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Dvorak Thinks Apple Will Switch to Intel
SeanTobin was among several users who noted that Dvorak's latest column discusses the possibility of Apple going to Intel for future macs. Yeah, this rumor pops up pretty often, but I wonder how long before we'd get binary compatibility between other x86 unix OSs.
If Mr. Dvorak had bothered to do the slightest bit of research before writing another baseless artice, he would know that Apple is switching to IBM processors, not Intel.
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still its interesting to speculate. TO keep up its tradition apple woul dneed to specify a reference platform considerably different than the usual bios driven, low end crap we are trapped in the intel world. So it would not just be a mac running on PC box. The interesting thing would be if PC manufactureres adopted the refernce platform on their high end units. by adotping a full featured platform with uniform specs there might be a breaktrhough in PC compatibility with its drivers making the world more mac-like
then we might have dual or tri-boot computers. (linux,mac,windows). Its hard to guess how that would shake out. I have no idea. one the one hand a lot of mac users might give in and become PC users now that the barrier is less. on the otherhand the reasons to use linux might vanish. Or maybe everyone would discover that the mac is the prefect compromise beteeen unix and ease of use. any one want to speculate? lots of room for disagreement
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
On the PC side of the fence, no Z-80 maker survived even the transition to the 8080.
Not surprising given that Z-80 was a faster, cheaper, more capable version of the 8080.
Dvorak needs to study his history.
It makes sense for Apple to drop Motorola as their processor vendor of choice. Motorola has made it known to the public that they are "refocusing on their core business" that means they are trying to take back share in the communications business (read: Cellular phones and infrastructure). Nokia has been beating the pants off of them for years and Moto has decided to take back the market it invented.
Processors are not in this strategy. So, what does Apple do? Obviously change CPU vendors. I thought Apple would go with an AMD hammer type chip. It fits nicely into their desktop/server strategy. The problem is the APPS! Apple has got to get the rest of the software guys to re-compile their stuff for the x86 platform. A daunting prospect at best.
But wait, there's more. IBM has a Power 4 drived 64-bit chip that has respectable performance and DOESN'T require that Mac developers recompile their apps! Everyone wins!
What do you think Apple is going to choose?
Info on PPC970 here.
-ted
Somebody ought to ask Dvorak if he is running a Chang modification on his PC.
For those who don't know the story, back in the days of the 286, a Taiwanese company claimed to be able to run 286's much faster than anyone else, it was called a "Chang modification". Dvorak touted it as a breakthrough technology. Of course anyone who understood technology realized the claim was ridiculous. It turned out all Chang was doing was reprogramming the timer chip so that it didn't keep time correctly - thus making benchmarks look more impressive.
In other words Dvorak's technical knowledge level is absurdly low. The man has great contempt for anyone who does have technical knowledge; he thinks we are inferior 'droids' to be ruled by assholes like him. He truly is the prototype of Dilbert's abysmally ignorant Pointy Haired Boss.
Dvorak really is dumb enough to think that Apple would change to Intel; the change from the 68000 to the Power PC almost destroyed Apple. Switching processor architecture destroys your software base - you have to run in place for years just to get back to where you were. That is the reason that Apple was in so much trouble after the processor change. Another change would be suicide.
And yes, I know that things are written in C these days, and we all know C is 'portable' so the change over 'running in place' period might only be 6 months to a year today. But 6 months to a year of additional progress lost by Apple would pretty much be the last nail in the coffin. Such a change would expose them to the ruthless pricing levels of the PC industry which Apple could never survive.
This is, after all, the same Dvorak that suggested Microsoft be nationalized by the federal government because operating system software was too important to allow private industry to manage.
I was duped into believeing Dvorak might have a few good points to make, but it was really all an attempt to get his page Slashdotted and sell lots of banner ads. For once, shame on you people for actually R'ing TFA!
Check this out, Blockquothe the Article:This goes on to speculate Apple will use Itanium chips. Without even getting into endian issues (which make buses and shared disk & memory slow and a pain in the ass), this is a huge transition from their current invenstment in PPC-only motherboards, and I imagine it will be power hungry, hot, and probably noisy, considering that current Apple chips needed a special case for cooling and Intel's chips are still known for running hotter (Sidenote: I'm unsure if this applies to the Itanium).
And let's not leave out price? An Apple box with (by then I'd assume it to be) a G5 AND an Intel Itanium? This would sell for $16,000 with no hard drives at minimum. Itanium is too expensive, and at this point designing a dual-architecture mobo is just not worth the trouble. A high end machine to run Photoshop? Guess again, most Mac users don't use Photoshop or anything of the sort, and Apple sure doesn't center their design process around anything Adobe does. And does anyone remeber Marklar having anything to do with dual architecture? I thought it was a software port of the closed-source elements of OS X?
Never trust a guy named after a weird keyboard layout.
