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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?"
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.
There is a world of difference between using an x86 processor, and using an x86-based PC. I suspect Apple has closely investigated hooking up an x86-64 (or two ;) to a custom motherboard/infrastructure that would solve many of the interrupt/expansion complexities of PCs. For example, they could adopt HyperTransport, which would make multiprocessing affordable, easy to design around and most of all, leading edge, which is important to some people. Remember, Apple is expert at getting a lot out of a little - it would not surprise me if they tied a Hammer to a custom motherboard and created a whole new architecture. And that wouldn't be a bad thing.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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
Yes, I hate it when you can tell that an x86's tappets need adjusting just by listening to it.
RISC chips are so much more turquoise, too.
Tim
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.