 architectures, seems illogical and time consuming.
Logik
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
Apple makes its money on hardware, so no matter which processor is in the box, buying a Mac will be necessary to run OS X, and it will still cost big bucks.
-A
From the article:
No.
I don't want a laptop that blows hot air like hair drier or desktops that have three fans. As people realizing (as another poster mentioned) the CPUs are fast enough, I don't see much point in abandoning the PowerPCs that are small, consume little energy, and hence run so much cooler. For me, computers that are quiet and cool are much preferable to the opposite.
Another thing the author of the column seems to forget is that PowerPC is not a chip solely from Motorola. The point that IBM is also a partner and develops PowerPC chips is completely missing.
The whole RISC vs CISC argument is completely outdated. There is no such thing as pure CISC anymore. Please get with the times. You may love mac and that's fine but at least use up to date reasons for why mac is superior to pc. That's about as bad as a PC user dumping on macs "cause they only have one mouse button".
- Toby
Competing head to head with M$? That'd be stupid.
P.S. I heard the Beatles were getting back together, too!
Click here or here.
Such a move on Apple's part would complicate matters significantly. Consider that if hardware devices would STILL need mac specific drivers to meet whatever "hardware security" apple uses to make their machines proprietary--Meaning much hardware STILL won't function with OS X, whether it's on top of Intel or a PowerPC proc from Motorola or IBM.
My favorite uninformed reader was this guy:
This guy doesn't understand the term "switch." If he starts off running an Intel PC, and buys an "Intel mac" what has he really changed? Still using the same ancient hardware architecture kludged on top of a 32-bit chip sucking more juice that an a electric battleship.
Who did what now?
Reading the article gives me the feeling that the author is the sort of person who enjoys starting a flame war and sitting and watching the trolls move in. Much of what is said in the column is FUD. To quote two parts:
Here's the most compelling reason to abandon Motorola's PowerPC chip: It's falling further behind in the speed race as Intel's chips leave Motorola's in the dust.
Yes, if you are going per Mhz this is true, but once again Intel is a CISC chip with plenty of legacy components and the PowerPC is a RISC chip,
with plenty fewer transistors. Mhz is not an indication of work or performance. It is on the other hand a good indication of the heat that the chip will emit.
Several engineers familiar with the hardware work that goes on inside Apple wrote to say that, yes, it has quietly developed a Pentium microprocessor that could power a Mac.
It is a known fact that Apple has an internal project, known as Maklar, where MacOS X works on Intel chips. Apple is a hardware company and while plenty of R&D might be going on, only so much actually ends up as a product. It may end up being real, but any smart company has backup plans, even if they never see the light of day.
Add to all this that e-week, the same source that started this hornets nest, also mentioned that Apple is working with IBM to use the 64-bit PowerPC chip in future Macs. The truth is, Apple is likely to abandon Motorola, as Motorola is incapable of developing any chips that have a market other than embedded solutions. Motorola has really appears to be trying to get out of the desktop processor market.
These are my points of view - you are free to disagree.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
buch of snobs and elitists using 3 year old hardware. ok guys, give quark a hug they'll come trough. shure
"Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Intel?"
Motorola's chips have always lagged behind intel, at least in the performance arena.
If I understand it correctly:
So... what advantage does OS/X have over Windows? Windows runs on just about every hardware setup imaginable - it took years for Microsoft to get this far. Same goes for Linux. Thanks to its open source nature, you can run Linux on a lot of hardware combinations. But OS/X can eventually only run on an Apple Pentium which is outdated the moment it comes out. Hmmm.
So that means that the only appeal of OS/X is its GUI?
Yuioup
Of course, we wonder how long it will be until some astute hacker makes this ability null and Mac OS X will be able to run on Beige Boxes. And if this happens, will it be a big problem? I mean, if Microsoft hauled off and proclaimed "you must now use Dell systems and if you don't you're not allowed to gripe about BSOD's anymore" people would have their head (again), but Apple wouldn't even have to say that - they could come out with an Intel OS and it would just be agreed/assumed that no one using a non-Apple box could go stuff themselves. Developers could have the best of both worlds - the Intel architecture they're used to and the closed nature consoles afford them (plus they can use this to make non-game applications, to boot).
Still, on the topic of similar hardware I'm shocked that it's been close to a year and we've had no XBox emulators for the PC. I mean, sure there's things to work around on the XBox (not the least of which is supposedly the fact that the data on XBox DVD's is backwards) but I figure if they can get Linux on the XBox, surely they could get XBox games to run on the PC. Perhaps the above scenario isn't so plausible after all.
Schnapple
THis is wishful thinking that apple would switch how ever really folks do you honestly think apple would cut into its own hardware, by swtiching, it just does not make sense to do an intel based pc version of the osx
without compromising Apple's control over its hardware.
Apple can simply continue to only allow certain hardware to work with its OS. Just because they move to a new processor doesn't mean they can't continue to do what they have always done. If Motorola and IBM can't help Apple keep up in the Mhz wars (Ghz, now), then why not contimplate a move to Intel or AMD? Use one or the other, and continue on. This could lower prices a bit, and keep the Apple moto of "It just works" intact.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
dell is beating apple in education... education has little money... apple makes great hardware which rarely breaks without applied force... make an intel based emac which dual boots into windows xp and osx... since appleworks is free with the emac, let the schools by msworks if they want... see which os runs more often... apple makes money on the hardware anyway!
The problem with Motorola's chips is that the front side bus (FSB) only runs at 167 Mhz. This means that Macs cannot truly take advantage of DDR RAM so long as they use the current line of chips, even though Intel machines have had this for two years now.
Back when the G4 was designed, things were looking bad for Apple, so Motorola retrenched into the embedded market. These processors need low power, not high bandwidth. That is why Apple laptops are so nice and Apple desktops are so lousy right now.
Furthermore, the focus on the embedded market is why Motorola does no deep instruction analysis (Again not needed in this market). Intel's investment in this area is what has helped their SPEC score over the years, not the clock speed.
There are rumors flying about a new IBM chip that fixes all of these problems, but that is all they are right now -- rumors.
This topic has been beaten to death here and on arstechnica.
:(
I personally can't see it happening for several reasons, the number one being software. Apple has commited to the intel/moto design, which includes a cpu library (altivec). Any 3rd party apps if not rewritten will need to be run in some horrible altivec->intel emulation kludge, which will be nightmareishly slow, and defeat the purpose.
Slower than the cartoon we know as XP? - probably not, but still slow.
The other thing is power consumption/heat dissipation - for mobile applications intel/amd just plain suck up too much juice and run too hot.
Apple is currently suffering because its chip suppliers have not been producing faster ships at the rate they should be, but until next month (chip conference) its all speculation as to what apples' long term plans are.
I've read this guy's writings before, and I find it annoying that his article got slashdotted. Now he is probably an even more highly regarded hack.
For my workstation, I couldn't change because of all the apps for windows, but for the other system I'd switch to OSX. Anyone with a toddler knows how easy it is for windows to lock up. Windows has come a long way, but my son can lock up windows in about 5 minutes. Whereas on a Mac he hasn't been able to do it w/o resorting to pushing the power button.
What interests me is that Apple hasn't said anything about this matter so far. These rumours must have their impact on Apple's sales; if I'd run a Mac-based shop and have plans to upgrade my systems, I would wait until I'm certain about the future; if they're really making the move I may postpone the upgrade. Apple must know this and must know about the rumours. Now there are 3 possibilities:
1. They're thinking about the possibility of making the move but don't know yet. In this case they will probably not say anything about this matter because it increases uncertainty.
2.They're not thinking about a move at all. They would most certainly let their customers know this to take away any uncertainty.
3.They're indeed planning to move. They don't want to make this known too soon since it will most certainly make buyers wait until the new systems are on the market.
So. We haven't heard anything from Apple yet so we're probably dealing with case 1. or case 3. here. :)
0x or or snor perron?!
But I'm bored.
First off, x86 != "Yay I can delete OS X and run Windows!"
x86 = instructions on a processor. x86 != processor. (Try fitting a Pentium IV into an Athlon mobo.)
Everything else = connected to mobo. All mobos are not created equal, and likely, Apple would simply create a motherboard that won't let you connect your fun happy pc components unless you use a hammer. (At which point, they won't work.)
Great, now that we've cleared that up, current Apple hardware rots. Sure, it runs cool and takes less energy, but in sheer performance, it's outclassed on all levels, especially if you want to do a cost-to-performance analysis.
If Apple does start developing an x86 solution (Which will be about the time that Microsoft announces a port of MS Office to Linux.), they'll use proprietary solutions. (Everyone remember how fun it was back in the day of 286-486s, when you had to order parts directly from the vendor because run of the mill parts wouldn't work?)
If they do that, they'll likely still be outclassed in hardware performance, and price.
Keeping in mind that Apple's income is based more on hardware than software, what would they gain from such a move?
Probably a bunch of aid from Microsoft to keep them around so it looks like MS has competition. That's about it.
No, the only realistic thing for Apple to do if they're ditching Motorola is to work with IBM as the rumors have it, and move to a 64 bit architecture. They'd be able to get away with charging exorbitant prices there, because they'd have the jump on 64 for desktop use.
It's decomposing. Don't kick it. Your foot might go through its rib cage.
Everything that's going to be said about a possible Intel or x86 switch has been said. Let me sum up the entire thread for you, so you don't have to bother to read the rest:
1. Apple will never switch to x86 b/c Apple is a hardware company and MS would kill them.
2. I don't know anything about this so I guess it could happen but Intel/x86 is faster, thus Apple should switch.
3. My sister's boyfriend's roommate knows someone who works for Apple and they already have boxen running x86 in research.
4. Darwin already works in x86. It's just a matter of porting Aqua. Oh wait. And EVERY application.
5. Apple can't put its installed base through another architecture switch. (witness 68 to PPC)
6. Apple's already put its installed base through an architecture switch AND an OS switch. They can do the x86 switch easily.
7. x86 is dead. Why move to a dead architecture?
8. Apple would NEVER allow OS X to run on non-Apple hardware, so x86 isn't an issue.
9. Forget x86. Go IBM PowerPC
10. But what about Altivec? They'd have to license it from Motorola.
11. Oh, yeah. They would.
Etc.. etc.. Not that this topic isn't worthy. But it's been done to death! I'm tired of it. Please please please let it die.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
The only real advantage of the PPC at the moment is that it lacks a lot of backwards compatibility cruft and, because of its RISC design, consumes less power and spreads less heat. It is a fine notebook CPU (and Apple is a fine notebook manufacturer). But Apple seems to have had no other chance but giving up this advantage by selling its newest line of desktop G4 Macs with dual CPUs, keeping up with Intel at least halfway with such a "hack".
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
"the megahertz myth is a difficult one to overcome."
Well, no, it isn't. If you want an impressive MHz figure, just divide the clock on-chip so that the external clock frequency looks suitably high. Either people will be fooled, and buy your processor, or MHz as a measure will be discredited. Either way you win.
I find it odd that no-one, in particular the RISC vendors, has ever done this.
Screw the hardware sales, their software sales to people trying to get rid of MS will make their sales of OSX worthwhile.
Does this mean a version of OS 10.x for Intel that we could buy retail. This would be a great idea in my opinion.
it's mostly been a matter of perception. Motorola chips have always been more effencient - meaning similar or equal performance at lower clock speeds (a 500 MHz G4 feels the same as a 1 GHz Pent III), less power draw, less heat generated, etc.
Apple's marketing of the chips has been a big factor. Intel has successfully convinced the general public that the only thing to look for in a CPU is how fast the clock speed is. There was supposed to be this big campaign of "MHz isn't everything" by Apple, but it was just hot air (iow, it never got off the ground). Effiency has it's costs - Motorola's chips cost more than Intel, and then appear slower because of Intel's big focus on the clock speed. This is why AMD abandoned the use of clock speed as the big feature in their ads.
Looks like Apple's best marketing approach is "switch", which focuses on the software side of things, something that's probably much easier to pull off.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Apple will switch to a new chip when the PPC line no longer delivers what they need. First scenario: the chips don't keep up with the demands of future Mac operating systems, in terms of capability or speed. Second scenario: Apple's production rate outstrips the PPC production rate. I.e., they can't buy enough chips.
Neither of these conditions appear to apply now. That can change, though.
Mitigating against a chip switch in the near future: 1) Alienation of existing Apple customers. No one is happy when their hardware and sofftware is threatened with obsolesence. 2) Moving Apple developers to a new architecture. Apple isn't finished moving developers -- big and small -- to Cocoa. Abandoning Cocoa anytime in the next few years would risk loss of many independent developers.
Meanwhile, stop fantsizing about running an OS X on you $600 AMD boxes. Apple won't position itself as a direct competitor to Microsoft in the OS market. (And, Microsoft won't start selling a version of Windows that runs on the Mac.) Apple is in business to sell hardware. They write software to give people a reason to buy that hardware. For its part, Microsoft seems convinced that they can make money selling Office into the Mac market.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I can just tell you this article is pure BS.
It's not unusual for a sub 1Ghz PC with good SCSI disks to handily outperform a 2Ghz+ machine with mere IDE
If you said "a clustered array of RAID5 15,000 RPM drives versus a 5400RPM single drive", then that would have made sense, but to use SCSI versus IDE as the big differentiation is just silly: The intrinsic SCSI advantage has been disproven countless times.
Sun sell systems with 300-400Mhz processors and gigaplane XB crossbar active backplanes
That's pretty disingenuous: Sun sells systems with tens or hundreds of those "300-400Mhz" processors, disproving your "CPU power doesn't matter" BS. I guarantee you that if Sun weren't sliding behind in the CPU game (it's hard to compete with AMD and Intel with such a small niche market) they'd sell much more powerful CPUs. Instead they compensate by clustering dozens of them together.
If you're buying a system in the near future, drop 500-1000 Mhz in CPU speed and buy faster disks or more memory with the money you saved.
You'd save next to nothing. An Athlon 2200+ costs $220 Canadian here, and puts you in the upper realm of CPUs. Considering that most power PCs have 512MB of RAM (which is virtually never exhausted. Despite having several development tools open, and SQL Server running, and several different browsers, I currently have 370MB free. Adding more memory will merely increase the capacitive load of my PC). Secondly, adding a faster disk only matters if you do tasks which are heavily disk I/O intensive, which the overwhelming majority are not (especially because people have so much memory, and hence disk cache). It's like saying you'll get better video encoding performance by equipping your PC with a faster CD-ROM drive.
This BS "CPUs are faster than we'll ever need" nonsense is as tired of an argument as it was a decade ago when contrarians were assuring us that a 386 was more power than any reasonable man would ever need. History has shown their claims to be absurd, yet as they say: History repeats itself. Take a man who claims that his Pentium 667 is "faster than I'll ever need" and give him a P4 2.2 to use for a week. Put him back on his 667. 9 times out of 10 he'll be on the phone to Dell to upgrade his PC. Most people who claim that they don't need better say so because they've never SEEN better.
Additionally, try doing some video editing on your PC. While the hard drive is a factor (because massive amounts of data are read and written), the processor is massively more an influence: An Athlon 2200+ will perform the task that much quicker than a Athlon 1500+, again thoroughly reputing your claims that processors are overpowered. That's especially telling as video processing is one of the most disk and memory bound activities.
There's three very good reasons that Apple won't release OS X on Intel:
1) Apple is a hardware company. They make the most revenue on hardware sales, not software sales. (Which probably explains the current lack of excruciatingly painful WinXP-like authentication for OS X.)
2) OS X has been heavily optimized for the AltiVec 128-bit SIMD vector processor on the G4. Without that optimization, it's a helluva lot slower, and I don't care how fast your Pentium or Athlon is running... vector processing is a whole other ballgame.
3) The majority of software would either not run at all or be severly broken by switching platforms. Most of the mainstream software for OS X is written in Carbon, the "migration environment". For those of you that don't know, OS X supports five software "environments": "Classic" (OS 9 running inside OS X), "Carbon" (Classic applications that have been tweaked to take advantage of most of OS X's Unix structure so they run native under OS X, but they haven't been completely rewritten), "Cocoa" (completely new Objective C apps, written in the NeXT-based OOP development tools), the terminal/command line applications, and the X Window apps (assuming you have some flavor of X installed on OS X, as it's not installed by Apple.) So, what happens to the Classic and Carbon apps if Apple switches to X86? They break. And what percentage of apps are Carbon apps right now? Oh, I'd venture to guess about 70%.
Telling application developers they have to re-code their software again, after telling them two years ago they'd have to re-code their software, is not a good way of making friends with the developers.
MacTacToe - for every problem, an elegant solution
I am a proud Apple gamer, and I DO seriously need the extra speed provided by the competitive x86 architecture, such as DDR Ram and nearly 3ghz processors.
Join the legions of Mac Gamers.
"Great games like Warcraft III... Breakout... Super Breakout... (photoshop...)"
So what does this article bring us? Not much. The guy doesn't even seem to be aware of the even more frequent rumour that Apple will switch to IBM chips.
This story is actually less informative than previous articles on the subject.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Let's go over this one last time. First, Apple will never release OS X to run on a generic Intel PC. If they did, they'd sell about 100,000 copies to geeks who don't want to buy Apple hardware. When those geeks find out that there's no software for OS X/Intel, they'll gradually move back to dual booting Linux and WinXP, leaving OS X as an interesting oddity like the copy of BeOS they installed once too. I mean, you can only watch the genie effect or transparent Terminal windows on top of a screensaver running on the desktop so many times before it gets old.
Let's not even get into the nightmare that it is to support every piece of crap cheapo PC hardware combination like MS has to. Apple does not want that, period.
Why will there be no software? Look at how long it took (and is still taking in many cases) vendors to update their software for OS X. Now imagine Apple pissing them off by telling them to recompile and retest under OS X for Intel. Sure, that part probably won't be as big as moving from OS 9 (unless they've got a lot of endian or other hardware specific code), but recall how long it took vendors to switch to PowerPC native code. Ain't gonna happen. Let's imagine: OS X Intel comes out; Apple tries to convince developers to support it, but they (wisely) wait and see how it goes. Nobody buys it, and software vendors see that it's going nowhere, so they don't bother with it. No software == no point. Good luck!
Furthermore, what's the incentive to port to OS X Intel if (a) it's a relatively small, untested market, and (b) more importantly, they already have a Windows version that works fine? Along these lines, for Apple to provide any sort of VMware-like Windows emulation under OS X Intel would be suicide for the platform. Application vendors would just tell their customers to run it under Windows/VMware. What then is the incentive to develop a version for OS X Intel?