Interesting story to note, however: Apple has already made Intel x86 compatable machines! Check out Apple Technical Note 1076, last updated Oct. 1st, 1996. Most notable: Apple created Intel PCs on PCI and NuBus cards (which were at the time fast enough to be a reasonable design) and actually shipped one bundled with the PowerMac 7200. From the Technote:Apple might be researching this whole Intel thing, and they even have prior experience in the area. I believe, however, that any such effort is a backup plan, so when IBMs yields are low enough to make the 970 too expensive and Motorola starts pushing clock speeds into the high 2.7GHz range while each new chip they release gets progressively slower, Apple isn't up shit creek without a paddle.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Oh, and one more thing. Apple's WWDC developer conference has been moved back to June.
The WWDC info page states "Get an in-depth look at the future of the Mac platform and a preview release of the next major version of Mac OS X, codenamed "Panther" "
Maybe we'll see exactly what direction they are taking the hardware in at that event...
[)amien
I speak with some of the higher-end devs from time to time, and they seem to believe that the next line of macs, or if not, the line after them, will be using the PPC 970. I see no real reason to doubt this, and I find it to be a wonderful thing as well, seeing as how IBM has been developing some nice chips lately, and they supposedly have the patent on a new chip technology which will do the same work as current chips but use less electricty. (Ergo, less heat)
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
ITANIUM?!! No, I don't think so John. The Itanium gets it's raw horsepower from all the cache it has. I just can't see this thing as a viable desktop processor. Hell, even as a server chip it looks dubious compared to the upcoming competition.
My bet, if anything, would be on the Opteron.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
It seems like Apple switching to Intel would be a support nightmare. Between people hosing their system by running BSD or Linux binaries and people swapping in PC hardware, it could be very, very ugly.
Has no read MacWhispers post title New PowerMac Motherboards To Use PPC 970???
Apple has bids out for PPC 970 mobos. Doesn't sound like they're switching to x86.
I'm not even going to bother reading the comments below. Apple's system is based on the PPC. Switching to x86 chips would be stupid. They're still trying to get developers and consumers switched to OS X, and to ask people to move to a completely different architecture so soon after a major OS change would be suicide.
Please, once and for all, Apple is not moving to the x86. It's a stupid rumor and only flames those idiots who say "I'd use OS X when it comes out for x86" and "I'll buy a Mac as soon as they use the faster x86 chip."
How about a post saying BSD's dead? Vi's better then emacs? RMS say something great/stupid?
How someone with horrible design skills like this, can be a writer at a major computer magazine is beyond me. He could at least have the sense to pay someone to design it for him . .
It's pretty well known that Apple has had OS X running on x86 boxes for years. The way the OS is designed, everything is high-level and very far abstracted from the hardware. Darwin and the microkernel are all that really need to be updated. I recall hearing that early builds of Aqua would run on top of Windows. So in short, Apple has OS X running on x86, probably very well, and have for a long time. Technically it's not hard to do, but as a business decision, it just doesn't make sense.
From what I've gathered, Steve Jobs was at the Intel conference representing Pixar, not Apple. As you may remember, Pixar recently began to drop their Sun-powered render farm in favor of a cheaper Intel-powered one. This had nothing to do with Macs vs PCs, Motorola vs Intel, etc.
;) ), and those customers would drop Apple if they thought it was "just another PC."
Similarly, while Apple and Motorola certainly haven't been getting along for a good while now, it doesn't make sense for Apple to switch to a CPU with an entirely new instruction set. Regardless of whether or not OS X runs on x86, all of the Mac OS X software would have to be ported.
What's more, Apple would lose a lot of their customer base, because there's a certain air of eliteness that comes with using a Mac (or, at least there is in the minds of some Mac users
And yet more still, it would be like SGI's Intel boxes: nobody wants to pay through the nose for x86 (c'mon SGI, $30 thousand for an Intel box? No thanks), especially when they can get it for cheaper by ordering it from Dell, HP, or building it themselves.
No, I think Dvorak is just being his usual idiot self. Besides, hasn't Apple already announced (maybe not officially) that they're going with IBM's 970 PPC processor? That would certainly make more sense, since Mac developers wouldn't have to port their software to a whole new architecture, and would only require a new motherboard and some small changes to the OS to handle the 64-bit pointers and such.
I would think that if you were an early PowerMac adopter in March 1994 you would not be too disappointed when Apple released an operating system (MacOS 9.2) which did not support it in 2001. MacOS through 9.1 supported all PPC based Macs.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
NeXTSTEP was running at most on 4 architectures at the same time (M68K, Intel X86, Sun Sparc and HP PA) and most of the applications are compiled to fat binary with one app having binaries for all architecture. This has been done and it's almost 10 years ago by the same engineering team in Apple now.
NeXTSTEP, now Cocoa, is a very clean framework that properly abstract the ysstem services so few applications needs to use anything low level in the system. The API is consistent across architecture and applications relying on the API can easily be compiled and run on any architecture.
It's possible for Apple to switch to another architecture once more then 90% of the apps coded to Cocoa spec rather then Cocoa/Carbon mix. At that time, it's just a matter of compile and run.
OS X is gaining momentum and getting 3rd parties supprt. It would take another two years for enough apps to ported to Cocoa to archive the critical mass necessary to make the "switch."