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Pentium-Based Macs The Future of Apple?

Posted by Hemos on from the but-what-about-my-pretty-new-tibook-to-be? dept.

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?"

3 of 597 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Never happen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.)

  2. IF Apple went X86, they'd go with the AMD Hammer by Brian+Stretch · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. It's funny... by Dirk+Pitt · · Score: 5, Interesting
    you should mention the "Put him back on his 667. 9 times out of 10 he'll be on the phone to Dell to upgrade his PC" comment. I work in high-end CAD (actually CAE) and commonly work with multi-gigabyte faceted models. My main PC until last week was a 550Mhz P3 Xeon, with a SCSI subsystem and a Visualize FX graphics card. Now, the lease being up on my old system, I have a 2 Ghz P4 with an IDE drive and a $300 nVidia card. GIVE ME BACK MY OLD PC. Disk swapping alone is killing me; with the disk work shifted to the processor, I'm doing so much foot tapping it's just silly. Don't get me started on the video card. Even regular GUI rendering is slower, much less 20k surface geometry.

    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.