For Apple to move their own hardware to Intel would also piss off a lot of people. They pulled it off once with PowerPC, but that was truly necessary. It went amazingly smoothly, but it was really a couple of years before PowerPC native apps starting showing up in numbers and the newest PowerPCs were fast enough to emulate the old 68ks as fast as the last ones. Does anyone really want to go through all that again? It would be a couple of years before Apple would even hope to be up to par with Windows in performance! Not gonna happen.
Sure, I don't doubt that Marklar exists. It does give them that last desperation option, when there's no hope for anything else. But perhaps more importantly, it serves to improve the OS X codebase simply by making it platform transparent. The one instance where I could possibly see an Intel-based product from Apple would be XServe. Just a thought - but if you're not likely to be running PhotoShop or ProTools or Quark on a server, perhaps an Apple branded unit with Intel would work out with all Apple server software.
The only intelligent thing Haddad says is in the second to last paragraph, where he essentially acknowledges that software would be the biggest roadblock. Developers will likely balk at the prospect of porting to yet another platform, and "without software support, the Mac would truly be dead." Exactly.
Of course, the most likely scenario lies with the rumors of the Apple/IBM collaboration on a next generation PowerPC chip. That's where I'd put my money. Nobody knows if/when G5 will ever come out and Motorola doesn't seem to care about the non-embedded market. Hopefully IBM can bring Apple back to the days when PowerPC really did crush the Pentium. We'll see.
Say hello to zMac.
Some users, however, would welcome a PC version of OS X. That would enable Windows emulation software, such as VirtualPC by Connectix, to run much faster. "The ability to switch back and forth easily between OS X and Windows would be a major coup," says Sasaki. Ian Crooks, operations engineer at Pennsylvania-American Water Co., declares: "I for one would switch tomorrow if they would release a [Pentium] machine."
This is exactly why Apple should never port OS X to an Intel architecture.
Virtual PC would run much faster if it didn't have to emulate the microprocessor, true. So much faster that it would discourage companies from coding for OS X itself, because you could run their Windows products on VPC.
Not only that, but eventually somebody -- not Apple, certainly -- would release a project similar to WINE that would allow Windows programs to co-exist with OS X programs. It won't be completely compatible, of course -- especially as Microsoft changes the APIs -- but it would give companies another excuse not to develop for OS X.
A third factor is the cost of porting existing Macintosh OS X software to this new architecture. Facing that cost, why not port to Windows and let the Mac run your program through these emulation options?
As time goes by, Macintosh users would have to depend more and more on Windows software. Sure, they'd prefer software designed specifically for their platform, but developers won't be selling it, because it's easier and cheaper to code for Windows. Eventually, the users would just switch to Windows because Windows programs will run better on Windows computers.
The author covered no new ground, had nothing specific to say other than the obvious. I was hoping he'd mention something about Apple not being around in a few years.....
Well, I am still waiting on a 17" iMac they have been talking about for years. What? There is one now? Never mind...
What I find more intersting is why is the slashdot crowd so obsessed with this idea? If apple did the switch to intel processors do people on slasdot really belive that:
I find it quite ironic that the crowd that touts open source software seems to have an ongoing dreams of running proprietary software. The funniest thing is, most elements for building an open source variant of OS X are around:
- The code of darwin, the kernel, is available and compiles on IA32, albeit in a limited fashion.
- The Cocoa libraries have an open source clone: Gnsustep.
- Re-implementing Carbon according to the spec, which is publicly available and quite clear would clearly be less work than project WINE.
So what gives?I work in a lab where we produce a very widely used piece of scientific software, and we do benchmarking on everything from old 68k Macs to new Dual G4s to AMD and Intel boxes running both Windows and Linux. The fastest benchmark we have on record, despite the fact that we dropped over five grand on our dual G4, was an $1100 dual Athlon XP 1800+ using Intel's C compiler version 6. It's not just faster than the fastest Mac benchmarks, it's WAY faster. We haven't tried any higher dual Athlon systems, but I suspect they'd be faster still. I'm not saying that an Athlon system would be faster than a Mac in all circumstances (I don't know one way or another), but the benchmark I've got the most experience with has got the Macs losing in a landslide.
That being said, I think OSX beats the crap out of Windows as an OS, and I'd really love to see such a great OS on a cheap, fast box. Can't have everything, I suppose.
David Coursey wrote a column on this subject not so long ago: Intel inside a Mac? Just wait.
I wonder what the implications this might have for Apple with regards to market share and software support.
The implications are that Microsoft will destroy them. Duh. This will never happen unless Steve Jobs is blinded with his own ego and his shareholders let him.
A Pentium based Mac would slow down terribly, as Pentiums do not use RISC, and the dinosaur X86 command set would make Macs crash just like a PC. This lame-brained idea scores a 10 on the stupidmeter!
How ya like dat?
Darn tootin!
The most computationally expensive thing most users ever do is DVD playback - Just about any off the shelf PC CPU will do this. I'm still running a slotted K7-500. BUT I got a nice (reasonably fast) IDE drive and plety of RAM. Most users don't even know what they are paying for. They don't understand computer architecture and neither should they have to.
Users want to buy on features rather than performance.
Personally I think that without new features that users want (and I don't mean OS updates) computers will have to start to be sold on the bundle, the style (I mean the physical look and interface).
TBH I don't think most users even give a damn what OS the thing is running although backwards compatibility is often an issue.
What most office users want -
A spreadsheet
A wordprocessor
Some simple database package (possibly)
Email
Calendar
Contacts organiser
HTTP/HTML is nice cos' it lets companies divorce the app from the OS - all you need is a nice browser.
What home users want -
A wordprocessor
EMail
Websurfing
Games (possibly - most don't give a monkies)
Graphics package (that can plug into their camera)
Some want music packages (me!)
DTP seems to be a popular choice but a decent WP would sort most out (they want clipart)
Computers (esp PCs) are NOT designed for home living, they consume too much power, they are ugly, large, noisy etc....
Sell on features and aesthetics not Mhz...
"None of this shit works" -W.Shatner
The author of the referenced article sympathizes with all the poor software developers who will be forced to rewrite their software. What, for the 2nd time in 2 years? I am drowning in tears of pity. Unless the 'software' in question contains hand-coded assembly and/or involves special drivers, wouldn't a quick recompile do the trick? We're still talking OSX, right? And BONUS, a new version/upgrade to sell your suckers (err, customers) to boot!
After spending so much time and effort bashing the Megahurtz Myth, there's no way they'd go with Intel P4 chips and their performence killing 20 stage pipeline.
OTOH, they might go x86-64 on the AMD Hammer series. Gobs of memory bandwidth, excellent FPU, high clockspeed and VERY high performence. Plus, by targeting x86-64 as their starting point, they get both optimized performence AND by definition don't run on 32-bit chips, so there's less whining from users about not running on their 32-bit generic PCs. They can go 8-way multiprocessor economically with the Opteron series too.
*sigh* I guess it works. You present a few facts, then use them as the launching point for unreasonable claims.
PPC != Apple. You start by attacking the XServe, which may be deserved, and expand the attack to the rest of the PPC family. It doesn't wash.
G4 does not compete with Xeon. POWER4 (itself a wholely compliant PPC chip) does, and you know what it Smokes Xeon as a server chip. Xeon scales to what 8 way, with a contorted memory bus structure? POWER4 scales to at least 24 way, probably higher if IBM cared to offer something bigger and integrates onto a modern server crossbar switch.
If Xeon is so good, why aren't companies converting their Sun/Oracle installations to it rather than RS/6000 POWER4 machines?
Please spare us the classic bait and switch strategy of arguments.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
yeah they might like the fact x86-64 is all shiny and new (mac people are attracted to this and mr jobs loves it )
BUT
1/ you would have to get adobe to port photoshop all over again
(photoshop is a carbon app and has lots of PowerPC asm still in the mac version)
2/you would have to have an emulator not only for PowerPC but all the OS interfaces much like running VMware with the whole OS
(although VMware approach is of emulating the whole machine you could shortcut it as you only have limited amount to emulate)
3/ the back catalog of hardware that you have like the apple system controller + gigabit NIC ASIC would have to have serious work not just a tweak
so whats really going to happen then smarty pants ?
apple tweaks the system controller for either RapidIO or IBM interface depending on supplier
(you get the real thing which matters in computing BANDWIDTH )
they have a seperate level 3 cache that apple can mess around with to get extra performance and so sell differant machines at differant price points
apple use's MOT chips for laptops and IBM chips for servers
regards
John Jones
Does your typical mac user even care if his/her CPU is 13.4% slower than it's intel counterpart? I am willing to bet that the reasons why they chose Apple in the first place will way outnumber a slightly slower CPU. (Plus with all the licensing and proprietary closed source layers -- I doubt you will ever see Macs make an inroads in the server market no matter the CPU speed...)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
If Apple really is faced with having to ditch Motorolla (and I'm pretty skeptical at this point), it seems to me that they would be all over Transmeta. Low power consumption, and maybe they can just have it emulate the G4 instruction set.
Mox
A pair of Athlons (or whatever they are called these days) using their hypertransport, to give huge memory bandwidth, and put firewire, serial ata, and all the ports on board.
This meshes with the graphics and video themes that Apple is popular with, and gives them a path to 64bits via sledgehammer. And it would make a fair server, if it fit in a 1u case.
I keep seeing replies to this story that go along the lines of "Apple is a hardware company and will thus design a proprietary system around an Intel processor so that it won't run on clones".
While I would not be surprised if this were the case, the fact that the CPU would be the same would eliminate a huge roadblock in the way of emulation. It should be possible, without too much effort, to produce an 80%+ speed emulator for a beige box that would run the OSX made for the Apple-on-Intel box.
I'd love to see Apple port to x86, because then it would only be a matter of time before I could run OSX on my commodity hardware without paying the Apple Hardware Tax.
This highly depends on the application. A single SCSI drive against a single IDE drive performing a single task may show the same performance. However, when you add multiple tasks and a lot of disk access , SCSI beats IDE hands down. As you add drives (don't even bring up RAID yet), tag command queing and parallel data paths blows away IDE no question. Now, add RAID into the equation, especially looking a the huge caching controllers available for SCSI with no IDE counterpart and you see that SCSI is certainly the way to go. Computer manufactures aren't idiots; IDE is cheaper and if it were on equal footing with SCSI no one would offer SCSI solutions. That having been said, no high-performance workstations or servers use IDE.
Sun, HP, etc., have for years sold small MHz machines that outperform the GHz machines available mainly because they use RISC technology and aligned instructions. Clustering has not been a large part of Sun's business -- ever! And, as far as multiple CPU's in a single box, yes, all these systems offer and endorse this, but then so does Intel if you read their journals. Intel ran themselves into needing GHz clocking because of poor chip design (backward compatible to x86). Sun and others don't design chips in those ranges because of the cooling requirements and heat failure rates. It is far easier for them to make lower MHz machines with multiple processors because they run OS's and software that can work UMP or SMP, where Intel has issues in the common market environment (example: Windows 95/98 unable to work SMP).
Click here or here.
Sun sell systems with 300-400Mhz processors and gigaplane XB crossbar active backplanes
That's pretty disingenuous: Sun sells systems with tens or hundreds of those "300-400Mhz" processors, disproving your "CPU power doesn't matter" BS. I guarantee you that if Sun weren't sliding behind in the CPU game (it's hard to compete with AMD and Intel with such a small niche market) they'd sell much more powerful CPUs. Instead they compensate by clustering dozens of them together.
Um, yeah. You might want to stick to the pc stuff which you seem to know because you are totally off base with this comment. Sun (or HP or IBM for that matter) don't have to compensate for anything. The systems are designed for different tasks than Intel/AMD desktop processors. The bus speeds are 10x what you find in PCs not to mention redundant arbitrated buses, ecc on the data bus, bus scaling with processors. You can't even put a large number of CPUs in a PC and have it scale, while Sun systems scale ~80% with every CPU. Compare that to 50% for the second Intel CPU and it falls off after that. You can put 106 CPUs on a Sun F15K in one or multiple domains; 100+ systems would be required to duplicate the processing power with Intel chips and even then data throughput would lag behind. Your comment is like suggesting a Corvette is a better vehicle than a tank because it can go faster. It all depends on what you are trying to do....
I also work on single processor Sun, SGI, and IBMs, all of which at lower Mhz are MUCH faster than my PC (except maybe the slower SGIs, like the Indigo R10000s; at 150Mhz, they're showing their age but STILL keep up with the PC in rendering speed). Sun's problem is not technology, it's sales. IBM is just killing them in marketing. I talked to a guy the other day that's getting ready to begin replacing their 1800 Sun servers with AIX boxes. He concedes the Suns are superior, but they have been convinced from the confidence bestowed by IBM's superior marketing skills. It's widely known that Sun has superior tech, inferior business sense.
I totally agree with you that it's BS the people that say 'current CPU speed is all we'll ever need', but it's equally BS to assume that the 'faster' Intel chips are actually the 'fastest' chips out there because of some marketing-driven clockrates. Superior architecture trumps clockrates any day of the week, and Intel is still lacking in the former. Incidentally, I'd take a single processor Ultra Sparc III box at 1.05 Ghz over a 2.0Ghz PC, even running *nix, any day of the week. As a matter of fact, I usually do.
You're right. They'll make oodles of money, just like Be and NextStep did when they gave up on making their own hardware and instead tried selling an alternative x86 operating system.
Not only is this news old (the article is over a week old!), it's also known to be entirely false. This was the same article which said Motorola was lagging behind Intel because they had fewer mhz, no? Think, people! This guy is an uninformed moron taking a cursory glance at limited information. Not only would OS X be terribly slow on x86 (since it's optimized for a RISC chip with good vector processing, the exact opposite of modern x86), Apple cannot allow interoperability without losing tons of money on hardware. How does this stuff get on /.'s frontpage?
It's not unusual for a sub 1Ghz PC with good SCSI disks to handily outperform a 2Ghz+ machine with mere IDE
Doing what? And what kind of disk subsystem? Put in a single IDE drive and a single SCSI drive, both running at the same spindle speed, and I doubt there will be a measurable difference. Modern IDE is not as godawful bad as it used to be. And yes, I used to be a SCSI advocate, and I definitely agree that SCSI has it's place. But it's not on the desktop.
Nowadays with the increasing sophistication of consumer software (like the latest games), the same issues are recurring
Which is why there's absolutely no increase in framerate or other performance benchmarks as you increase CPU speed, right? Oh wait, there is...
If you're buying a system in the near future, drop 500-1000 Mhz in CPU speed and buy faster disks or more memory with the money you saved
Yes, that $30 will go far.
Looking at Newegg, the cheapest AMD Athlon processor I can buy is a 950 MHz Athlon. For another $13 I can buy an Athlon XP 1600 (1400 MHz). The most expensive Athlon XP available right now is a 2200 (1800 MHz) for $155. And an Athlon XP 2000 (1667 MHz) is $100. The reality is that CPU prices aren't as high as they used to be. In fact, you're likely to spend more on memory than you do on the CPU. Heck, the motherboards can be more expensive than the CPUs now.
And the MHz does still matter. Virtually everything still winds up being CPU bound - pop in a faster CPU, everything gets faster. The same can't always be said for memory (512MB is sufficient for most purposes currently), and improving disk performance is freaking expensive (compare prices for 15k SCSI drives to 7.2k IDE drives. Don't forget to factor in the necessary SCSI card and equivalent storage space).
If you're a gamer then the best place to put money is the video card... they still scale based on CPU speed, but the difference between a $50 video card and a $150 one is far greater than a $50 CPU and $150 CPU.
Are there bottlenecks still? Sure. But despite the horrible, evil numbers that float around university EE/CompE courses it's not really that bad. If it were then we'd still be stuck back at a couple hundred MHz trying to change laws of physics to get the HD, memory, and network subsystems up to CPU speeds.
Oh, if you really want to think about just how wide the disparity between CPU speed and other systems are -- that 3 GHz P4 is actually running it's ALUs at 6 GHz. And yet it still manages to get enough data to show a marked improvement over a 2.4 GHz P4.
As any knowledgable engineer knows this is not the case at all (as a matter a fact, in some benchmarks the PowerPC architecture beats the x86 architecture even when running at a much lower clock rate; just try photoshop on both platforms).
Motorola lagging is not perception it is real. The "market perception" is overblowing it, not inventing it. Apple being forced to go dual G4 to remain competitive is real, the gap could not be "spinned away" by marketing as in early iMac days.
When PowerPC/Mac and x86/PC systems of the same clockrate are compared against one another the PowerPC/Mac advantage is usually around 20-30%. You can find specific tests where one platform grossly outperforms the other, and if you look harder you can find such tests that aren't rigged (486-optimized code, Altivec vs. MMX not SSE, etc.), but these are the exception not the rule. These rare exceptions tend to be very CPU centric and don't stress the system architecture. Looking at the CPU in isolation is of limited value. A system wide looks shows some serious shortcomings on the Mac side, namely memory. Example: DDR not really utilized by the CPU. And this is a Motorola failing not Apple's.
One of the few components of the operating system that was not very portable was the Quartz rendering engine, which had previously been written with a lot of optimizations for PowerPC and G4's (CHIP SPECIFIC CODE).
However, now they've switch over to OpenGL, and have just highly optimized the DRIVERS for the G4 and for multiprocessor environments. So, Quartz is written in OpenGL. What does this mean? One of the few VERY chip specific components of the OS is no longer tied down in such a way.
So, sure it's a possibility...and anyone saying that they wont because they make sales off of hardware...Ummm...who says they still wont make proprietary hardware? Just because they use a different CPU doesn't mean that they cannot make use their own board design.
I'm not one to vote either direction, however it seems that they've made it apparent that they want to be able to move quickly in whatever they do.
- Sighuh?
not really fair when the top dual Powermac doesn't actually cost $5000. Having said that, our fastest box here is also a PC, an Athlon XP 2100+ - seems even more so because it has a top-flight GeForce 4 Ti GFX card. Still, we've got another Mac on order - some jobs are just SO MUCH qicker and easier on a Mac.
That was classic intercourse!
Sun sells systems with 300-400Mhz processors because they are a lot like motorola in that they just can't keep up with Intel.
However, when you add multiple tasks and a lot of disk access , SCSI beats IDE hands down. As you add drives (don't even bring up RAID yet), tag command queing and parallel data paths blows away IDE no question.
I hoped that this argument didn't erupt. It's always the same conclusion (That SCSI isn't inherently faster than IDE), though there'll be a new army of FUDsters reading your post and restating what they saw, presuming that a claim is proof.
