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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?"
Palladium/TCPA/DRM support?
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.
You will never see MacOS X running on a generic x86 "beige box".
And as long as that is the case, you will never see Apple with more than a minor percentage of the Desktop market share. The vast majority of people live in a world where price matters. 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 sales. (And don't give me any of this 'But you can buy a refurb Mac for only $500 bull.' So you're telling me for a Mac to compete with a PC on price I have to buy a used out-dated Mac with no warranty? Well guess what. You can buy a refurb PC for $100.)
Oh.. not again.
Why does everyone assume that using Intel-chips would make the computer compatible with PCs?
Apple could design the hardware in a very specific non-compatible way and just take advantage of the fact that Intel-chips are a commodity.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
True, but Carbon is most certainly a stopgap measure, while Cocoa is more a long-term solution. From Apple's pages:
Carbon is designed to provide a gentle migration path for developers transitioning from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X.
---
Cocoa provides developers starting new Mac OS X-only projects the fastest way to full-featured implementations
slashdot!=valid HTML
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
That analogy is flawed because Jaguars and Porsches are a lot faster than the average car.
Actually, they're not, but that perception is part of why they sell. The reality is that there's a perception that the Porsche or Jaguar is a better car, for whatever reason, just as some people have a perception that the Mac is a better computer, for whatever reason. Because of that perception, they're willing to pay more. Apple has significantly better margins than any other PC OEM. Their sales estimates and so on are based on their actual market, not on the total PC market. Much like Alienware and other small PC OEMs do much better than Dell or HP on a per-unit basis, and manage to survive despite having a significantly smaller user base. In other words, if the company does well on it's current user base, they don't have to take extreme measures (such as changing architectures and pissing off their users and developers) to build that user base. They need growth, but not to the point of having a greater overall market share than Dell or HP.
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.
In some ways that's true, but primarily Apple has been doing very well since Jobs came back. They make a lot of money, despite their small market share, and in the end all they need to do is continue slow growth.
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.
Changing CPU families when software is still catching up with the last major OS changes could very well lose a great deal of the developer support they already have. Otherwise, they'd have to do extensive work to limit the amount of work developers have to do on the platform change, which would probably include emulating the current platform on the x86 for existing apps, which wouldn't be pretty.
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.
The real loss, though, if Apple went to generic hardware, would be on Apple's bottom line. By far they make most of their money on hardware. This is most blatantly obvious when you look at parts they sell with a new Mac purchase which are available for the PC as well (such as the SuperDrive, and their prices for RAM and hard drives). They make a killing on the hardware, and most of their standard software is cheap relative to x86 equivalents (though their upgrade pricing on the OS is a little steep, since essentially all OS purchases are upgrades). If they're making any money on software right now, it's not much in the consumer market. Microsoft might be able to sit back and do nothing if Apple made that decision, because the increased support costs and decresed revenue (from lack of hardware sales) would kill them without intervention.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
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 ?
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!