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Cringley Thinks Apple & Intel Are Merging
SamSeaborn writes "In Bob Cringely's latest column he talks about the Apple switch to Intel and concludes:
'what's behind the announcement is so baffling and staggering that it isn't surprising that nobody has yet figured it out until now. Apple and Intel are merging.' "
Quoth Cringely: "Certainly, he never said WHICH Intel chip they'd be using, just mentioning an unnamed 3.6-Ghz development system -- a system which apparently doesn't benchmark very well, either (it's in the links)."
Those stupid benchmarks are comparing a G5 running native PPC code to the 3.6 Ghz Pentium running PPC code under emulation. Follow Cringely's link to an article that in turn links to ThinkSecret which then explains that the benchmarks are for Rosetta.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Apple loved to pull Phil Schiller onstage to do side-by-side speed tests showing how much faster in real life the G4s and G5s were than their Pentium equivalents. Was that so much BS?
:)
Not really. But, how many things REALLY take such advantage of Altivec that its worth keeping it around?
yet Intel's 64-bit chips -- Xeon and Itanium -- are high buck items aimed at servers, not iMacs.
Someone wanna tell this guy about EM64T?
Where the heck is AMD?
Maybe Apple talked to AMD, and Intel offered a better deal. Maybe Apple wanted to ensure there'd be no supply problems (I'm sure Intel fabs a lot more CPUs than AMD does).
Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?
I wondered about this one too. Especially after Jobs showed how easy it is to port apps.
Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?
Gah! I sure as hell hope not!
The vaunted Intel roadmap is nice, but no nicer than the AMD roadmap, and nothing that IBM couldn't have matched.
Could have, but would they? I sincerely doubt it. IBM is more interested in all the CPUs they're going to put into the next generation gaming consoles. They'll sell far more CPUs, AND they won't even have to worry about making them faster.
Enter Apple. This isn't a story about Intel gaining another three percent market share at the expense of IBM, it is about Intel taking back control of the desktop from Microsoft.
That'd be sweet.
Remember, you read it here first.
C'mon, Dvorak predicted this years ago.
And the reason? Because Dvorak held the position before him.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Disclaimer: Personally, I have no idea on how much faith to put in this particular prediction, either. I just keep my money in the S&P 500 and don't loose any sleep over the specifics.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I think it was '97 or '98 that Intel quietly announced an initiative to make an operating system, IIRC it would have had an OS/2 style Windows emulation layer or VM. Way I heard it, Microsoft freaked and told them basically that they would subsidize copies of Windows on AMD chips to the tune of $0, so they just better cut that shit out. So intel dropped it. Funny, I google'd for 15 minutes and couldn't find anything, but I distinctly remember it. Anyone else remember it?
If I do remember it correctly, Cringley's little conjecture might have some weight to it. Intel finally gaining control of a market that it figures it should own.
Which is one major reason that OS/2 withered - it did such a good job running Windows program that nobody saw the need to actually buy OS/2-native programs... If Apple undertook a similar strategy, it would probably be the last straw for many Mac developers...
>Question 1: What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel?
2 E16819116198
Dissapearing as we speak and that is part of the reason for the move.
>Question 2: What happened to Apple's 64-bit operating system?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
intel Pentium 4 630 Prescott 800MHz FSB 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 EM64T
$289 NOTE the EMT64T.
The Chip in the dev platform is reportedly:
Nntel Pentium 4 660 Prescott 800MHz FSB 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 EM64T
Again note the EM64T
>Question 3: Where the heck is AMD?
To me this is the lamest question people ask. There are so many reason that it would be a much bigger surprise if it were AMD. Want some:
0: Better deal, simpler engineering if you stick with one.
1: Intel provides the whole platform from a single vendor. Massively simplifying engineering the new platform
2: The myriad of reasons that Dell does the same. Most of them Dollars.
3: Pentium-M Laptop platform.
4: Truly massive Fab capacity, vs AMD history of production problems.
>Question 4: Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?
As said before Developers. Because there is no other way you can give ALL the developers a heads up and keep it a secret.
The Mathematica demo fooled no one.
Mathematica is basically a platform independent kernel with a GUI wrapper.
Right now you are only hearing about the people who's apps without endian/platform specific issues. Most of them, like us, will just never bother to make the migration and are focusing on our Windows and Linux products and writing off OS X.
InfoWorld still runs a column by yet another columnist who goes by the name Robert X. Cringeley. It's sort of an IT industry gossip/society column, and it's often actually pretty good.
Breakfast served all day!
I'm pretty sure that Apple has admitted to the devs at WWDC that Rosetta is in fact a Transative-powered technology.
We all knew that Transative believed they had something big. Evidently they do. The Mach-O binaries with their lazy symbol lookup provide a very nice, natural framework for Rosetta to run.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Note that the current design already has a POWER processor as it's core. The problem is, a lot of the chip is dedicated to the fancy vector processing units. There's no way to make up for that. The entire win with the Cell processor is that it's got so much of it's transistor budget dedicated to something that CPUs do relatively poorly: vector processing. The rest of the design is very standard. So the best you can do is match what you're doing with other POWER CPU's in terms of performance, but you'll be significantly more expensive because of all those vector coprocessors.
sigs are a waste of space
Except that Apple's big beef with IBM wasn't about roadmap, but production capacity.
From a few articles I read, it was not even that. It was price. IBM could not lower the price to meet what Apple wanted to pay for it. IBM considered the current Apple deal was just about break even for them and maintaining Apple as a customer was not worth the potential loss from a lower price. The stories also quoted that Apple accounted for less then 2% of IBM chips sales.