Yes, there is a question about whether SCSI "blows away" IDE. This is, quite simply, SCSI FUD. There have been countless comparisons by people trying to prove exactly what you're claiming that have shown that with modern IDE systems, and the best current SCSI systems, the only benefit of SCSI is because the best of the best hard drives (hence extremely $) are only available for SCSI (i.e. 15,000 RPM). If these same drives had an IDE interface, there would be no advantage. The "multitasking" aspect is BS: Ever since the days of modern operating system with disk controller drivers that do exactly what the SCSI hardware would do (queuing and optimizing access), that point is moot. Additionally, most IDE controllers nowadays DO have IDE queues, and are actually recognized as "SCSI" (despite using IDE signalling and IDE drives). Promise controllers have queues, optimizations, etc.
Sun, HP, etc., have for years sold small MHz machines that outperform the GHz machines available mainly because they use RISC technology and aligned instructions
You realize that RISC machines require more cycles to achieve the same performance, right, completely countering your own argument? BTW: Intel went to Ghz clocking because they eliminated the x86 compatibility in the core (and went RISCish), but instead built a emulation layer around it. Sun, HP, etc all, haven't sold processors that are higher performing than the high end consumer processors for years. They make up for this by, as mentioned, implementing extreme, and astoundingly costly, SMP.
No. Clock rate is irrelevant. The original design goal of the RISC paradigm was to make computer chips less complex which frequently has the side effect of making the chips more efficient in terms of how much work can be done in a single clock tick and in how much power is drawn.
Certainly some RISC architectures used the increased efficiencies to produce insane clock rates (Alpha). Other RISC architectures (MIPS) kept low clock rates that delivered comparable performance by doing more work per clock tick. Go back to 1993 through 1995 and look at the SPEC scores for different RISC chips.
In other words, different design teams have taken the RISC paradigm in many different directions.
The big potential losers if Apple should switch chips would be software developers. They would be forced -- perhaps for the second time in two years -- to rewrite their programs, this time to make them work with a Pentium-based Mac. That's no small task -- and could be a disaster for the Mac community, since many of its developers are small shops. And without software support, the Mac would truly be dead.
Oh, yeah. That's why.
Imagine running an x86 Mac that has no native version of Office or Photoshop and runs PPC-based versions like molasses, but runs Windows versions at native speed. Imagine trying to convince developers to write for OS X instead of Windows at that point. Why should they bother?
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
Definitely. PC manufacturers love to compete on Mhz, but a fast CPU is useless if it's starved of useful work by bottlenecks in I/O, memory bandwidth, etc. It's not unusual for a sub 1Ghz PC with good SCSI disks to handily outperform a 2Ghz+ machine with mere IDE.
LOL you obviously have no clue how computers work.
I know a lot of people here want OS X on stock x86 hardware, but as many people pointed out it will not be happening. Apple will have a custom motherboard and ROM to prevent OS X from booting just like they do on PPC (generic PPC can't run OS X either). But will this motherboard and ROM of theirs be able to prevent people from loading Windows on a Mac? Although some people would buy the hardware just to have the dual-boot of OS X and Windows, I think this would hurt Apple in the long run. It would only serve to increase Windows' desktop share even further - and it would allow MS to eventually get out of writing software for OS X, which would force some businesses to stay in Windows for Office. Once they're using Windows, why boot into OS X and why even buy the Mac anymore.
The other thing is that eventually people would figure out how to get OS X to run on their generic beigh box (even though I said above that this won't happen), leaving no reason to buy a Mac. Right now Apple seems to have done a decent job of not allowing OS X to run on generic PPC machines, but I think that part of this can be attributed to few hackers having a PPC machine sitting around. Nearly everyone has an x86 machine around, so there will be a much greater effort to hack OS X to run on them. Actually, since the OS X binaries would be compiled for x86, it might even be possible to lift them off an OS X install and put them on a x86 Darwin install, which would be bad news for Apple.
Anything that allows Windows and MacOS to run on the same machine can not be good for Apple. In the short term a few people might buy a new machine or OS just for the coolness of dual-booting the two, but in the long run they will have a great deal of trouble competing with Microsoft. Truthfully I'd love to see Apple position OS X against Windows and win the battle, but the chances of that happening are very slim, and the likely casualty of the war would be Apple Inc. and all of their great products. I don't want to see that.
1) Pentium chips run hot and comsume so much power the fan on the thing will be huge and whirrrrring at 7000 rpm minimum.
2) With Intel(TM) DRM(TM) you won't be listening to your music, so you'll hear that fan loud and clear.
Way to admit the truth, now if we could only get the apple.slashdot.org folks to do the same, the world would be a better place :)
Weren't they going to use AMD chips for their systems? They already have been using the 756 southbridge for their peripheral host ever since they began selling the G3 bubble-tower. I had assumed that they were planning on doing a swich when hammer came out.
The systems are designed for different tasks than Intel/AMD desktop processors.
I'm sorry, did I somehow claim that they weren't? The prior poster claimed that Sun, et. all, proved that clock speed doesn't matter because they have lower clock speed processors on their systems. I call bullshit. Sun achieves extreme throughput by using lots of processors simultaneously. Is the net result extreme performance? Absolutely. But claims that clock speed don't matter are absurd. A Sun 15K offers up to 96Ghz of 64-bit processing power: Yeah, they don't care about CPU power at all.
I'd love to see the numbers that show that the "the intrinsic SCSI advantage has been disproven", even once.
Sure, in raw throughput and seek times, IDE drives can perform on a par with SCSI. Certainly, the bus speed is up in nearly the same realm now... but you forget the part that's important to USEFUL speed. A SCSI subsystem will generally operate at about 10% CPU utilization during saturated disk I/O, the same load on an IDE subsystem will suck up closer to 80% of your CPU cycles.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have my CPU doing something more useful than copying bits back and forth between a bus and a controller all day.
IDE is the best way to go if you're building a network file server -- it's MUCH cheaper, just as fast, and the file server by definition has nothing better to do than sit and do disk I/O (and network I/O), but I'd rather have a SCSI disk in my workstation any day.
As far as the CPU arms race... of course faster is better. But it's a question of what you're doing. Do I need a 1GHz+ cpu for moving windows and icons around on my desktop? No (well, I *shouldn't*, if Bill f***ing Gates didn't write such crappy code!).
The things that need fast CPU's are the same things that have always needed fast CPU's. Scientific calculation, Graphics manipulation, and of course Games. I suspect the last one is the only REAL reason most people "NEED" faster CPU's. Of course, I also think game designers lost their way back in the early 90's. I certainly think many of the games from the 1MHz C64 were more original and indeed more entertaining than much of what's on the shelf now. There are exceptions, but most of the "innovations" in gameplay today involve glitter without substance (see Quake 3 vs. Quake 1 -- much better graphics, but gameplay? atomsphere? storyline?).
Show me a game today that has the same level of immersion as Zork, and I'd happily go buy it and whatever hardware it needed to run. UT2003 looks great, and I'm sure will be fun... but it and the 2GHz CPU and $300 graphics card it wants won't engulf me the way a text game I can play on my PDA can.
No matter how fancy the hardware and how clever the graphics rendering, it'll never be as fast or as natural as your own imagination.
The G4 chip is not really all that much more expensive than an Intel chip. The cost difference of Macs comes entirely from the fact that Apple builds in much, much higher profit margins on their systems than commodity Windows PC makers, who are constantly chopping each other off at the knees for that little sliver of market share. Why do you think so many PC makers have been bought out or closed while "beleagured" Apple is still going strong?
An x86-based LCD iMac would still cost about $1300, because Apple has determined that people will pay that much for them. It's a huge seller at that price.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Apple has been working with AMD quietly to maintain an optimized version of MacOS X for AMD's next generation chipset. Sources inside AMD have mentioned this.
The OS that is running on the hardware has more than a little bit to do with comparitive speed as well.. This is blatantly obvious when using rendering programs such as rhino3d.. My home computer running win2k can render things exponentally faster than the lab computers here which are 3x times as fast but run 98.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
Yep, thats why gcc/rendering on a $8000 sun/400mhz is the same speed as a $100 600mhz celeron box
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Do you have over 1600 comments? Why Not?
...let me see. Mainly because I'm not a prattling little idiot, who thinks that the sheer quantity of his facile opinions should engender the respect of others.
What a dickhead.
The reasons Apple wouldn't do an Intel Mac are blatently clear to anyone who has observed the marketplace at all.
Apple sells premium priced machines to a die-hard, hard-core following of graphic designers, musicians and video editors. These are people willing to pay extra for a quiet, good-looking machine as part of their studio.
If the machine were built from an Intel chip, it would kill the core audience of Mac followers. They can't point to their machine and proclaim how different it is from "regular" PCs, it would be noisy because the Intel chips run hotter and therefore require more fans, and with an Intel chip, it would remove the barrier between common and premium home computers.
Would you buy a BMW with a Chevy engine in it? Probably not. So why would you buy a Mac with an Intel chip in it?
Apple knows that with the core audience, the computer they buy says something about them, just like the car they drive. It must be 'different', so there's an aura of prestige.
Apple hasn't made a computer for the common man since the Apple II -- they have always priced themselves for the premium buyer who wants something better than average.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Folks, it ain't gonna happen. Apple was only able to get through the 68K->PPC change because it was able to write a good emulator, and a decent PPC on X86 emulator is still yet to appear, and I think unlikely ever to appear. And they're just now getting through the Classic->Unix change. Apple is much more likely to go with an IBM chip now that they seem to have successfully evangelized Altivec to IBM.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Yeah - look at the way Jaguar and Porsche suffer from being confined to a tiny part of the overall car market.
That analogy is flawed because Jaguars and Porsches are a lot faster than the average car.
Mac people are like the guys who buy jags, mgs and so on. Sure it will always be a small part of the market but that doesn't mean Apple can't make money doing it.
To carry the analogy further, Macs are like niche cars that can't use the same fuels, oils, or tires as "normal" cars. That's the problem that Apple has: In order to be successful, they have to convince software publishers to create Mac titles. Those companies have to be convinced that it's a financially sound decision to hire Mac software engineers, Mac support staff, and to buy Macs to be used for development, testing, and support.
Apple is always on the hairy edge. If there were fewer Mac titles, they'd lose market share. Then there would be fewer Macs and the incentive to develop Mac titles would be less -- which would mean even fewer titles. I think you see where this is going.
I wish Apple well, but the only way that I think they have a chance in the long run is to bit the bullet, change CPU families, and create Macs that perform as well as PCs at similar price points.
If they try to become a software house like Microsoft by selling OS-X for generic x86 PCs, they will probably be destroyed by Microsoft. If Microsoft actually viewed Apple as a competitor (rather than a faux competitor that keeps the FTC off of their backs), life would get ugly at Apple. Microsoft would likely not produce a version of Office for OS-x86 (clever name, eh?). Microsoft would discourage Windows developers from creating titles for OS-x86. Microsoft could withold support or even actively sabotage titles with "service packs" to punish software publishers who released OS-x86 titles.
Just my $.02 on the subject.
I'm a software guy, so admittedly I only partly understand the issues involved in any hardware port. However, since, as I understand it, the Athlon was mimicing x86 instructions and breaking them down into a more Risc-like set, couldn't it do something similar with the PPC instruction set?
:) ?
I'm sure 64 bit brings its own set of problems, and my money's on the IBM Power4 mutant, but in theory at least, couldn't something from AMD be *tweaked* to emulate PPC (or would that kill any performance advantage and make for a really warm Crusoe
just my blog and pix
The main reason I hope Apple don't switch to x86 is because PPC is different (different is good) and frankly, x86 is a fucked up architecture - it's a 20+ year old architecture that's been kludged over and over.
In almost every discussion that involves PowerPC vs. x86 sooner or later this sentiment comes up. Ok, it may be right or not - but HOW DO YOU TELL ? Are you programming assembler on any of these platforms ? Or do you tell by looking at the chip ? */me opens up his G4 tower, pries away the cooler.. hm... does the same to his Duron...* looks quite the same... a rectangular piece of something looking technical on some kind of socket...
Are you really knowing about a relevant difference or are you just babbling some marketing fluff you heard somewhere without having a clue ?
I mean - Unix (used as a basis for OS X) is a 20+ year old architecture that's been kludged over and over - does that mean that OS X sucks ? What about Linux ? Different is good - so why not run Plan 9 - that's as different as it can get, I think. But both are not really valid arguments for or against any platform IMO.
This is a bit of information I have been spouting off about for the last several months.
In order for any company to compete, and perhaps destroy the Intel/Microsoft cartel they have to be able to offer 2 things.
Thing 1: Easy to use operating system...
Many Linux fanatics view Linux as the silver bullet for restoring competition back into the computer industry. I say BAH! Linux, in order to offer more acceptance into the computer community needs to work on it's GUI in order to be something every Joe Blow user is going to want to use, and feel comfortable using. Apple is light years ahead in research for usability. Granted some usability experts will tell you there are some, but few, inherent flaws to MacOS X's usability, but it still reigns supreme over others nonetheless. Here is a good article that is somewhat related to this MacOS X Article
Thingy Numbero 2:
Apple needs to get into bed with a chip manufacturer with more production facilities. This is a good idea since this will cheapen the hardware needed to make an iMac or a PowerMac. If I recall correct, Apple recently has decided to get IBM to produce the PowerPC chips that will be in their boxes. IBM has more facilities to manufacture said chips, which makes them a wiser choice over Motorola. I personally don't think this will last. I think that Apple should hook up with AMD in very much the same way that Microsoft has with Intel. If memory serves, AMD has even more facilities than IBM. Additionally AMDs architecture isn't too dissimilar from the PowerPC architecture. This sort of alliance would only serve to make both companies better.
I personally believe that this is the only way anyone is going to give Intel/Microsoft a run for their money.
FYI if you think that Microsoft is the only problem think again. Intel is just as bad as Microsoft in the scheme of things. There is a need for reestablished competition in not just the software industry, but the processor industry as well.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have my CPU doing something more useful than copying bits back and forth between a bus and a controller all day.
IDE has had busmastering for about 7 years, removing the CPU from most disk control operations. Furthermore most modern IDE controllers also offer command queueing (i.e. Promise). Of course, it's of marginal use as controlling a hard drive takes such a micro-iota of actual processor time nowadays.
A SCSI subsystem will generally operate at about 10% CPU utilization during saturated disk I/O, the same load on an IDE subsystem will suck up closer to 80% of your CPU cycles
When I'm copying at full bore between partitions, or over a high speed network, the drive is completely saturated and the CPU usage is about 2%. During most copy operations, the most CPU intensive aspect of it is Windows drawing the "Now Copying..." dialog.
I can't agree more. I've been overclocking my PC since I got my 486-33 10 years ago. Anything I could do to squeeze more horsepower out of it to play the newest games.
- I upgraded memory
- I learned that 256k cache is worth it, and 512k didn't help as much..
- I learned how to use mem
/d to put TSR's in certain places in memory so I had plenty of conventional free. (7th guest in 4MB - on a SCSI CD - baby!)
- I did the basic 'up the bus speed'
- Ran my VLB video at 50mhz
:)
- Optimized bios Ram speeds..
I kept all that up until a couple years ago..Overclocking and optimizing has mostly'deteriorated' into CPU upgrades, revving up the MHZ on the MB. I now find I don't need that as much, because the blockage is in the Internet connection, not my CPU. The games run fine, but lag is (always) intermittant. Playing Descent on a 486 over a 28.8 with Kali WASN'T just the line speed, but also your PC speed. I have a PIII 800 now, and games run just fine. Now it's the line speed.I think this finally set in with me a couple weeks ago when I broke down and bought my first notebook (and new PC since the 486 :). I was concentrating on screen size, memory, and HD. After I purchased the Notebook, I was surprised to discover it was a 1500 Celeron. I only checked because I couldn't remember if I got an AMD or Intel, and I was thinking it was around 1200.
So many years of tweaking, and now I can't remember what CPU BRAND I even bought.
On a side note, While Mandrake 9.0 RC2 installed PERFECTLY (not sure about Winmodem, don't need it) on this Toshiba 1405S171 (from Circuit City), I have one annoying issue. If I type 'rick' fast - at my normal typing speed. It comes out rriicckk. The same thing happens on my home system mdr8.0-8.2. I thought I just had a shitty Mb ;)
I can't think of a good search term for that kind of an issue, so I havn't found a solution, any ideas?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
You really should be fair when comparing the boxes. If disk swapping is killing you, you better tell us how much ram each system has, or shut up. Same for the drives. You may as well say, "I just got an SBLive, but I still run out of ram in 3ds max."
Actually a VMWare-type solution might be a better idea assuming that Windows could run on an Intel-based Mac box.
Basically he thinks that he could get the best of both worlds on a single box. I am not so sure that he is right.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Go back to law school. Or alternatively, read the DMCA.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
As has been said elsewhere, (and IMO) Apple x86 boxes should be the only ones that can run OSX. But does that have to mean that they could not run other x86 software? What if OSX/x86 came with something that I'm going to tentatively call xClassic86?
Imagine something like a dual P4/2Ghz built in the style of what next year's G4s would look like. If a Windows user bought one they could get the warm, fuzzy Apple experience but install and use the software they already own in xClassic86. It seems like the switch campaign would be even more successful if the Windows crowd didn't have to immediately shelve all the software that they paid for or culled from free/share-ware sites.
Between OSX's BSD underpinnings and xClassic86, it should be even easier for a *nix user to switch to this box. And with 2 2Ghz procs under the hood, xClassic86 might even run hardware emulation fast enough to run MacOS9 and OSX/PPC apps acceptably well.
Would xClassic86 be a bitch to program and buggy to its last day on Earth? Probably. But if it gives prospective buyers the assurance that they can use familiar softare from day one, and if it gives developers a year or two to make the switch, then it might be enough to give OSX/x86 boxes a foothold in the market.
Omnivore (10.3) could follow Jaguar, then by 10.4 or 10.5 enough native OSX apps should be on the market to allow phasing out of xClassic86 if it does turn out to be an ungodly ball of cruft. And if they can get it smoothed out and running cleanly, then even better: OSX/x86 can be the universal computer. Instead of the old "Write Once, Run Anywhere" this Mac could say "Write Anywhere, Run Right Here!"
Just a thought. What do you folks think?
"In a hierarchy every employee will rise to his level of incompetence". The Peter Principle
Here's a question for you chipheads. Most of you already know the following:
The Pentium Pro [and all subsequent processors in the Pentium family] takes CISC x86 instructions and converts them into internal RISC micro-ops. The conversion is designed to help avoid some of the limitations inherent in the x86 instruction set, such as irregular instruction encoding and register-to-memory arithmetic operations. The micro-ops are then passed into an out-of-order execution engine that determines whether instructions are ready for execution; if not, they are shuffled around to prevent pipeline stalls.
