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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?"
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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
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
That would be the dumbest thing they would do.
Unless this is mandated by law Apple should not touch this stuff with a 10 foot pole. They would gain leverage in the marketplace by offering computers free from this crap.
If they did this rip -> mix -> burn would have to be changed to rip -> ask for permission to play -> ask for permission to play -> burn? (are you of your mind, you can't do that)
If Intel pushes this palladium crap they deserve to be driven out of business, I don't care how damn many GHz these chips would run at, I'd consider any DRM enabled chip to be defective.
Click here or here.
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.
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?!
intel isnt going for a law that requires just x86 chips to have DRM. they would want the law to require all computer chips. that would include APPLE's
apple would not have a choice.
and even if they did have a choice, if adobe and Microsoft told them they have to, Apple would. oh no, photoshop and office on a mac
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.
*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?
The PIII 1.4 Ghz is *alot* faster per Mhz than the P4. I would guess than on alot of tasks the PIII 1.4 Ghz compares favorably to a P4 2.6 Ghz or so.
...
At work we benchmarked a large variety of systems and for our task (compiling a large software base) the PIII 1.4 was the best choice by far. Better than any P4, of course alot of that had to do with the fact that the PIIIs can be run dual CPU where the P4 cannot.
The PIII 1.4 has 512K of L2 cache on chip, this is the biggest difference. Also the PIII has a superior design; the P4 is a *huge* mistake that only Intel's gigantic momentum in the industry could allow them to get away with.
That being said, the PIII 1.4 is also quite expensive, $300+ per chip. I have no idea how much G4's go for but I'm guessing they are expensive, as are the top-of-the-line P4 chips. The athlons are alot cheaper but in our tests on-chip cache seemed to be supremely important and even the mighty and inexpensive Athlons fell to the PIII 1.4.
I make these points only because you seem to be suggesting that a "mere" PIII-1.4 bested a G4. I just wanted to make it clear that a PIII-1.4 is actually a very fast x86 processor, comparable to a 2.X Ghz P4, where X is > 4, especially on the kinds of benchmarks that c't was running
Apple sells the myth of G4 performance superiority with Photoshop benchmarks, thus convincing the gullible and non-technical people. Photoshop indeed performs better on a Mac because it is optimized for the platform[.]
This raises a question about the importance of benchmarks: if a technical magazine says your computer is slower, but the application you use the most every day (as many Apple users do Photoshop) runs faster on your computer, then who's being fooled? While we technical folks might tend to obsess over benchmarks, the masses of gullible, non-technical people only care about getting their stuff done as easily and as quickly as possible, regardless of the technical merits of the chip powering their computer.
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
So many people don't understand this: a few principled hold-out - unorganized, isolated, idiosyncratic - are irrelevant in terms of the momentum of Palladium/DRM-type developments. Opposition to it has to be organized - a PR campaign against the loss of consumer rights and personal freedom. Too many mistake this for saying that what is called for is a governmental solution (although a truth-in-advertising law - demanding that rights-limiting technologies boldly and explicitly advertise "YOU WILL BE UNABLE TO COPY YOUR MUSIC AND DATA IN MANY SITUATIONS USING THIS DEVICE", might not be a bad bit of legislation), but at least as important is simply embarassing hardware manufacturers and content distributors away from such techniques.
Back when the G4 was designed, things were looking bad for Apple, so Motorola retrenched into the embedded market.
True, but not completely the reason. Don't discount the effect of Steve Jobs' killing of the Mac clone market, which shrank Motorola's market for selling its non-embedded PowerPCs to one vendor. This angered the company far more than the press would have you believe, since Steve Jobs single handedly kicked Motorola out of a market and left them with a huge stock of unsold systems.
If Motorola were really worried about the non-embedded PPC market, they would've allocated additional resources to the project long ago. There are plenty of smart people working there.
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.
Yeps G4 and P3 are such different kind of beasts currently, that I could make C code that runs on one machine twice as fast as on other, with optimized compilers. The reasons for speed differences has nothing to do with ISA in either case though. The apples main failure is its slow FSB and limited outstanding memory requests. There are multiple versions of G4 with one that does 1 memory write and 5 reads. And another that does 8 combined. Guess which one they used...
/not many functional units.
And from pentium pro intel has always had much more of those. And improving it makes NO sence for embedded chip ala motorolas main market for it.
Another issue is that the P3 run software that was by far better optimized for it than mac has.
Now there is ONE thing that is coming along that can save mac...
Specs seem to say 8 instructions/cycle 200 instructions in flight at OOE, >1MEG ondie cache, second core ondie and 6.4GB/s bus.
Thats like double the speed of P4 bus...
Clock speed may lag compared to P4 or may not.
Depends how well IBM engineers get it tweaked.
BTW in floating point 2.8ghz P4 looses on 1.1ghz powerpc CPU. Yeps its the base of the cpu that will be used for the new chip that will be used at next summer at apple.
That will have die shrink too it would get at 2-4Ghz at launch for desktop. Cannot estimate maximum since the clock speed limitation was power consumption AND absolute reliability requirement that resulted much less agressive timings compared to desktop chips.
Motorola is BAD company for apple while IBM does much better.
A) IBM makes HIGH end servers/workstations
B) IBM makes POWERPC chips for those markets.
c) IBM will make desktop version of it for later.
A) Motorola makes embedded chips that must run with low power.->low max clock speed
B) those are powerPC chps too.
C) Makes desktop versions of it to sell Apple.
As you can see there is difference. And what apple gets next summer IS the thing that keeps it in high end for some time. Unfortunately many apple suporters will hold their purchases for apple until this thing comes out, since their current chips are desperately out powered, on unoptimized code.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Ignorant twat. Do you even know what Shake and Rayz do? Photoshop is about as comparable to Shake as Excel is.
And anybody who's ever worked in creative production knows that the person in front of the machine is much more important than the machine itself, and a much bigger investment as well. If you're paying an artist $90,000 a year, you're going to get him whatever machine makes him happy. And he's going to ask for a Mac, because Macs are much more pleasant to be around than PC's. Go ahead, try to convince a production manager than he should throw out his Macs and buy an office full of PC's. I'd love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.
Actually, in retrospect, that'd be a pretty boring conversation to watch. You'd line up all your arguments for why Macs are slower than PC's and why PC's should be used instead, and then the production manager would just ask you to leave and go back to his job. Pretty dull stuff, really.
So you bought the wrong PC for your needs - that doesn't mean there's anything intrinsically wrong with the technologies it uses.
;-)
First off enable DMA for the disks - there's no way you should be getting any noticable CPU usage from the disks, even if they are IDE. I can run a defragger on my box and it never gets above 1% CPU usage.
Secondly, if you are a CAD user WTF are you doing buying a games card? Hardly any surprise it doesn't perform too well. Will be sweet for Doom 3 though
Like you say, your box is being killed by some dodgy disk settings, the wrong gfx card, and probably a lack of memory. However you use that as a reason to slate the processor - hello? The processor isn't getting a chance to do anything because of all the bottlenecks.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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.