Dude, I don't know what the hell that statement means!
If you're referring to 'hot air', well then I'm even more confused since blimps are full of helium, and are not heated!
The other thing is that applications spend significant time in system libraries, especially since Mac OS X provides heavy math functions (FFT etc) that are implemented with the vector unit. It was the same thing many years ago running 68K applications under emulation; many ran just as well as "native" versions since most of the processor time was used copying graphics (CopyBits(), drawing the user-interface, doing file I/O, etc.). Applications which do significant number crunching themselves will be most affected.
Jesus Christ! Couldn't you have just linked directly to the goatse.cx image? At least we're somewhat prepared for that...
Here you go
You're doing it wrong.
> There are interesting nuances to this, though, for one that Apple is using PC BIOS...
i ve-it-back, please-don't-show-this-to-anyone systems have a BIOS.
For GOD'S SAKE, get a GRIP! Their preliminary, not-for-sale, we'll-rent-you-a-system-for-a-year-and-then-you-g
Their final shipping products are as likely to have a bios as the final PPC X-Box is to have APPLE ROMS. (Yes, the x-box dudes at MS are currently using PowerMacs to develop on. Get the parallel?)
God, I'm so tired of people leaping to conclusions like this. The first prerelease of what eventually became Mac OS X was Intel-only, and yet somehow when the actual first release of Mac OS X for consumers came out, it was for PPC.
Preliminary hardware is preliminary hardware. Stupid assumptions are stupid assumptions. Neither one is, frankly, worth terribly much.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Dante. Not Chaucer. Dante.
I'm glad to see so many agree. I read this and thought the guy must be either heroically misinformed or smoking a seriously high grade of crack.
I won't go into all of his points but the 64bit bit is torn to shreds by the article over at Ars. Apple are moving to Intel from the bottom up, not the top down. At the moment only the G5 offerings are 64 bit so there is no regression by moving all the G4s to 32bit Intel chips first while Apple wait for Intel's 64bit chips to come along by the end of 2007 which is when the PowerMac is due to be upgraded.
In short - WTF!!
You can't go and say "if..." and say that the G5 has a performance advantage based upon a chip that doesn't exist. Part of the reason Intel has a performance advantage is that they have superior process technology and are more willing it use it on their CPUs.
And besides, what until you see what 65nm does for Intel...
Anyway, Intel has been faster than PowerPC since DAY ONE. When Apple announced 60/66/80 MHz PowerPC 601s (40MHz FSB tops), Intel already had had 66MHz Pentiums for a year. Two months later, Intel had 90 and 100 MHz Pentiums with a 66MHz FSB.
And beyond that, Pentium outperformed the 601 in everything but floating point. Check Microprocessor Reports' report on it. 601 was superscalar with the ability to (sometimes) execute an integer, floating point and a branch instruction all at once. Pentium had the ability to often execute two integer instructions at once plus a branch (sort of). Microprocessor Reports correctly showed that Pentium was able to execute multiple instructions per clock far more often than a PPC 601 could. And as noted above, it was also running at a higher clock rate.
Despite being CISC, Microprocessor Reports took the uncomfortable stance that the Pentium was a better chip than the vanguard of RISC's entry into the mass market.
PPC's next step was the miserable 604, which at 120 and 132MHz was choked by its still awful 40 and 44MHz FSBs. Pentium was already humming along along at 133MHz with a 66FSB. And it was only going to get worse. Pentium Pro had already been out for a few months, at 200MHz and an on-package 1:1 L2 cache.
Around this time, Apple released machines using the 603ev, which at 275MHz marked the last time PowerPC was faster (in MHz) than Intel's offerings. It still couldn't match up in real-world performance, as Pentium Pro and followons were capable of significant parallelism, and the 603ev did virtually none.
Much later, Apple released the PowerMac 9600/250, 300 and 350, with 50MHZ FSBs and a still slow 1:2 off-chip cache. By this time, Pentium II was at 400MHz with a 100MHz FSB.
Apple was in a deep hole now, because the entire 604 line was killed when its next chip, the overly complex 614 was killed. After some scrambling, the 613 took off. Apple named this the G3. It was a much simpler, but it was the best PPC had to offer, and helped Apple make up some of the huge gap in performance between them and Intel.
Apple's absolutely terrible memory latencies and bandwidths held them back through all the G3 and G4 days. This perhaps reached a peak when Apple released G4s that used DDR, despite the fact that the 133FSB on the G4 meant it couldn't get any more performance from DDR than from SDRAM. Meanwhile, over on Intel, Intel had 800MHz (effective) FSB processors, with dual-channel DDR RAM that provided 6.4GB/s theoretical memory bandwidth, compared to an Apple G4's 1.04GB/s. Yes, the gap in performance was as large as it sounds.
The next time Apple would even come close in performance was the early days of the G5, which with dual processors and a very fast and tricky bus architecture was capable of beating a single fast P4 in general performance at times. It also was capable of beating the P4 handily on performance, at least until SSE2 took off and the gap closed a bit.
And now the new frontier is notebooks. Intel's fastest Pentium-Ms are capable of providing 2/3rds of the performance of their fastest desktop processors. Apple's laptops meanwhile with their G4s are only capable of perhaps 1/3rd the performance of a single G5 chip.
Apple/PPC simply started out behind and never caught up. It's a wonder Apple was able to hold out this long.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95