There are drawbacks in using the RISC approach. The first is that converting instructions takes time, even if calculated in nano or micro seconds. As a result, the Pentium Pro inevitably takes a performance hit when processing instructions...
Did Intel leave a door open, to feed micro-ops directly to the RISC core, bypassing the x86-to-micro-op translator? If so, here's Apple's chance to make OS X-on-x86 leapfrog Windows' performance. Windows has to go through that translator to maintain compatibility with pre-Pentium Pro CPUs. Apple has no such required baggage.
All that's required is developing a compiler that cranks out micro-ops instead of x86 instructions. Shouldn't be too hard, as Pentium chips themselves can make the conversion in nanoseconds.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You do have to doublecheck every experiment.
No one is going to believe your cold fusion experiment works if it can't be reproduced.
I'm not going to believe you unless you link some actual tests.
Common sense tells me the x86 PCs are faster than Macs just because so much more time and money goes into R&D for Intel and AMD's CPUs. You can try and prove me wrong, but you can't just say PPC is faster and expect me to take it on faith.
Life is too short to proofread.
You are incorrect. Per clock tick, the big RISC vendors provide chips that perform much more work than the big CISC vendors.
Consider the following:
CPU MHz SPECint95 SPECfp95
MIPS 195 11.0 7.0
MIPS 250 14.7 24.5
SPARC 200 7.4 10.4
PA-RISC 200 17.3 25.4
PPC 200 14.0 12.6
PII 233 7.0 5.2
PIII 550 22.6 15.4
K7 550 25.0 20.6
Then consider that the PA-RISC at 200 MHz and the MIPS at 250 MHz both far exceed PIII and K7 floating point performance and the PA-RISC at 200 MHz is not all that far behind the PIII at 550Mhz. If you look at more recent SPEC benchmarks (SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000) you'll see much of the same with a 667 MHz Alpha delivering a higher performance than a 866 MHz PIII. True, the gap is closing, but as you correctly noted, Intel and AMD are now providing RISC ships with CISC instruction set wrappers.
(I cribbed the SPEC scores from here. It was the best site I could find with a good historical overview.)
I'm not sure why every single /. contributer assumes that a company can only sell a single family of CPU, but has *anyone* considered for a moment that Apple may be ready to put both x86 and PPC in the same lineup?
Consider:
Apple nuked OS 9 booting effective 1/1/03.
Mac OS X is clearly being supported internally for x86.
Apple is concerned about Mot/IBM pulling through with decent CPUs.
My guess is that Apple is going to put both PPC and x86 in boxes next year. The x86 boxes will run Windows, but OS X won't run on a Dell or HP box, etc.
Apple can sell the superior performance (let's all hope...) 64 bit chip that IBM is working on to the pros, and sell either G4 or x86 to the masses. If you really are concerned about Windows compatability, there's an easy out for you - you don't need to decide between Mac OS and Windows - you can have both.
There's some risk in a strategy like this, but by and large it could be a big win for Apple. The 'switch' campaign gives consumers a way to ease into Apple products - buy a 17" iMac x86, run XP on it (maybe like VPC?). If you want to use iTunes, you can do that, and eventually you may upgrade your Windows software to Mac OS X versions.
Of course, if the PPC performance isn't there, nobody will want those boxes and developers might as well chuck OS X development altogether. That's the biggest risk.
for the rest of us to move to Itanium.
Amazing magic tricks
Aaaaaargh! No no no. There has always been, and will always continue to be, a chicken/egg relationship between hardware and software. Software is implicitly written for the capabilities of the existing hardware. And, the hardware doesn't start to fill new niches until the software exists and is proven. So you have this continual push/pull relationship between one and the other.
The pair, software and hardware, will continue to evolve in tandem for decades and hopefully centuries. Computer science is still in its infancy (what? 50 years old). Hell, one of the applications you listed, "surfing", barely existed 10 years ago. It doesn't take a leap to imagine that there might be new applications that appear on a time scale of 10 years.
Bah. Gross. It's a cliche not because it's true, but because people like to think they know something the rest of the world doesn't when all they're actually doing is looking at the ground beneath their feet, refusing to look up at the horizon.
Sure those ALUs are 6GHz but they're only sixteen bits wide.
Sounds like 3GHz to me...
Never mind that that useless pipeline easily outperforms the current best offerings from AMD and Motorola (though Intel and AMD are playing leapfrog, Intel's on top at this moment.) Do you even know what processor pipelines are for? Do you know that Apple's past comments comparing pipeline depths of powerpc processors to the pentium 4 was complete and utter FUD? Have you even looked at fair and reasonable benchmarks?
The plain truth is that powerpc processors and Macs have been lagging behind in performance for a long time. Top of the line G4s use 1.25Ghz processors. Even if they were twice as wide superscalar (I don't believe they are) AND the majority of programs could take advantage of all the extra execution units most of the time (which is not often the case on any superscalar CPU), they would still not match the performance of a top-of-the-line P4. Not to mention the fact that the Apple hardware would STILL be much more expensive.
How long has Apple been demonstrating performace superiority by relying on artificial benchmarks that consist of a select group of Photoshop filters? Preciesely as long as they've been lagging behind in performance. They've even given up on the performance edge lie completely now (though plenty of Mac cultists think comparisons made five or ten years ago are still relavent.)
Unfortunately, Apple's current marketing campaign sucks. Instead of showing some snob talking in vague ambiguous terms about how OSX is so much better than Windows, actually SHOW OFF THE OS. Demonstrate how easily you're able to open you're co-worker's MS Office documents (the Mac version of Office is much better than the XP version IMO). Then start minimizing and maximizing crap. After they cream their shorts, lots of PC users will be lining up to pay for overpriced Apple hardware.
This post is not a dig against Hammer. OSX running on Hammer would be pretty damn sweet. If I could run OSX on commodity PC hardware, I'd do it in a hot minute (or at least dual boot to it). In fact, there's nothing stopping Apple from dressing up PC hardware nice and pretty and running OSX on it. Unfortunately, they'd almost certainly make it proprietary hardware using an x86 processor (and probably still nVidia graphics hardware, which would be nice). Anything else would probably be suicide, even if they decided to just be an OS company.
My dream would be if Apple made OSX more conformant to unix standards (i.e. the unix standard filesystem layout). Imagine running the Aqua gui on your *nix of choice. I'd drop X11 like the dirty slut that it is.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
Why do we assume that if Apple changed chip manufacturers, they would also change platforms and architecture? It seems to me a much more likely senario that if Apple were to change processor vendors, they would either
A) develop a new architecture
or
B) continue development on the PPC architecture, just with a new company.
After all, IBM makes x86 chips, but they're developing PPC chips for Appple too. It seems to me that if Apple could provide them with the correct tools to do the job, AMD or another manufacturer would be happy to take on the extra revenue that the PPC chips could bring in. Assuming they can justify the R&D costs.
On a side note, if Apple does switch, it seems highly unlikely that they would switch to Intel. Maybe IBM, maybe AMD, but they've spent too much time bashing Intel that to switch over to them would be a worse PR move than the M$-Apple alliance.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
It does when you count the price of that spiffy LCD monitor. It's a bit unfair to compare the price of a Mac with a Cinema LCD monitor to the price of a headless Athlon box using a monitor that was lying around the office. Macs have supported standard VGA monitors for at least ten years now, and there's no reason why you have to buy a new monitor with a new Mac.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
(Personally, I don't think Palladium will ever see the light of day. It looks pretty clear that AMD won't sign on for it. That means Intel won't do so either. Otherwise, they're dumping quite a few future sales in AMD's lap. Intel is known for holding out until the last minute when negotiating big changes to their products.... I think you'll continue to see them talking about "considering Palladium" up until the last minute, but it won't really be in there.)
Therefore, I believe that assuming Palladium isn't in new Intel CPUs, Apple has no reason not to use their processors in a new line of Macs.
I don't think Apple would want to try to silently switch over an existing product line to Intel chips though. Instead, they should design a whole new Mac (with another cool new case design and all), and trumpet it as the "Mac with Intel inside".
As long as they can build enough supporting hardware on their motherboard to prevent PC users from "lifting" the Intel version of OSX - they should be just fine. I don't see why any Mac user would care which chip powers their Mac, unless they're being an unreasonable zealot about the whole thing? In my scenario, everything else stays the same. You still need to buy a Mac if you want to run OSX. OSX still runs all the same software, only faster with the latest Intel CPU behind it.
I suggested Apple needs to do this yesterday in a thread and was called a troll and stupid....
Put OSX on a pentium and watch XP die a quick death. Even if it costs apple the office suite, given a year that will be all M$ has to offer and they will be porting it for anyone willing to pay.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Dells Precision 530 Cluster P4 XEON 2.0 GHz (#79 on the Supercomputer 500 list) it has 256 processors isn't far behind the 2048 processor SGI ORIGIN 2000 250 MHz (#52 on the list). Not bad for a system that scales so poorly.
Its not how much ram you have, or how fast your ide drive is. It comes down to bus bandwidth, not processor power or total memmory. The reason is simple:
The vast majority of the time, nothing is going on in your computer. The processor's running at 6% usage, drives are quiet, etc, etc. And yeah, then bus bandwidth doesn't matter. But when you're loading the huge graphics files in the games, then everything is going, and the bus is what's holding everything back. You could have a gig of ram, but if it can't get data in and out really fast, then who cares? The processor is at 100% usage because its trying to make up for the slowness of everything else.
In the end, fast computers don't come down to a fast drive, ram, and cpu. It comes down to a good drive, ram, and cpu THAT WORK WELL TOGETHER. Thats where sun, sgi, and apple have the advantage: they actually design systems to use specific componenets together. Unlike the pc designers, which just makes fast parts, and assumes they work well together. The old Sparc 5's at school, with 64mb ram and a 150mhz processor run faster then my celeron 800 laptop at home.
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
Here's something you apparently don't know:
Power consumption increases linearly with clock speed.
(This is an approximation, but it's a pretty damn good one when you're talking about the CMOS logic that all modern processors use)
If you've been keeping up with the developments in processors for laptops, you would know that a processor no longer has to run at its maximum clock rate all the time. This means that a 2GHz processor can run at 500MHz, saving power, until I actually do something that needs a 2GHz processor. Add a thermally controlled fan to this and you only have to listen to the fan when you're doing things that would be impossible/impractical on a crappier laptop.
And what the hell is this "CPUs are fast enough b.s."? No computer will ever need more than 640K of ram too, right?
Life is too short to proofread.
It might be a selling point for more people than just you, if people were made aware of it. Show a side-by-side comparison of how many dollars' worth of electricity will be consumed over the next five years by an iMac and by a typical Wintel system.
Show another comparison where the savings are even more dramatic if the Wintel system is connected to a CRT (as opposed to the iMac's LCD).
Show a third comparison where 30 such computers are used in an office in Phoenix (where the air conditioning is always running), and the thermal output of the Wintel machines drastically increases the operating costs of the HVAC system.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Dude, when you can frag a friend over the net in Zork using a rocket launcher, then say "Haha I 0wnz0r3d joo!!" then maybe your statement will have some merit.
Yes, IDE has had busmastering for a long time. I think 7 years is even pessimistic, it's been bus mastered for a very long time. However, with IDE the bus mastering seems to just interrupt the CPU less for disk transfers, not totally absolve it from those duties. This is why SCSI has historically had a 2-3% CPU utilitization with the bus maxed.
While you make a good argument for purchasing an aftermarket IDE controller (which can perform tasks with the CPU utilization of SCSI), the reality of the matter is that virtually zero OEMs ship a system that way, they use whatever is built in on the motherboard. Which almost always consume a large amount of CPU time when performing disk I/O.
This is why the only people who build enterprise-class database servers with IDE drives at their core are idiots. That or they're penny-wise and dollar-stupid.
Moof!
Actually, Intel has not optimized their R&D for overall CPU speed in the last few years, they have focused on maxing the clock frequency.
/Tor
They realized that the vast majority of consumers see frequency as completely synonymous with computational power. Even my father, an electrical engineer with 17 patents, came home one day bragging on the great deal he got on his new computer with a lot of MHZ. I saw the Celereon label and did not say much...
RISC vs CISC stopped being an issue when Intel chips became RISC chips pretending to be x86's
If Apple moved the Mac platform to Intel processors, then they will need to have a PowerPC emulation layer so that all the code written for existing Mac hardware will continue to work (mostly, hopefully).
Does this mean that Intel chips would be RISC chips pretending to be CISC pretending to be RISC?
I'm a Lightwave user. Lightwave works on both Mac and PC (Windows). I'd love to go to Mac, but all of LW's coolest plugins are compiled for the Intel architecture.
If I could run OSX on my Intel/AMD, that means I'd finally have some choice between Windows and Apple, since the playing field would become level.
I am a bit naieve, though: If OSX were to suddenly run on an Intel processor, would that mean that Intel compiled plugins would instantly work? Would Newtek have to massage the code to make them work?
Yeah - I think you just made a very valid point that many people forget.
Premium services are typically only purchased by the upper-class people that can ride out economic downturns, relatively unscathed. (Oh sure, they might cry in their beer about their stock values plummeting - but if they're pretty "well to do" to begin with, they likely didn't invest more in stocks than they could "afford to lose".)
The people literally living "paycheck to paycheck" aren't shopping for luxury goods. It's a "luxury" when they can afford a new (or someone's second-hand) computer in the first place.
I think where confusion comes in with Apple is their rather quiet refocusing of their target market over the years. After all, they got their start pushing their computers into schools and trying to tell everyone they were the only option worth buying, at any price, because they were easier to use. Nowdays, they've really gone to much more of a high-end, artsy customer-base. Sure, educators still buy them - but their students often don't. I know a number of PC users who never owned a Mac, but they "lust after" a Titanium Powerbook, or a G4 with the cinema display. Honestly, most of them will never actually buy one - because they don't have the cash for it, and in the "real world", it just makes better economic sense to buy upgrades for their existing P4 system, one piece at a time. But the fact they perceive a Mac as "cool to own", despite owning a high-end PC already, is rather telling.
I've chimed in on this myself with the following story on Forbes.com:
Will Apple Put Intel Inside?
August 9, 2002
Rumors are buzzing that Apple computers may one day be stamped "Intel Inside." It won't happen.
http://www.forbes.com/2002/08/09/0809apple.html
" (see Quake 3 vs. Quake 1 -- much better graphics, but gameplay? atomsphere? storyline?).
"
Quake1 had a story line, but quake 3 was never about a story, it was about getting online and blasting your friends. It does that very well.
Now, I won't get into what you should like, that is just stupid, and I wouldn't presume to know what you will enjoy. I would wager that Zork was one of your first games, and so it will always be great in your (and mine!) mind.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Palladium is a Windows technology that uses TCPA - a hardware spec for "trusted computing".
AMD signed up for TCPA *BEFORE* Intel did.
AMD and Intel plan to do it differently: AMD on the motherboard chipset, Intel on the processor.
Also, while the guy is right that the transition would be a big pain for the developers, in the long run it might make things easier for them, because most of them keep a seperate branch of x86-optimized code because they also sell it for Windows. Post-transition, these two branches would be able to have much more in common. That might make things easier in the long run.
Alright--here is a reason for not making the transition: the upcoming desktop Power4's from IBM. I am almost certain these will be in Macs sometime in 2003, and when they are, most of our beige pc keyboards will be covered with drool.
An Athlon 2200+ costs $220 Canadian here, and puts you in the upper realm of CPUs.
Thats the problem with all these discussions. When you get right down to it, Intel and AMD fans really do believe that the performance rating of the CPU is its clock rate.
What's the Athlon's performance with 8 watts of power? Will it even run with 8 watts? How can you have a laptop otherwise? How many clock cycles go by on average before it executes an instruction? 20? 30?
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
OK, lets say they'll be doing that! switching to the x86 architecture
- thing-as-the-lower-priced-PC does.
:) ...)
Why close it of? Use special moded CPU's with special motherboards...etc etc? Only to remain a closed of platorm? In doing so, not letting users form doing what they what with a pice of hardware they bought (it really doesn't sound that attractive to switch to... more like they would be doing-a-$ms--thingie, "cough up the money, and WE'll control you! You can thurst us!")
All I _really!!!_ wish for in a computer, is that after I buy it, I may do what the heck I want to it, with it, on it! And run what software (OS) I want (may it be Linux, unix, Mac OS X, BeOS.. etc), and how I want it. And no further ridiculous cost like "to run that, you have to use exactly this, you may not/can't reuse your working-old-one".
Now that would be comprimized, if I bought "the new Apple AMD x86-64 MAC" and found that I can't play with it. Can't run my stuff, can't fiddle with the hardware, have to buy super-expensive-ultraDitt&datt-that-does-the-same
And as for the "porting Mac Os X software to the x86 architecture". It really would make this harder in the closed platform approach, cause it would make developers rewrite their software. On the other hand in an open platform, I think, the Mac would gain a lot (both in new avalible software choices & reuse of already cross platform avalible software). Take Adobe, (and x-other developers) already have almost all their software running on both x86 and PPC, so it wouldn't bother them if Apple would switch. Maybe it would even cut cost for them (goodbye to the Apple PPC Mac-department
[The end]
Having 5 guys/girls doing the same thing, is both time & energy consuming.
Having 5 guys/girls cooperating on the same thing is less time cosuming and energy saving.
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
I made a recent post saying this was in the works. No one believed me. Believe me next time, for I know things!
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
When I got my first 33Mhz 486, it was blisteringly fast and ran Windows 3.1 like a dream. All was good in my world. When I moved to Win95, it became slow, but usable. Then as software evolved, the software started grinding the machine slower and slower. Netscape 2 was OK, 3.0 too an age to laod, and by the time 4 was out its was dire and slow. When I got the new version of Eudora it couldn't keep up with my typing. Neither could Netscape's mail client. This I decided was horrific - how can a 486 with 33 million cycles per second to burn not be able to render a few characters per second to the screen??? By the time I had a P200Mhz those problems were forgotten. All was good again. Except for Java which made my PC feel like that old 486 again. Thing is I still have that P200 so out of date I am, and in the latest version of Word it can't keep up with my typing once again. Many other pieces of software now run pretty cripplingly slow, and i'm not talking fancy graphics programs or anything. So when one day my P4 2Ghz can't keep up with my typing...again i'll sigh... :(
That's not an article, it's an opinion column. No fact, sources, even credible rumors - just wild assumptions that anyone here could make with no less authority. C'mon people, next we'll be calling Springer a current events show!
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
However, what about Intel? Some might say this would give Intel a monopoly position in PC hardware, and lead to calls for their breakup. They could spin off the StrongARM division, for example. I wish I was a corporate lawyer, I'd need a forklift to get my bonus check to the limo..!
(this is not a
If PowerPC keeps lagging in performance year after year, then Apple does have what it takes to make a transition. Apple has decent hardware abstraction layer in OS X, it has its native development tools allready ported to x86, it inherits knowledge from Next developers who were doing dual binaries to support several Next architectures.
It is worth reminding people that Apple back in 1999 was talking of the Yellow Box, a full port of the Cocoa development environment for x86 to interest developers to create dual binaries that could run on either a wintel based computer or a Mac computer.
Now, why this won't happen now. Traditional window developers won't be interested in doing dual binaries and shifting their development environment to Cocoa. Traditional Mac developers are for now still stuck using Carbon, the transition environment from system 9 to OS X. And until these developers aren't at least on Cocoa, Apple will kill itself in doing a radical hardware switch.
But I can envision (not in the next two years) a time when Apple could have the flexibility to transition without creating a tremendous heartache to its loyal developers. Also, even if Apple has its own dedicated architecture based on an Intel or AMD chip, the cocoa environment will suddenly be more attractive to regular Wintel developers, since we probably aren't talking full dual binaries.
Apple and Motorola introduced several incompatibilities into their PowerPC designs which made their instruction set incompatible with IBM's POWER architecture.
Eventually, Apple is either going to have to drop the usage of these extensions, or pay a lot of money to have them maintained as a separate architecture.
Whatever induced them to diverge in the first place? Was Motorla trying to lock them in as a customer?
When you get right down to it, Intel and AMD fans really do believe that the performance rating of the CPU is its clock rate.
Okay, tell me what processor is faster than the current high end AMD or Intel processors? Please feel free to link examples of single processor competitor systems that trounce the high end AMD or Intel options on widely respected benchmarks. The reality is that the el-cheapo $200 Althlon holds its own and surpasses the majority of lauded, super-duper "RISC" (I use that laughably as most users of the term seem to have pulled a PC Magazine out of their 1988 archives, and don't understand the current state of processors) processors, but fans of UltraSparc, Alpha, etc, presume superiority just because it's rare, sort of like how the anti-Pop are sure that their particular music favourites are superior because they're "alternative".
As far as clock cycles/instruction, all current processors have superscalar instruction pipelines and generally perform at least one instruction per clock cycle (20 or 30? Geesh, you looking at an 8088 timing book?).
I wish that they wouldn't support Palladium, but it looks like they will.
Go with Intel and guarantee no hardware advantage? Brilliant!
Apple has often had the chance for CPU superiority but have instead chosen marketing and small speed bumps. When was the 1.6 GHz G4 first demonstrated, two falls ago?
It just doesn't seem to matter to them. If it did, they'd've pushed IBM and Motorola and quad-CPU's would be rather common by now, with some sick 16-CPU systems for Adobe and demos.
Ok, a while back I had to copy about 55.6 gigs of data from a backup disk to my main hard drive. (If that doesn't max the bus I don't know what will.) First, the backup drive was a 60gig IDE 7200rpm drive on the primary IDE controler on the motherboard. The main hard drive was a 149gig RAID 0 array on a Promise Fastrak TX2 PCI card comprised of two 7200rpm drives. Anyway, the copy operation took something like 20 minutes. However during the entire time, CPU utilization never rose above 1% and I think that was just to draw the little copy dialog box and the CPU utilization graph. Sure the Promise card may have been been doing stuff the CPU would normaly do but the 60gig disk was just on the motherboard and hence, acording to previous posts, should have been taxing the crap out of the processor. So, how is the amount of CPU time IDE drives use actually significant? Sure SCSI beats IDE hands down for interleaved read/write operations but CPU utilization? Bah. That hasn't even been an issue since processors got above 300mhz.
We're going to make information free Mr. Anderson, whether you like it, or not.
Interesting account of previous x86 work at Apple:
That's true, we did shell out a pile for the monitor. I had momentarily forgotten that. So, slightly unfair price comparison, but nonetheless the speed results hold.
Please help!
I am in the roofing business and recently my boss took away my hammer and gave me a handsaw instead. Now it takes MUCH longer to pound in my roofing nails. Saws suck! Who designed these things anyhow? There are sharp bits all along one edge and I often cut my hands as this crazy saw flaps back and forth. =(
GIVE ME BACK MY OLD HAMMER!
- Toby
I've been hearing this stupid argument for YEARS. It's WRONG WRONG WRONG, and it's been wrong every time I've heard it over the past decade. Every time a new CPU comes out, people go ON AND ON about how most users have no use for such a fast computer, or how Moore's law is nearing it's limits. It's ALWAYS BULL. It's a beautiful example of human shortsightedness in action. Yeah, sure, the average user can do their word processing and web browsing and e-mail just fine on a two or three year old computer. When was the last time this WASN'T true?
It's a good thing we've got games pushing hardware faster and faster, otherwise no progress would be made. Nobody really knows what sort of software we'll be running in the future. Back in the day when people were saying "you won't need anything more than a 386", did they think about the real time spell checkers available in most word processors? High-quality voice recognition?
Every time somebody says we're going to run into the limits of such-and-such technology (the end of Moore's law), there's ALWAYS some sort of breakthrough or advancement to keep it plugging along. How many years ago was it that they predicted that we'd have to get rid of magnetic media and go to optical? How many times has Slashdot posted some story about vaporware holographic memory or something to replace hard drives? Remember bubble memory?
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
The things that need fast CPU's are the same things that have always needed fast CPU's. Scientific calculation, Graphics manipulation, and of course Games. I suspect the last one is the only REAL reason most people "NEED" faster CPU's.
Most gamers seem to be happy with mid-range CPUs now, preferring to spend their money on the graphics card. What games are being played makes a difference here, but in most cases a new video card will give you more improvement than a new CPU.
Of course, I also think game designers lost their way back in the early 90's. I certainly think many of the games from the 1MHz C64 were more original and indeed more entertaining than much of what's on the shelf now. There are exceptions, but most of the "innovations" in gameplay today involve glitter without substance (see Quake 3 vs. Quake 1 -- much better graphics, but gameplay? atomsphere? storyline?).
I think that if you looked a little closer you'd realize that there was a lot of the same thing going on back then, too. The most major difference today is that there are a lot more games coming out, and the innovative games don't always get the best coverage. As for Quake 1 vs Quake 3 specifically, I think you'd have a hard time really comparing them, because id software was going for a different purpose with Quake 3, basically trying to design a multiplayer game from the start, rather than a single player game with the multiplayer tacked on (so badly, I might add, that they basically redid the whole multiplayer subsystem). I didn't particularly like Q3, but at least I can see that they had a fundamentally different design for the game from it's previous incarnations. We do get a lot of repetition through the wonders of increased marketing, and it's been that way at least since Doom came along and everyone started making FPS games. However, if I really looked at it, I'd say that before that we had a lot of side-scrollers that didn't really have much difference between them, and before that was the top-down style of games, some of which were also the scrollers that pre-dated the side-scrollers.
Show me a game today that has the same level of immersion as Zork, and I'd happily go buy it and whatever hardware it needed to run. UT2003 looks great, and I'm sure will be fun... but it and the 2GHz CPU and $300 graphics card it wants won't engulf me the way a text game I can play on my PDA can.
The UT2003 demo seems to run very well on my system, which, although it has the 2GHz CPU, is running a quite old GeForce2 GTS (old for a video card anyway). Since game performance really depends on that card for most of the games I play, it will probably be my next upgrade. There's certainly nothing in any existing game pushing me towards the 2.8GHz processors currently available or the 3+GHz CPUs on the horizon. I'm sure Ill eventually buy a faster processor, but it'll probably be something like the reason I upgraded to the 2GHz CPU as well, it made sense with the amount of money I was going to spend anyway.
As for why Zork and the like may have been more immersive to you, perhaps it had a lot to do with the level of imagination it takes for those games. A lot of people are just as easily engrossed in a good book as in a good movie. Your mind supplies most of the details, so you don't get limited by the machines capabilities or knocked out of the illusion by something the designers used that doesn't mesh with your vision of the game world. Many game companies have even considered developing text-based games again for many of those same reasons, but usually there's little demand for them at anything other than the lowest price points.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
The article makes the claim:
"The big potential losers if Apple should switch chips would be software developers. They would be forced -- perhaps for the second time in two years -- to rewrite their programs, this time to make them work with a Pentium-based Mac."
But how much re-writing would actually be required? X already runs a bunch of *nix software, right? What kinds of apps. would need to be "re-written" if the processor was switched to x86?
just try photoshop on both platforms
At the picture sizes I work with, just about any task in pshop (except loading, rrr) is just about instantaneous. Photoshop is also more heavily optimized on the mac platform then it is on the PC.
Even then, I'd be willing to bet Photoshop on a high end dual Athlon system would be faster then a high end Mac. Perhaps you have some actual benchmarks to prove otherwise? I doubt it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
bah I missed one closing tag, but it was at the very beginning...
-PainKilleR-[CE]
My main machine is a 1GHz Athlon, with 512MB of PC133 cas2 RAM. My other machine is a 233Mhz PII, with 144MB of PC66 cas3 RAM. For email and web surfing, they are about equal. I really don't care about the difference, when I notice it.
For doing big simulations, or for big symbolic math problems, the slower machine is too slow. That's mainly because the smaller RAM get it started swapping too soon. On symbolic math, the faster machine is about three times quicker than the slower, for problems which don't get into swap on either machine. I suspect that has as much to do with the speed of the RAM as it does with the CPU speed.
>>If you're buying a system in the near future, drop 500-1000 Mhz in CPU speed and buy faster disks or more memory with the money you saved.
This is almost good advice. Buy the slowest CPU which will run the fastest front side bus available, and use the money you save by not getting the highest clockspeed CPU to buy the fastest RAM available. Buy enough of it that you will never have to swap. For most folks purposes, the difference between 1GHz and 2GHz is no more significant than the difference between cas2 and cas3. The 233MHz machine will look FAST if the 2.3GHz machine has too little RAM and is swapping.
>... "CPUs are faster than we'll ever need" nonsense is as tired of an argument as it was a decade ago when contrarians were assuring us that a 386 was more power than any reasonable man would ever need.
I also have a 486 which I use for email and web surfing. It is too slow, but again, the problem is largely too little RAM: it only has 12MB. Once the broweser (Dillo) is loaded, it can render a web page fast enough. Of course, Pine is lightning-fast on it. Here is some advice I have found useful about building a fast computer.
You mean there are Mac users who aren't unreasonable zealots?!?
Is this all the mac users have left? Power consumption? I mean, some people want quiet PCs, but spending thousands of extra dolars for a mac is not a very viable solution to many people, especialy when you consider the low power consumption PC chips out there (VIA etc) you can get low cost/low noise/low price trifecta if you really want.
And my laptop is really more like a iron or hotpad then a hair dryer. Just a high temprature brick.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Intel and AMD fans really do believe that the performance rating of the CPU is its clock rate
actually, the fans know the difference and buy things based on the benchmarks important to them. it is the masses who believe that clock rate = performance. any fan of amd knows that an amd chip that performs the same as an intel chip also runs at a lower clock speed. the same as a mac fan knows that a mac that performs the same as an amd chip will run at a lower clock speed. it is slightly more involved, because different architectures are better at different things, so it isn't an even ratio accross a range of applications.
What's the Athlon's performance with 8 watts of power? Will it even run with 8 watts? How can you have a laptop otherwise?
amd has 1900+ and 2000+ mobile athlon chips. these are for use in laptops, so they must meet power requirements.
How many clock cycles go by on average before it executes an instruction? 20? 30?
from reading your question it would be easy to assume that nothing is happening except every 20 or 30 cycles. it only matters when you turn your computer on. if it takes 20 cycles for a given instruction to complete, when the first one finishes, there are already nineteen behind (or maybe only 15) it in the pipeline, so the next instruction is #21 (or 16 or whatever. but different parts of the proc are active at the same time). it's a bit simplified, i'm just illustrating a point.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
The original design goal of the RISC paradigm was to make computer chips less complex which frequently has the side effect of making the chips more efficient in terms of how much work can be done in a single clock tick and in how much power is drawn.
Nope, the original design of RISC was to make computer chips less complex, requiring fewer transistors and more instructions to do the same thing. But since, they were simpler, they could run at higher clock speeds.
RISC does less per instruction then CISC, but it runs more instructions per second. That was the original idea, although it's gotten twisted around by Mac advocates now that their RISC chips run slower then Intel "CISC" chips that are actually RISC anyway.
The x86 instruction set is complex, but since the p-pro, all intel chips have been RISC. AMD has been making risc chips since the k5.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
there seems to be a push by motorola into the imbeded and kiosk market. Motorola cpus appear all over the in lots of devices other than computers. The market being what it is/has been it might not have been such a bad idea...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If Apple REALLY wants to make a jump, they should partner up with Sun and use UltraSparc chips on proprietary motherboards.
sometimes "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"
not always of course, but in this case I think it would be a great combo
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
Here's a comment from an AMDzone article (page 7)...
"Switching gears to Apple will the rumored support of Hammer become a reality. Will Apple finally stop making the same mistakes and port over their OS to Hammer? How will Steve Jobs react to a market full of 64 bit CPUs when all Motorola has is bad yields? Surely this has crossed sweaterman's mind as the race to 64 bit computing accelerates. Will the rumors turn to reality? Again, like Dell, Jobs seems to be the stubborn type, so the likelihood of booting OS X on AMD silicon is far fetched at this time."
If apple moves on the x86 platform market, it could be the best that they could do. I for one would buy their software in a heartbeat if I could run it on a home made machine. It's the only thing that's holding that company back. It would really put microsoft on the run from unix based computers. To bad it'll never happen because they are in bed with each other.
Steve Jobs should grow a pair and just do it. Nobody likes proprietary hardware anyways.
-makoffee
Ummm 3Ware sells 12 drive IDE caching raid controllers that can saturate a pci-64 33Mhz bus. AMD and Intel have in fact caught up to the big boys in raw performance per cpu as the 2.8Ghz P4 beats anything but the largest Power4's and HP PA8700's which cost about 10-20 times as much. Now we just need someone to come along and build boxes with large numbers of them (barring the fact that there isn't yet a Xeon based on the same process as the 2.8Ghz chip.) The price/performance of the comodity chips and there related subsystems is so far beyond what Sun, SGI, IBM et al can hope to achive that I think they have some serious problems ahead. In fact for many computationally expensive applications people can't wait for the Opteron because it brings very large memory support to chips that are so much cheaper and in some cases faster then the competition that it is silly. For instance 32 1GB DDR modules would cost only $11K at an above average price of $350/module, whereas a similar amount of ram from Sun costs $40K, then there is the projected cost of Opteron chips which should be around $500 versus $4-8K per CPU from Sun depending on which Ultrasparc 3 you want.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
google uses ide drives.
I'm sorry, did you say something?
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
1) in the real computing world. intel and amd are called junk processors. /toilet platform than os X /x86
2)IBM makes better procesors.
3) IBM just Built a new factory in NY to make ooodles of proccesors.
4) put an intel or amd next to IBM SGI or SUN and you realize that there is no comparison.
5) Industry is not driven by 14 year old hakers who like to download porn and play with cool hardware. it driven by buisnesse who actually do things with computers.
6) i am writing this on an imac and i wouldnt recomend macs to my companie if they had intel or amd processors.
7) try to buy an ia64 i dare you and send me the shipment confirmation. i dont even think intel can make ia64 and amd doesent have any hammers. while IBM SUN and SGI have had 64 bit processors in mass production for awhile.
8) anybody who knows processors and does more things with them than just playing quake and downloading porn, will not touch and or intell.
9) what sounds more plausible
a) imac running on already mass produced Power 4/ PowerPC64 chips ( damn near mainfraim capability)
b) imac running on the mythical ia64 ( try to actually buy one) or the non existant hammer x86/64.
10) yea everyone has x86 chips thats because their junk processors. everyone also has a toilet and it would be much more plausible to have os X
wake up get real get a job and buy a real computer.
I meant 'low heat/low noise/low price'. I'm very tired.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Apropos to another of today's articles, wouldn't Richard Stallman and the FSF insist it be called a "GNU/Linux worm" ?
"FLAKINESS." Here's the most compelling reason to abandon Motorola's PowerPC chip: It's falling further behind in the speed race as Intel's chips leave Motorola's in the dust. It's true that this race, to a large extent, is baloney, since Pentium and PowerPC chips process information differently. Yet, as Steve Townsend of technology consultants EMA Inc. puts it, "the megahertz myth is a difficult one to overcome." In particular, it creates the impressions that Macs are somehow less powerful than PCs.
OK, so because the general public thinks they're slower, Apple should abandon them? I think Apple needs the PowerPC to be one more thing that sets it apart. Macintosh computers are great and extremely thoroughly designed. The PowerPC is efficient and robust and I'd take a 1G PPC over a 2G Pentium any day. It's not the processor speed alone that makes these computers tick, it's the overall computer design along with the way the processor can handle inputs from all the different channels.
~ now you know
...due to one small little feature that OS X relies on...Altivec. Any future processor would need these instructions or be able to emulate them perfectly.
It has to do with motorola.. My dad works for a company that buys chips from them.. and lately morotola has well, "not been friendly" and been pissong companies off.. So this looks apple is fed up with dealing with Motorola.. and anyway.. I'd rather have a risc on my desktop than that stupid x86 processor.. (Go Alpha!!!!)
what will keep AMD, or someone else, from making a overdrive type chip mod that will allow me to connect my AMD chip to an Intel MB.
"Of course, for most people, we're close to that point where chip-speed stops mattering... (maybe 1-2 more cycles of Moore's Law ought to do it.) How many people think about the speed of their computer while surfing, emailing, word-processing, or any such thing? (I know, I know, it's a cliche, but cliches are cliches because they're _true_.)"
Ha don't make me laugh. Do you seriously believe that?
I don't konw about you but I want to tell my computer what to do, not type it in or use a mouse but use voice recognition to tell it what I want it to do, and for it to make assumptions so i don't have to be speaking syntax.
I want to be able to say
Me: I would like to write an email to John, tell him I really enjoyed Doom3 from years ago.
Computer: What would you like it to say?
Me: I will get back to that later, bring up that speadsheet I had open last week, the one listing my expenses. Also, find a good image of the New York skyline and display it full screen. If I don't have one locally find one on the net. Get the best quality one you can find.
I also want my games to look photorealistic, I shouldn't be able to tell whats a polygon and whats a texture. And I want all to happen without loading or waiting for any of it.
You think were 1-2 cycles of Moore's Law (whatever that is?) away?
Of course you don't need to buy a "spiffy LCD monitor." The dual 867 will work on regular monitors. (Of course I love my 17" LCD, even though I've been spoilt by 21" CRTs in the past)
A couple of months ago I acquired a 700 Mhz iBook with 256 Mb of RAM. It was my first Mac and I was very excited. OS X has a clean interface and some nice features, however the speed was very slow compared to my 1.8 Ghz Dell laptop. It seems like Mac enthusiasts use the "Mhz isn't everything" slogan way too often. I've done primitive tests encoding mp3's, using Photoshop 7, and zipping files and my Dell blows the Mac out of the water. Also, it takes three times longer for the Mac to start up. I like the looks of the Mac and I really like the CDRW/DVD combo, but for raw performance it doesn't come close. I think making an Intel based Mac would be a great idea and would definitely help me "switch".
1) Benchmarking is Difficult.
2) Which version of OS X were they using?
3) What version of RedHat did they have running?
4) Who's software were they running on what?
5) What kind of "software and hardware" performance?
6) If I use Photoshop every day, Photoshop matters more to me than any other benchmark.
6a) More users have photoshop on desktop machines than have XServes.
7) RAM Configuration of the two systems. Were varying RAM Configurations attempted?
8) Hard Drives.
&c &c
Benchmarking across two platforms is *incredibly* difficult.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Personally, I don't know of any.
A Pentium IV 2.8Ghz offers a peak SPECint2000 score of 1010. Meanwhile an Alpha running at just over 1/3 of the same clock speed offers 2/3 of the performance. That same 1 GHz Alpha has only 80% of the SPECint2000 performance of the AMD Athlon 2600+. These numbers were grabbed from the full list of published SPECint2000 results.
(Exceptions include benchmarks that bypass the virtual file system, and networked disk arrays that are accessed directly by several different systems without any intervening OS).
Here at my company, we bought a lot of Linux-based x86 boxen to do our serious work. We use EDA tools from Synopsys, and they are *much* faster on these machines than on Sun. Even when you equalize the MHz, they're still faster. And we were able to buy a rack of 1U systems for what it would have cost to buy one or two (I am completely serious here) 750MHz UltraSPARC III systems. We would have been insane to buy the Sun systems.
With that said, the original poster that got us started on this was right -- the memory subsystems are the killer part of the Sun systems. A 2-CPU x86 system (PIII era) sucks when compared against a multi-CPU Sun running two of its processors when memory-intensive computation is going on (same task, same tool versions). We looked at this VERY carefully, and dual processor x86 systems were ruled out due to the simplistic memory architecture of the x86 machines. This is of course changing, and is already worth looking at again. But my money is on the Sun boxes even today for multiprocessing.
But for single-CPU applications, MHz is king for the chip synthesis/static timing/simulation tasks we need to do. Larger cache sizes help some apps, and scarcely matter at all for other apps.
Oh yeah, no hardware failures in any of our 40+ x86 boxen, but for awhile there we were replacing CPUs on our 4500s like inkjet cartridges on a low-end printer. Unbelievable.
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
Google is also up to what, like 10000+ nodes? I'm also pretty sure they're not using ide drives for their web cache/serach/et. al, but merely for the acutal bootup of their nodes. In that case the difference between SCSI and IDE are negligible. Their main cache, however, is more than likely a vast RAID/FC array.
result.red = source.red * mask.red / scale
result.green = source.green * mask.green / scale
result.blue = source.blue * mask.blue / scale
result.alpha = source.alpha * mask.alpha / scale
On PCs, this takes a pile of instructions. On G4s, this takes ONE instruction. Not only that, but each composite value only takes one 128-bit register.
Apple and IBM Team Up on 64-Bit Processor
Um, yea, I doubt that's for sh*ts and giggles...
I can't stand when journalism is blind to the fact that the SOLE reason the x86 architecture is popular is due to PRICE.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
IBM's latest PowerPC press release: "IBM today announced it has delivered 10 million PowerPC processors to Nintendo for its award-winning Nintendo Gamecube system. ... The IBM PowerPC architecture has been selected for a variety of applications in networking gear and network-attached products, including base stations, routers, modems, Internet-access phones, digital TV boxes, laser printers, optical switches, RAID controllers, and personal computers."
I'm not quite sure if you're agreeing, or disagreeing. The original poster claimed that Sun, IBM, etc, realized that processor speed no longer matters, to which I replied that if that were the case, why are they sticking dozens of processors in single boxes. The next Joe then claimed that AMD and Intel fanboyz are all fooled, and their processors are really slow, but they just don't know it because they're misled by clock speeds, to which I replied asking what competitor processor beats a high end consumer processor. The reality is that they are few, and very far between. Maybe the Itanium2. Other than that, a high end P4 or Athlon pushes the envelope of single CPU computational power, even when compared to UltraSparcs or any other esoteric processor.
And 4. The PC market is at the moment in the wait for a switch to 64 bit. It will probably take a few years before consumers have to migrate - but switching the Apple will take a similar time. So the moment they were ready on X86 they could start migrarting to X86-64.
Poor Apple developers!
It's all about the pentiums, baby! - Wierd Al
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
...if Porche made cars the average person could afford (or was willing to pay), they might find themselves suddenly occupying a far larger niche than they do now, on name alone.
Likewise, I can tell just from reading Slashdot that there are a lot of people out there with "Mac envy," who'd really like a chance to use a Mac, but who either won't or can't pay for the hardware. Me, I'd join up in a split instant.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
If Apple make an OS X that runs on any Intel hardware, Linux on the desktop is dead.
Apple hardware sales will suffer, but they will more than make up for it in OS X sales.
Go Darwin!
For example, in December of 1995 while Intel submitted SPEC scores for Pentiums in the 100 to 200 MHz range, HP's fastest SPEC submission for PA-RISC was on a 120 MHz processor, IBM's fastest SPEC submission for PPC was on a 133 MHz processor and the fastest SPARC submission was on a 150 MHz processor. DEC was rather exceptional with their 300 MHz Alpha. I think that perhaps you are confusing the poster child of the RISC world, the Alpha processor, with all of the RISC world.
Feel free to correct me and let me know the last year that most RISC chips had higher clock speeds than most CISC chips.
You said "Most people who claim that they don't need better say so because they've never SEEN better."
That is complete Bullshit. I have a PII 400mhz system with a SCSI 2 full height and full width HD and 512 megs of ram. Right next to that computer I have a PIV with 1.7g cpu, IDE HD and 512 megs of ram. For regular applications, there is a minimal difference. Even high end graphic games (both have 64 meg video cards) have small difference.
I guess my point is, I seen both of them side by side. For the additional costs assoicated with the P IV, I do nto see the benifits. If I knew what I know now, I would of never bought a new machine.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
It looks like a lot of people have already challenged your assertion that IDE is just as good as SCSI. However, no one brought up the particular issue that plagues my experience with IDE - hardware write caching.
Most modern IDE drives have write caching enabled by default. However, under every OS I've tested this configuration can lose data, even with a journaling filesystem. The problem is that the filesystem thinks that the data is successfully written to disk, but it's actually in the drive's cache buffer. If you lose power at the wrong moment, you lose that data. I've reproduced this problem with Western Digital, Seagate, and Maxtor 7200rpm 4MB buffer 80GB IDE drives under both Linux 2.4.X kernels and Microsoft 98/2000/XP platforms.
I've written in to each of those drive manufacturers and they have confirmed that the cache buffer isn't backed by some battery or other type of power reserve, and that data can be lost when power is removed.
Apparently this isn't an issue in SCSI land because SCSI drives respect a flush command, while some IDE drives do not.
The bottom line is that if you want a reliable system with IDE drives you need to disable write caching, which drastically increases disk access latency and results in reduced throughput for many tasks.
I'd love it if a kernel hacker can provide some more details as to why journaling filesystems can't forceably flush the IDE disk's buffer... I've found many older threads on the issue on the linux kernel list but haven't found any definitive resolution or action items recently.
As the situation stands now, my iozone benchmarks show a 15k RPM 80GB SCSI drive performing 2x to 3x better across all tests than a 7.2k RPM 80GB IDE drive with write caching disabled, DMA turned on, and all other hdparm options optimized for maximal performance. That is a pretty large difference. Yes, I did verify that the hdparm tuning options were working correctly.
And yes, the 3ware IDE RAID controllers have the exact same problem. They have an on-board raid cache, but it's not battery backed, so it is not a good idea to enable write caching in most cases. The 3ware cards are great and cheap, but they don't perform as well as their scsi equivalents.
Before someone tries to flame me, yes I have heard of a UPS, but for the machines I'm trying to protect I can't trust that the UPS will be properly maintained, not overloaded, strong enough to survive a long outage, or that the customer won't hit the power button themselves out of ignorance when they think that the system has "hung".
I think that the numbers speak for themselves. If the fastest RISC processor (the Alpha) delivers 2/3 of the performance of the fastest PIV at 1/3 of the clockspeed of that PIV, then fastest PIV is faster than the fastest RISC processor.
Granted, this is a relatively recent developement. Until Intel broke the 2GHz range and AMD delivered their 1600+, the fastest RISC chips did perform better in published benchmarks than the fastest AMD and Intel chips.
As an aside, I'd hardly consider the Ultra SPARC to be esoteric.
I also think its funny that you note the Itanium2 as a possible exception. The Itanium2 runs at a much slower clock speed than the PIV or the Athlon.
It will be interesting to see what the next generation SPARC and PPC chips bring to the table. PA-RISC, Alpha (arguably), and MIPS (arguably) seem to be out for the performance race. (Although MIPS will likely continue to do well in the embedded space.)
Yes, because the rate of software innovation has slowed so.
However, a paradigm shift will come (other than Quake that is;) and suddenly we'll need all the extra performance. Natural speech recognition, for instance, might be such a shift. Ironically, the last demo I saw was on a G4 Powerbook, but it looks to me as though the voice dictation product are finally getting usable for most people, with a *fast enough machine*.
I'd love (as I've stated in previous posts) for Apple to support at least the new x86-64 chips from AMD. That would differentiate them from everyday 32 bit systems, and provide world class performance to boot. Plus, Apple would have a new "64 bit" ad campaign.
Cool, eh? ;-)
(I know, I know, it's a cliche, but cliches are cliches because they're _true_.)
Except, of course, when they're wrong. ;-)
I'm reminded of an old statement out of IBM (paraphrased): "The worldwide market for computers is around ten machines."
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Well, in terms of removing bottlenecks, Apple is behind everyone; they have only just begun to support DDR memory in their top of the line machines. I'd say that bus speed and memory i/o are where Apple is limited the most.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
to business week for my techinical news.
Let's see. I'm a professional programmer with 30+ years experience, using every type of computer and OS. Mac OS X is superb. I don't use Windows and Linux for the same reason that I don't eat at McDonalds. That makes me unreasonable?
The last time IBM developed a PPC cpu there was a big hubub about Apple using it--with the usual blind Apple fans thinking that Apple was the reason IBM developed the chip. It's no different this time.
Couple of things...first, the IBM chip is at least a year away from complete development--IBM hasn't yet released all of the specs. Secondly, as I understand it, this particular PPC will have four processor cores on each die with a scalability of eight--meaning it could be run in dual cpu configurations. How this will fit into Apple's plans is beyond guessing at this point. Just because something is called "PPC" is no reason to think it will easily work within the Mac architecture.
IBM's stated goal with development of the cpu is to build and ship its own Linux-powered entry level servers--although IBM has used the word "desktop" as well, I think we should take that with a grain of salt until IBM has some silicon everyone can look at. The hubbub about Apple adoption comes almost exclusively from zealous Apple fans who have no earthly idea what IBM's cpu will be good for because apart from knowing IBM calls it a "PPC" they know little else about it.
Last time it was size, expense, heat and lack of AltiVec which nixed Apple's use of IBM's PPC. What will it be this time? We'll probably know more when IBM finalizes the cpu's specifications.
Personally, if Apple does become bright enough to move to x86, I'd rather they go to AMD's upcoming Hammer, provided Hammer pans out to meet expectations AMD has created around the cpu. It ought to easily outperfom a P4 and it would give Apple 64-bit capability (great for the corporate server market) when and if Apple might want to use it.
> Secondly, adding a faster disk only matters if you do tasks which are heavily disk I/O intensive, which the overwhelming majority are not (especially because people have so much memory, and hence disk cache).
I think a fast disk IS important for anyone who wants to improve speed. Modern Windows is disk intensive, as are many applications at startup. My computer went considerable faster when I upgraded from a 5400rpm drive to a 7200rpm RAID without upgrading the CPU (1.3GHz P4) or memory (384MB of RDRAM). I think I have about as much disk access as anyone (I am not running my machine as a server except for the occasionaly Kazaa, which I do not leave open 24x7), but my computer went noticeably faster. I say upgrade the hard disk before you upgrade the CPU.
Disproven by who? Show me someone who thinks they're disproving the intrinsic advantage of SCSI over IDE and I'll show you someone who's deluded.
FACT: SCSI has a faster peak bandwidth than IDE. IDE's peak is 133MB/sec per channel, and the current SCSI implementation's is 180MB/sec per channel. As a bus approaches saturation it becomes less efficient, therefore SCSI should be more efficient at the same load.
FACT: SCSI supports tagged queueing. This means that in heavy multitasking situations or situations in which you are looking all over the disk (such as a RDBMS), SCSI can be dramatically faster than IDE. Before you get your back up, though, it is true that this offers little to no benefit on the average workstation.
FACT: IDE is still problematic after all these years. There are still situations in which one disk will work as the master with another disk but not as the slave. This is pathetic.
FACT: IDE requires one set of resources for each channel; IRQ, DMA, IO port, and memory address. SCSI requires one set of resources for each controller which might have four channels.
FACT: IDE supports only two devices per channel. This ties nicely into the above paragraph. If you want more than four devices you need more than two channels, which means you need devices/2 sets of resources. While on one hand we do have interrupt sharing, and it usually works fine, it doesn't always, and you still have to consider IO ports and memory addresses. Most devices have a half-assed implementation of plug and play which only allows a small selection of those addresses, presumably to cut down on the cost of the address decoder. In addition most IDE buses will not let you mix modes on the same channel (PIO and DMA) so your PIO devices drag everything down. Thankfully, they're disappearing, but they aren't gone yet.
So tell me again how SCSI is not intrinically superior to IDE?
Eventually SCSI on the desktop should be replaced with firewire, though I (and many others) am still waiting for actual firewire hard drives, not a disk in an external box with a IEEE1394 to IDE converter. Right now 1394 is only 50MB/sec (at 400mbps) but the new faster standards are supposed to be doing 800mbps (100MB/sec) right now and 1.6Gbps (200MB/sec) by sometime in 2003. Then we are supposed to get 1394 over fiber sometime after that at 3.2Gbps (400MB/sec). 127 devices per channel, which is more than we're likely to need any time soon. THAT has the potential to replace SCSI, again people actually make real firewire drives which we can put inside our PCs. 1394 is also nice because you can run it as a local bus, IE synchronized with the CPU. This makes it actually useful for things like putting ALL your hard drives on.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I know a number of PC users who never owned a Mac, but they "lust after" a Titanium Powerbook, or a G4 with the cinema display.
Exactly. I heard a joe-user type talking about (a) how hard it is to use a Mac to edit video. (Huh!?!) and (b) how insanely cool the pulsing sleep light is on an ice book and how great that is.
Clear, Dark Skies
Um, have you heard of bus mastering DMA? You know, that IDE technology that's been around since, what, 1997?
I have never seen more than 10% CPU utilization on an IDE drive that was running in DMA mode, even doing burst reads/writes at maximum drive speed. If an IDE drive is using 80%, then either it's running in old, crappy PIO mode, or there's something seriously wrong with the interface driver.
Joe Palmer designed alot of Mac hardware while working for Apple... moved on and designed the BeBox for Be... http://www.josephpalmer.com/view/box.shtml ...
Then one morning I tried to imagine what the Mac would look like running on CHRP. Take the Apple brand monitor away, was it still a Mac? Yes. I had proof. I had a Magnavox monitor on my Mac at home. Keyboard, Mouse? Yes again. Some of the workstations and PCs I'd used had really nice input devices. Oh oh. What made a Mac a Mac? time to look in the system. CPU? was 68K, now PPC. It could be changed again. Still a Mac. Memory? I kept needing more, but the memory SIMMs kept changing all the time anyway, so that's not it. I/O? well I would miss auto eject floppies, but by then most of my new software came either on CD ROM or was downloaded from the internet. Serial ports? The Mac serial ports were much better, but the PC ones were capable of everything I actually wanted to do. One after another the hardware "advantages" of the Mac were measured against the PC, and were found to be better but... ...
<anecdote>
After spending many years as a sysadm/programmer for small corporations, I was given a consulting gig as a programmer at a major 'enterprise' (one of the largest public hospitals in Sweden).
One day (sysadming dies hard), I spent some time checking up their system (clustered HP refridgerators, 40 disk SCSI fibre channel SANs). After some checks, I went to the local sysadm guy and quoth:
"Your CPUs are only
The sysadm guy looked at me like I was slightly retarded, and said (slowly, using simple words)
"Disks will always be the bottle neck, and we have the fastest ones as we can afford. Any good system will fully saturate the disks. 99% disk saturation is a sign of a well balanced system!"
To which I could only reply
"Doh!"
To tie back into the SCSI Vs. IDE debate (and the post I'm replying to), if any 'real' system - real meaning 1000's of IO bound tasks - uses the disks to the max, then CPU load from IO can become a major selling point.
Oh, and a final word. The above system, which served ~10,000 users, including many high bandwidth medical applications, had two 266 MHz PA-Riscs(!).
</anecdote>
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Good grief, yes.
The "News of the Weird" syndicated column publishes little notes when it "retires" a formerly weird story because it's happened too often to make the cut. (Stupid criminals who pose for cameras while destroying them -- stuff like that.) It's past time for Slashdot to retire "Apple -- could it switch to Intel chips?" stories, at least until someone hears Steve Jobs mention it in a keynote speech.
The pros and cons have been gone over maybe sixty-thousand times. Leave it alone, jeez, this is starting to be like an OS wars topic.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Dog-armed it! Missed a < :-)
<anecdote>
After spending many years as a sysadm/programmer for small corporations, I was given a consulting gig as a programmer at a major 'enterprise' (one of the largest public hospitals in Sweden).
One day (sysadming dies hard), I spent some time checking up their system (clustered HP refridgerators, 40 disk SCSI fibre channel SANs). After some checks, I went to the local sysadm guy and quoth:
"Your CPUs are only <20% loaded, but your disks are like 99% loaded all the time! You really need to get more drives!"
The sysadm guy looked at me like I was slightly retarded, and said (slowly, using simple words)
"Disks will always be the bottle neck, and we have the fastest ones as we can afford. Any good system will fully saturate the disks. 99% disk saturation is a sign of a well balanced system!"
To which I could only reply
"Doh!"
To tie back into the SCSI Vs. IDE debate (and the post I'm replying to), if any 'real' system - real meaning 1000's of IO bound tasks - uses the disks to the max, then CPU load from IO can become a major selling point.
Oh, and a final word. The above system, which served ~10,000 users, including many high bandwidth medical applications, had two 266 MHz PA-Riscs(!).
</anecdote>
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Is anyone else sick of this car analogy? You can count on it appearing every time the Mac vs. PC is discussed.
Here's the problem with this analogy. We only drive cars *to* work while for many, computers *are* our work. Ok, ideally we walk to work or telecommute, which only makes the analogy even worse (i.e., we could do without cars altogether).
The cost differential in cars can easily be 3+ fold. Nonetheless, even the fastest car gets stuck in traffic jams and even the cheapest cars are pretty darn comfortable (certainly compared, say, to an old bug).
In contrast, the cost differential between Macs and PCs is much less than 2-fold, even ignoring total cost of ownership calculations. This is your JOB and/or your love. Spending a little more (thousands, tops, vs. tens of thousands for a car) makes perfect sense.
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
Point #1 hardly makes any sense, especially considering that IDE only has one device on a channel transferring at the same time, and no single hard drive gets anywhere near 133 MB/sec sustained transfer rate anyway. Looking forward, Serial ATA starts at 150 MB/sec and goes up from there.
As for point #2, tagged command queueing is now part of the ATA specification, although there isn't much support for it yet (mostly IBM drives, and apparently some experimental OS support in Linux).
And as for resources, so what? Serial ATA doesn't even have master/slave, there's only one device on each "channel", so does that make it worse then? How does this cause problems? With current motherboards (especially those that support APIC in the chipset), you really don't have to worry about resources.
Our high-end image processing software runs cross-platform on Windows, IRIX, Linux, and OSX. And I can tell you that my dual 1GHz Athlon RedHat box already smokes a dual 1.2GHz G4, by about double. And you can now get a dual 2.8 P4. It's not even funny anymore. (By the way, our Windows version is even faster because the Intel compiler is just amazing. Can't wait to use it on Linux.)
Just look at the Photoshop benchmarks on Apple's site: they disingenuously compare a dual 1.25GHz G4 with a single 2.53 P4, and say it's 90% faster. That means against a dual 2.53 P4, it would almost keep up, even with all the full-on Altivec optimization they did for Photoshop. Oh joy!
Intel (or AMD, whatever) has *got* to be the way to go for Apple. The PPC is losing ground fast. You can't keep up with the tremendous consumer-demand-driven processors from Intel. Jump that sinking ship, Jobs!
-- Tristero
Perhaps that's because it may not be a myth. The fact that Apple has never submitted SPEC benchmarks is also disturbing. I think Apple is significantly behind in terms of performance and they know it. The question is whether they are going to fix it by moving to IBM or Pentium.
I looked into this once tryong to convince myself to buy an LCD panel instead of a CRT for my next computer.
For an 18" LCD vs a 19" CRT, I'd have to keep the LCD for something like 17 years before it paid for the price difference in power costs, compared to a CRT running 9 hours per day. (Home computer, where I'm at work or asleep most of the day and so the CRT is turned off or in powersave mode when I'm not in front of it.) $200 for the CRT, $600 for the LCD, and 7cents per kilowatt-hour. Don't remember where I got the power usage figures, I think it was from NEC CRT and LCD monitor spec sheets.
I did not include power costs for running the AC extra in the summer. Bear in mind, though, that you run the heater less in winter too, so it is possible that you will balance this out. I didn't look into this, but it may be a wash.
This let me know that power consumption/cost alone was not a reason to get an LCD monitor for a desktop computer.
You don't realize how little power really costs... An extra 50watts, used 24 hours per day, increases a power bill about $30 per year. Takes a long time to make up for $1000 difference in system price at $30 per year.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Given that you posted pointers to "benchmarks" that only measure clock speed and not performance, I think you have made my point. (Which was a claim about what people like you think performance is.)
Sure, all modern processors are superscalar. That doesn't mean a lot of them sit idle a lot of the time due to poor architectural decisions, forced upon the designers by the requirement that they maintain backwards compatibility going all the way back to the 4004. Not 4004 instruction compatibility, but the compatiblity-compromise-chain goes that far back.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
do you think Porsche would last? If they try to scale their manufacturing capability up to Ford levels, do you think their QA would remain at Porsche levels?
how long after Apple cut prices before they failed the way so many other bottom-tier PC vendors have. Hell, the way so many TOP tier PC vendors have. Of the PC companies that were formed in the same decade Apple was, how many are left? Of the PC companies formed in the 1980s - how many are left?
Clear, Dark Skies
People need to calm down, take a step back and think about what Apple Computer is.
Apple is a HARDWARE company.
Apple is a HARDWARE company.
Apple is a HARDWARE company.
Dreams of OS X going to any platform other than Macintosh would be devastating to their business model. They don't exsist only to write software. Why?
Apple is a HARDWARE company.
Once you understand this, then you can post.
Damn straight that makes you unreasonable! McDonalds sandwiches are 100% Beef(tm), can the burgers you buy at Safeway claim that? Didn't think so.
See? McDonalds burgers are better, because they're faster, 100% beef, and you don't have to cook them yourself.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
I'd go one step further and argue that Apple buy into VMWare and use what they have already done to provide X86-on-X86. It's not "emulation" as much as it is a virtual machine. It's probably only a philosophical argument whether you'd expect x86 Apps to run in an x86 environment "window" or whether you'd expect to double-click on an application and have that app window appear natively alongside OSX applications. I'd argue for the total Windows/x86 VM environment, since that way you're just needing to emulate hardware bits and not try to do the WINE-style OS call translation (which is hard to do, and leaves you farther behind when people start wanting to run newer OSs whose function calls aren't known).
I'd also argue that the VMware capability be a permanent addition to the operating environment, not a temporary kludge to satisfy some interim changeout period. A native-OS supported VM mechanism could also support 68k or even PPC applications (much harder, I acknowledge) or people wanting to utilize a seperate x86-specific OS or environment.
You should all be ashamed.
No one claims that clock speed doesn't matter (or why would any company increase the clock speed). The ascertion was that its not the only thing that matters, and in the business world rarely does and therefore isn't as important as its made out to be. As an example: the number of transactions a ERP or OLTP or RDBMS can process in a given period of time isn't really a matter of how fast the processor is but rather the overall system speed (I/O, memory bus, etc). We all know that modern processors are extreme overkill for routine office work so that's really not an issue either. If you are just doing math and not accessing or processing data, I'm quite certan an Intel chip at 3x the clock speed will do the calculations faster. It's just that in the real world of data processing, the CPU is almost never the bottle neck. Sun doesn't design systems for SMP and high throughput data buses to "make up" for slower clock speeds, they design them that way because they do certain real-world tasks better.
I'm not that terribly experienced with Mac hardware, but I remember when the RC5-64 distributed.net client was really popular to run. A friend with a g3 (300 or 333 Mhz, I forget) could do a ridiculously high number of keys while idle. I don't remember the exact number, but it almost was beating a dual-processor 400Mhz Intel machine's total of both processors!
"I can be self-referential if I want to," said Tom, swiftly.
Uh...those were both benchmarks of Specint and Specfp performance metrics, and the clock speed was indicated for reference. I highly recommend that you read up on how any modern processor, from the Pentium Pro, on, works, because your misguided notion of backwards compatibility is woefully incorrect.
An extra 50watts, used 24 hours per day, increases a power bill about $30 per year. Takes a long time to make up for $1000 difference in system price at $30 per year.
Well, suppose you're on the fence about whether to buy an LCD iMac or a CRT Wintel, and you intend to get 5 years' use out of your next computer. Seeing that the iMac will save me $150 worth of electricty would certainly get me off the fence!
you run the heater less in winter too, so it is possible that you will balance this out.
Yes, the heat put out by your computer slightly reduces the load on your home furnace. If you heat your home with electricity, the computer's power usage is a wash during the heating season.
But if you heat your home with gas, oil, or coal, it's a really bad idea to run some computers with the expectation of reducing your heating bill. Gas, oil, and coal usually cost much less per BTU than electricity.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
4) They're keeping it as ammo against Motorola and IBM: 'if you don't speed up your processors, we'll use this'. In which case they won't announce anything whether it is a serious plan or not.
How do you figure? The branch-prediction demo was pretty straightforward, if you ask me.
The plain truth is that powerpc processors and Macs have been lagging behind in performance for a long time. Top of the line G4s use 1.25Ghz processors. Even if they were twice as wide superscalar (I don't believe they are) AND the majority of programs could take advantage of all the extra execution units most of the time (which is not often the case on any superscalar CPU), they would still not match the performance of a top-of-the-line P4. Not to mention the fact that the Apple hardware would STILL be much more expensive.
You're not taking into account a gigantic range of things with your simplistic argument. AltiVec, for example. Yes, you need instructions that are highly parrallel to make it work. Instructions like the ones Photoshop asks for. See, that's the thing: Apple computers are designed for specific kinds of tasks, namely multimedia. You big-iron-overclockers just do not understand that. I doubt you can understand that, without going to work as a designer.
Of course you can buy something that's faster than a PowerPC. Yes, that chip exists. You know what? There are even chips that out-run your Hammer chip. Yes! It's true. Who cares?
As for your 'expensive' comment, that has been destroyed over and over again and I won't take the time to further refute it here. They cost more up front, less over time.
Ok, I'm on fire now, but I don't care. I don't understand the animosity towards Apple stuff. It's just another choice. It's not trying to take away your PC, man. Apple is not a threat to you. Just see it for what it is: another vendor. They've got some interesting stuff. When AMD come sup with a new chip we're all 'ooh, nice new chip, that'll drive cometition!' but when Apple does it, you try to rip it down. No, it is not superior stuff in every single way. But all the speed in the world doesn't make a goddam bit of difference when your operating system makes you want to kill yourself.
Again, sorry for the flameage, but fucking hell, I get tired of some of the rhetoric. Just take a pill and relax. You don't like Apple? Ignore them. But save your own FUD, willya? It makes me tired all over.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Now would be a good time for Transmeta or VIA to make a pitch to Apple....
Um, you do realize, right, that AMD's 64bit architecture is basically just an extension to x86 in the same way Intel's 32bit architecture introduced with 386 was an extension of the 16 x86 from before (from the 8086, 8088, 80286, etc)
Windows is just a thirty-two bit extension of a sixteen bit GUI on an eight bit processor with a four bit instruction set from a two bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.
Hey you know what? I hear the PII, PIII, PIV, and Athlon all work a bit differently too. Have these guys been living under a rock since Windows 95? Why do Mac oriented columnists always refer to x86 as Pentium?
NO WAY IN HELL.
Notice the switch to sustainable revenue streams? Consumer electronics, internet services, OS upgrades. Downplay the hardware, make cash on sustainable income streams, invest r&d into software, port to x86... THEN... you continue to have best-of-breed premium hardware that just works. Your market who needs seamless interoperability of devices and editing/authoring capabilities will still come to you, continuing the self-proclaimed snobbery of owning a "real mac" (hey, I own 3 macs), while providing an entry path to the masses for the OS. Somehow help the development of WINE, and you've got a serious plan for giving people options for an easy-to-use consumer OS (sure, your distro's easy for you to use). And hey, charge me $200 for an intel version, I'll do it. My wintel laptop is ready.
Risky? Yes. Unreversable? No. Remember, When all Apple had was hardware, they licensed other manufacturers to make MacOS machines, and changed their mind. (wisely, at the time) Now they're much more focused on driving sales of consumer electronics, internet services, and the OS than they used to be in the early 90's.
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
In 1995 I noticed many Apple computers had Intel chips in them. Most notably was the intel BIOS chip.
windoze doesn't have to support every piece of crap hardware under the sun. they simply crete the driver API developers use to write the drivers. apple the same. when hardware crashes a system, BLAME MICROSOFT. they wrote the crappy way drivers work. maybe not all hardware is supported in linux, but damnit, hardware drivers are stable, which is why my uptime on my desktop (a P3 933, 512MB,etc.) can run browsers, gimp, vim, apache/mod_perl, evolution, etc, and i can do heavy web testing asd not worry. bullshit that m$ has to support hardware.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
IBM makes powerpc processors too and there's been news of 64bit PPC's in Apple computers. That's far more likely than x86 chips. Besides, we all know that Apple depends on hardware sales quite a bit, so this kind of rumor is old and pointless.
Yes, my point exactly. You measure clock speed and call it "performance".
Apparently it is you who is ignorant of processor architectures, and it is not my responsibility to educate you.
The idea that Apple would trade a high performance processor architecture for a low performance (At absurd power requirements) one is laughable.
Keep wishing for that validation-- but you're going to be disappointed.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Hardware doesn't.
the x86 chips ARE based on 20+ year old technology, and I've programmed assembler for almost every one of them, as well as m68k and PPC chips.
THERE IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE
for one thing, the interrupt model on x86 chips is horrible
on x86, there are "flavors" of assember (masm, nasm, tasm, etc), each insisting their spec is the one true x86 spec
ever try optimizing code among a list of nearly thousands of assembler opcodes? as opposed to mere hundreds for any RISC chip
x86 has got to go.
Of course, MOSX is never running on commodity hardware. But Windows runs on an accepted standard set of hardware, right?
Imagine, for a moment, MacOS X86, with QuartzGL on high-end Apple-branded hardware. Given Apple's nice play with BSD/LGPL licensed software, what feature could they add to their operating system? Wouldn't they be able to port WINE? Apple could have it's very own Win32 runtime, without making consumers buy WinXP.
It didn't work well for OS/2, and it might not be the best idea for Apple, but they've got an existing user base and (lately) a cohesive corporate vision. Apple would have to burn that bridge when they crossed it. Not like IBM.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
>>Most people who claim that they don't need better say so because they've never SEEN better.
Tell me about it. I thought my first wife was good. But she's nothing like my second wife.
(I should include a link to girlfriend2.0, but I'll let someone else get funny points.)
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
and I agree with a comment that someone had posted then. They basically said that the demand for OS X on x86 just shows that people are not happy with their present choices (except those of you not using Windows.) I do not see Apple switching. I do not think you could put a Pentium 4 or Athlon in one of those new iMacs due to heat. Also, OS X runs great on Macs. One reason being that there aren't many different configurations to support. Imagine what it would be like to support clones. I just made the "switch" recently. I have a 800mhz G4. I am very happy with the performance. I love the bundled apps that came with it also. I had no problem with the price when I purchased my Mac (2k) and now that I have been using it for a few months I have found that it was well worth the few extra dollars I spent compared to a pc with the same features. If anyone asked my advice about a new computer, I would not hesitate to recommend a Mac.
The Mhz != Mhz argument is valid, but Apple's stretched it waaay beyond reality. The PPC chips *do* run cooler and *do* have a more sane instruction set, and for a lot of people that is valuable, but as for raw computational power? Nope...x86 chips are way out in front.
Oh, a better quote from the article:
Dammit, Apple, if you're moving to x86 you simply aren't going to be a competitive systems manufacturer any more. You're going to have to accept that and either sell add-ons or only sell software.
May we never see th
That extra RAM will get used for caching.
May we never see th
Yeah, one of the two. (actualy modern intel chips can run either way)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I totally agree with you that this is just history repeating itself. But I think all these claims come from the fact that a guy who uses a P4 2.2 and goes back to a PentiumIII 667 will not actually complain. Many people believe, rightly, that he probably won't notice much of a difference. The real problem is lack of software to use those spare cycles. And even stuff like video encoding, which I do a lot of, is of little interest/use to most people so far.
I think history shows that there will definitely be new applications to take advantage of spare cycles. But the reason there are so many people saying there's no use for such speed is because there really is very little that truly takes advantage of it (yet).
The fact that I can imagine fully real holodeck style VR, which would require incredible calculation speeds, shows that eventually, we will take advantage of those spare cycles. And since there is a middle ground between what we have now, and the VR I'm talking about, we'll definitely find ways to take advantage of those cycles.
But the fact remains that most people today use a computer for things like word processing, web browsing, listening to music. For simple applications like that, they really are right: we have more than enough speed. But the point is that in the future we will have new advanced uses for computers that are just not feasible yet.
I saw this comment re: IDE and SCSI CPU utilization and it reminded me of an interesting thing that happened to me recently...
I own an eMac and an iBook... I have OS X 10.2 on the eMac and I use it to share my dailup Internet connection.
I beleive the eMac uses IDE...
OK... So I had the eMac sharing the Internet and was browsing away on the iBook and copying some files onto the eMac (as a backup)... and the eMac went to sleep in the middle of doing this...
Now for the weird bit... The internet still worked and I could still copy files onto the HD... So basically I assume that the HD and the modem are on different buses so it can shut down the CPU etc without affecting the "essential" services... ??
Anyone, anyone??
PS it really was asleep... I heard the fan spin down.
If you think about it, all that would be left for Apple would be the O/S and they wouldn't be able to make drivers fast enough, then that would be the.
Check out the "hockey game" commercial at this link:
http://www.shareviewstv.com/aerontv.mov
Jeez,
Intel is doubling the preformance with increased bus speed / MIPS / capabilities every 18 months. 3GHz by the end of year, 400 FSB, PCI Express (much faster I/O), laptop specific chips (Banias) and other innovations happening at an accelerating pace. And look at the next 12 month roadmap, they are simply pulling away from their competitors and increasing the pace of innovation.
Windows XP is simply good enough for 99.9 % of users. I've had macs, I've used them; I've used and progammed on unix and windows... You know what, they all get the job done.
what is is with these Mac heads who have to continue to malign Wintel for beating the snot out of their competitors.
If you feel superior for using a Mac, fine. There are people who get a thrill out of having a nice pocket watch, or driving a 62 Porsche. so what? it's not competitive on any level anymore. Maybe 10 years ago against Windows 3.1...
Don't hate Microsoft / Intel for winning. Why doesn't anyone bitch about Jobs raping the marketing when he actually had a better product (back in the mid 80's) instead of building market share?
Oh yea. We're el33t, the user experience is so much richer and I'm so much more of a left brain thinker because I use a mac... Whatever.
The whole Mac line seems to have alot of pastel colors to it. Is it really a coincidence that EVERY time I pick my wife up from any hair salon, they all have their translucent iMacs up front? Pink isn't the only way to make something girly. And silver, gray and white are usually the colors seen on the Bride's side of a wedding.
I used to work in PC sales, and the fact is that women purchase PCs much more based on how they look. Hewlett Packard sells a TON of PCs and overpriced monitors to match them because their PCs aren't an eyesore in the living room. The color scheme is subdued, front drives and ports are covered, and some even have CD storage built into the top so you don't have media laying around.
Most of the girls I know wear a lot of black.
Most EVERYONE wears black. It goes with everything because it doesn't stand out like a sore thumb. That's why it's the standard color for all but the most expensive TVs and AV components. I would never buy a DVD player that had the same design sytle as the new iMac. The last thing I want while watching a movie is for the player to be vying for my attention.
Try FalconNorthWest, Voodoo, or Alienware for some cool looking PCs. A PC should either look damn cool, or try to draw as little attention to itself as possible. Your ugly iMac may seem hip yesterday, but it's going to be an eyesore soon when even your grandmother with dementia knows it's an ancient machine.
Since when does someone's computer have anything to do with their gender?
I suppose you drive a pink Cadillac? Eh, Mr. In-Touch-With-His-feminine-Side?
Unlike a car, the case of a PC is just a shell. Nobody is going to walk by and go 'Hey, that 6050Z is one sweet-ass machine! Can I try it out?'. (except for that one dork that memorizes the specs for every product model that he can't afford) The case is standard, no matter if you bought a top of the line machine, or scrounged out a $500 model. The appearance of your PC either needs to fit your personality, or fit into the background.
First of all, I know Apple is "working on it" with IBM. That still doesn't mean that Apple will find the chip suitable. "Working on" never means anything--you should certainly know that. Let's see what Apple *announces*--that's a whole lot more important than idle, wishful conjecture, I think. Let's also see IBM finalize the specs and show up with some *final* silicon in hand. Any idea when that will be? I didn't think so.
Secondly, your "blind journalist," the guy who wrote the article that's the center of this thread, is as big a Mac zealot as they come--for journalists--who aren't supposed to be zealots about anything, really. (Something called objectivity is supposed to apply.)
Now, lets finish up with your cpu remarks. I think it's fine and dandy that you like the PPC architecture better. That, however, doesn't do diddly squat for people who choose their OS's and hardware based on its *software compatability.* Most people don't know enough about esoteric cpu design to appreciate what you appreciate. They appreciate tangible things like software they can see on the shelves, and widely available hardware upgrades from 3rd parties--that kind of thing.
Where you're blind, and I think a bit stupid as well, is you simply have no idea what a BOON this would be for Apple--it would thrust them square in the middle of a huge and thriving market in so many obvious ways that it's hard to count them.
Further, *never again* would Apple be at the mercy of a minority cpu maker like Motorola. Let's say that IBM takes initial development of this chip in a direction Apple doesn't like later on--golly, gee, Apple's gone from the frying pan into the fire yet again. AGAIN! Do you think Steve Jobs wants to be saddled with a second Motorola? I don't think so.
Here's a clue for you. IBM's commitment to OS/2 was but a pale shadow of Microsoft's to Windows--that why OS/2 never went anywhere (sorry, I was there and know better--OS/2 didn't crap out because of some laughable nefarious Microsoft plot--it crapped out because IBM quit before they got the ball rolling. THIS is the company Apple wants to tie its cpu fate to?) If I was Jobs I would think long and hard about that. You see, Apple might survive one more major cpu shift--if Apple is forced to do it again in five years because IBM decides it's got better things to do than worry about PPC development for Apple, it's Deja Vu all over again.
OTOH, if Apple goes with, say, Hammer, Apple will never have to worry about switching cpus--ever again--because x86, like it or not, drives the market and is exactly what Apple competes with. No longer would Apple ever have to use pitiful photoshop microbenches to try and convince people its fairly slow present PPCs are fast enough to overcome clock leads of 2GHz or more (leads, not total MHz.) They certainly are not--and every body knows it. That would be a thorn Apple would never have to face again--it would appease investors--it would do all manner of good things for Apple.
As far as appeasing the traditionalist Mac users who irrationally hate everything x86 and can't help it, so steeped are they in propaganda Apple now needs to shed--these are the people Apple needs to eventually dump if the company ever wants anything more than 3% of the world market for PCs. Appeasing the faithful might well keep the red ink away right now--but it does nothing to help the company grow--without growth Apple may as well hang it up.
"The MHz Myth" is all fine and dandy, but at some point your superior architecture isn't going to prevail over raw clockspeed. And at this point looking at the numbers it's getting pretty silly to claim so.
G4 : P4
Frontside bus 133 : 533
Clockspeed 1000 : 2800
Memory bandwidth 1.06 GB/s : 4.20 GB/s
Both have powerful SIMD instructions.
Remember if two Photoshop filters don't convince you of the G4s superiority you're obviously just a troll.
If we look at Apple's current status in perspective and remember what barriers to switch to the Mac there were, say, five years ago, we'd have:
- Apple needs to start making a profit
- Apple needs an understandable product line (who could figure out what was what among the two dozen or so different models)
- Apple needs a good consumer model (there was no iMac 5 years ago)
- Apple needs a better operating system
- Apple needs to be friendlier to the open-source community
- Apple needs to catch the interest of the Slashdot crowd
- Apple needs to offer faster computers
- Apple needs to reduce its price
- Apple needs a multi-button mouse
Well, in looking at the list at the moment, I'd have to say Apple has made good progress in five years. And now, all it has to do is:
- Apple needs to offer faster computers
- Apple needs to reduce its price
- Apple needs a multi-button mouse
I wouldn't be surprised if, in the next year, we see:
- A multi-button mouse for the Mac (that's cooler than any mouse -- Bluetooth maybe?)
- A G5 or the IBM chip to really speed things up
- Increased sales that reduce costs, thus prices
When you look at what Steve has done just in the past five years, it doesn't seem the least bit remarkable that Apple will make the right moves. And I don't see where it has to be with changing chips.
Wallmart is now pushing PC's with the Via C3 800 running Lindows 2.0 for sub 200 W/O monitor. For about double the price you can get a p4 1.4 in the lindows box. I think that using this logic:
||
So, as long as people can buy PC's with Windows on them for $500 - $1,000 vs. a Mac which will cost at least 2 or 3 times as much, then Mac sales will continue to be dwarfed by PC
||
these low cost low to mid perfromace Lindows machines will be more popular then anything else.
IMHO The point that everyone is mising here, is a very simple one. People like to play games on computers ASWELL as doing work on them. There are very few good games for Apple (aside from Diablo 2) or any *ix based OS unless you are running them in a shell which the average person cannot understand how to setup, nevermind the performance hit when doing this! (joe beergut who likes to lookup pr0n will not be getting a lindows cheap box or a crapple).
It is the demand for simplicity, the demand for usability, the demand for playability, and the demand for low price which sells the command "beige" box to joe beergut.
Am I completely off base here, or does Apple make a huge portion of it's net profit from hardware sales? Switching to Intel would slow down their computers, and make people stop buying Mac hardware. Yes, OS X sales would go up, but I really doubt it would be enough to compensate for the decrease in hardware sales. Not only that, but Mac software would have to rewritten, again, right after they have made the switch to OS X. They would have to be insane to make such a move.
Apple must move over to more conventional CPUs. At best Apple has 4% of the world's market (per hits on Google), and lives in a very limited niche. Its schizo persona as a software producer / hardware manufacturer is probably ultimately unsustainable. Its hardware is too expensive and (flamebait) underperforming to be attractive to the larger public. Special pleading about how "really" fast G5s are vs Intel/AMD aside, bang for buck Macs aren't even in the competition. Macs cost about twice as much as a generic box to purchase. Being "pretty" examples of industrial design is not enough. Sure, Macs look great but hard headed corporate buyers and budget minded families aren't buying on the basis of looks. I can double the speed of my home generic PC by buying a new CPU for maybe a $100 US, or I can spend ten times (at least) more and move up a slight increment for an Apple.
Apple can't afford to be dependent on small production runs of ageing chip designs from a single manufacturer, who has in the past intimated
stopping production.
Hows this or a business model:-
1. Apple moves to more generic components whilst retaining its distinctive (and good) software;
2. Macs drop significantly in price, more Macs are sold bringing in economies of scale for hardware and software production;
3. Dell or the like start selling Apples because they are now around the same price of Dell machines;
4. Os X and its successors start to be competitive in the real world rather than being dependent on a dedicated minority of users and Microsoft's magnanimity
Thoughts anyone ? By the way my first computers were Apples and they worked fine, but that was years ago when they represented good value not just arty designs.
Are you slow? Do you have any clue what Specint and Specfp? They measure performance. You're a moron.
That is complete Bullshit. I have a PII 400mhz system with a SCSI 2 full height and full width HD and 512 megs of ram. Right next to that computer I have a PIV with 1.7g cpu, IDE HD and 512 megs of ram. For regular applications, there is a minimal difference. Even high end graphic games (both have 64 meg video cards) have small difference.
I have a P3 667 aside a Athlon 1800+ (both with similar RAM and hard drives), and shortly after getting the Athlon I now find the 667 almost unbearable to use. I do some development, and just general browsing, and using the 667 is like pulling teeth some operations seem so slow. Games like Falcon 3 (a three year old game) are intolerable on the 667 (it has a GF3 Ti200, BTW).
All this t-shirt stuff and nonsense ("Apple is a software company"/"Apple is a hardware company"). In 1984 Apple became a lifestyle company and---upon release of the iMac---returned to those roots.
That said, understand what Steve's posse is trying to achieve with the New Macintosh. They want to eliminate the need for consumers to worry about CPU model #s, memory bus throughput, graphics card acceleration compatibility, etc., so they can get on with the business of creating.
From a marketing perspective, that means a commitment to simple product lines that "overdeliver" complete systems (no choosing between nxmxpxq components). Apple has done a good job in this respect.
It's a trickier matter on the technical side. To satisfy their customers, Apple has to deliver better technology that *at least* performs as well as the competition. They used to do this by adopting/developing technologies well in advance of the PC world (ethernet, SCSI, ASMP, NuBus). But the Intel world caught & passed the mac world in the post-8500 dark days of "Dilbert" Amelio.
(The 8500 was the crowning achievement of the shift from 68040 to PowerPC: a workstation-class machine with a modern peripheral bus. On its release there was a clear PPC product hierarchy (601-cheap, 603-portable, 604-power) mired in a hash of product numbers no-one could figure out. God bless the 8500.)
Software and hardware fumbled about for a while, at one point (xmas '96) all hope was lost. Apple was dead and somebody was going to pick up the pieces.
Since then, the hardware has been revitalized. The software has been reborn. The vision has been restored.
One problem, however. Apple can no longer deliver on the "don't worry about the details, we've done the hard work for you", because their hardware's got more heart problems than Dick Cheney running a marathon. Understand, the rest of their machine is fine; world-class; Barry Bonds good.
Apple has to solve the ticker problem and re-establish a three-tier product hierarchy around the processor. They've done such a good job with the software that even the CPU is in play. They're in a position similar to that of MS back in the NT 4.0 days.
But they won't abandon POWERPC. Bank on it. They'll use the Power4 derivative as the top-end chip and the G5 as the pro-sumer/portable chip. The G4 will continue as the budget chip.
OS X 86 will be available as an option to those that demand it and can forego (shrinkwrapped) POWERPC applications. It will run on Apple hardware astonishingly similar to the PPC hardware.
At this point, you---the loyal Apple customer---will be back in the position you were when the 8500, the TiPB, the Q800, the IIfx, and the Mac+ came out: "Hey, I bought the best machine I could afford...and Hey!, it's insanely great."
>...if Apple wanted to completely be out of making hardware, ...
> because they'd be aiming OSX at commodity hardware, and that's
> just too hideous to imagine,
Part of their whole approach is to dominate the hardware to make sure stuff works. Not a big issue for Linux install people, who actually know what a disk controller is, and have the courage and time and skill to mess with it until it works. Apple's trying to make appliances that work the first time. WIth a market full of peripherals that also work the first time. You have to narrow the hardware spectrum for that.
Marketing-driven companies end up over-marketing their products. Engineering-driven companies end up over-engineering
Steve has done it before. If he wants, he'll do it again. He'd love the fame of being on everybody's hardware. And, if they revive Multi-Architecture-Binaries, there's no rewrite - just a recompile and relink. I wonder if MS would build Office MAB (but who cares, there's OpenOffice...)
Is it possible that Apple may be considering some form of DRM too?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
there is no way a 500 MHz G4 has the same performance as a 1GHz PII or Atlalon. Maybe some things that are Altivec enhanced are, but Mac OS X (especially 10.1.x) is way to slow to be useable on anything less than a top of the line dual G4. Compare this to Win2000- wait no you cant comapre that at all! all this "it just works" crap is moot, you cannot compare PnP 1995 to todays PnP!!! Everything i have connected to XP has just worked! and it will work for you too if u check the HCL first!
512Mb of RAM vs 2GB
300MHz vs 1.7 GHz
Local SCSI disk vs RAID over fibre (just to complete the joke, tell us it is RAID 5).
What did you expect?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
charles haddad (dvorak, etc.) is in the business of getting people to flock to the bw site/mag.
he has no more interest in intel than i do in toads.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
If they can't get the IBM working reasonably fast make the jump to Itanium 2. If you look at the price of the Itanium 2 they cost about the same as the Xeons with the same amount of cache. That is you subtract off cache costs Itanium 2 is comparable in price to pentium 4s.
Further I could see Intel giving Apple a sweetheart deal on the Itanium 2's as a way to pressure Microsoft to start agressively pushing the 64 bit CPUs for the Wintel platform.
Again IBM is the path of least resistance but Itantium 2 should be a fairly easy switch.
There is a patch, AND a few suggestions. Will try it soon.
Thanks for the reply.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Do you mean Apple isn't a potential competitor of IBM with a pretty good UNIX running on the PPC chip?
x86 is always little endian.
Are you the "Fact Girl" from Kids in the Hall?
FACT: Most motherboards now come with 4 channel IDE, giving you support for 8 IDE devices, however anyone and everyone puts but one device on each chain. Hell, serialATA is just eliminating device contention and signal sharing, and is making a single device per drop a standard. Therefore each drive has up to 133MB/s of bandwidth. Of course the best hard drive in the world can't saturate that, making excess wasted headroom.
FACT: Given that any modern system puts one drive per chain, most of your other points are moot.
FACT: Hard drives are slow. "Tagged queuing" (which Promise IDE controllers have) makes sense if the CPU is so burdened down that it can't keep up with the burdensome task of controlling a hard drive and is distracted and the hard drive fiddles its thumbs waiting for the next command, but in modern era that is unbelievably irrelevant. A database server running on a modern system would do just as well with an IDE subsystem, ignoring that modern IDE chipsets have queuing, quite simply because the software hard drive driver can do a much better job of queuing and prediction than the hard drive ever can. That's one of the benefits of faster processors.
SCSI has some historic advantages: You don't see external IDE connections to tape drives, and you don't drop 7 devices off an IDE chain. Do you want to anymore, though? Nope. We've got firewire and USB2 for that, both far cleaner and more appropriate for those tasks. SCSI was nice in the 386 days as well due to the queuing. Does it matter today, though? Nope. Are there implementations of SCSI that beat implementations of IDE? Absolutely? As I mentioned: If the original poster mentioned that someone could get a benefit from a 7 disk RAID5 array of 15K RPM drives versus a single IDE drive, then sure, that's true. But simply saying "SCSI beats IDE!" is just dumb, and it's an argument from 1988.
No, I think the issue is that you can't comprehend english.
I know what specint and specfp are. I was around before they were around.
They measure clock speed and call it performance. They don't measure performance.
It gets tiring dealing with half wit idiots such as yourself. The net was much better before AOL. And why is it the average poster on slashdot seems to be a twelve year old who just managed to successfully install linux and so he thinks he's 1334?
Come to me when you've built a computer from scratch-- and I mean, designed the PCB, wrote the bios and burnded yourself with a soldering iron. Then you can talk about who knows what you fuckwit.
Its really become quite clear, as I said originally: Those such as yourself, think clock rate is performance. And a "benchmark" that measures clock rate is what you will then use.
you're real happy
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
By deferring it to "the motherboard chipset", it seems to me AMD is leaving it more open than by putting it inside the CPU itself.
How many times did we have a CPU in the past with only 1 motherboard chipset available for it?
Even if they release their own "recommended" chipset to use with it, you can be almost sure some smaller firm in a foreign country will engineer up boards using an alternative that doesn't have TCPA in it.
You probably can't, however, disable it inside a CPU just by cutting a couple pins or whatever.
Indeed, although somewhat off-topic, given my response was to someone claiming "AMD would never do it".
You can turn off TCPA on the next Intel chip without doing anything fancy. You can do it though the BIOS.
The problem isn't turning it off. The problem is without the support there at all, you still can't use the software that requires TCPA to be present. So having a chip that doesn't support it gets you no further forward than turning off TCPA support in the BIOS.
Its really become quite clear, as I said originally: Those such as yourself, think clock rate is performance. And a "benchmark" that measures clock rate is what you will then use.
Uh huh. And that would explain why a 1Ghz Itanium2 comes close to the P4 2.8Ghz in specint, and surpasses it in specfp. You're a moron, and claims of your great historical knowledge are ridiculously misplaced.
While it might be nice for the new user to have Windows apps seem to run in the OSX environment, VMs would add a lot of value for everyone, from newbie to ubergeek. Like you said, it would be easier for Apple (and, I imagine, the owner) to make VMs work. And hopefully networking the VMs and the host would be easier with Rendezvouz than with Samba!
Hello, Apple, are you listening? Until you do something this cool, I'm hanging onto my beige G3.
"In a hierarchy every employee will rise to his level of incompetence". The Peter Principle
Yep, measuring clock speed is a stupid way to try and measure performance.
You are the moron here. I don't mind ignorant people, its ignorant people who run around and insult those who actually know what they are talking about that is the bane of slashdot.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Bwahahaahaha. You're funny. I read this whole debate and every reply has you saying the same completely incorrect statement, and him replying with an actual fact. You are dumb old man.