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Apple May be Intel Show Pony
Robert writes "Computer
Business Review reports that the implications of Apple dropping IBM as its chip vendor
in favor of Intel, announced earlier this week, will straddle the broader computing
landscape. Apple stands to gain a competitive edge by partnering with Intel because
it will have access to slightly cheaper stuff."
Is it just me, or are the headlines and summaries becoming more and more sarcastic and twisted, especially with regards to anything Apple-related?
Apple May Be Intel Show Pony
Indeed, twisted by the Dark Side of the Source, young Zawinski has become.
And that's just on the front page this morning! It's not that I have anything against a little editorializing, but these don't even seem like relevant comments any more...
Dell has proven that they only want to make cheap stuff... they used to brag they made "PCs" now they just make "clones" but make them cheaply. Intel needs somebody to really show off their cutting edge stuff...which no normal PC maker will do. Enter apple looking for a new partner. Intel just lost the Xbox account anyway.. and the writing on the wall is that MS will stab them in the back just as fast as every other partner.. It's foolish of Intel NOT to take the opportunity to develop hardware that breaks all the PC rules and start over from scratch.. frankly they'll be Intel's "demo" group and just let everybody else copy them.
Huh? I thought Slashdot was Google's show pony!
This flipflopping must stop! I don't know who to worship anymore!
Apple has just released the first official benchmarks of the new x86 Mac. Steve was even kind enough to show how the P4 Mac related to the speed of the G5.
It was a tough choice, but I doubt Apple moved to Intel for cheaper chips, or better processors. Intel has always developed chips that aren't x86 or IA64 for "research" purposes.
I'd imagine that Apple are probably after Intels vast fabrication resources. They probably see that IBMs fabs will probably be under pressure to crank out chips for the XBox and Playstation.
For the volumes of chips that those two platforms will need, its hard for IBM to justify Apple taking up their valuable fab space.
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
A low voltage Itanium 2 is coming at the end of the year in production quantities.
The support chipset for the Itanium is also quite impressive.
The Itanium roadmap shows support for up to 8 Itanium dual cores.
I understand that the proposed Apple / Motorola/Freescale settlement involves an unlimited Altavec X86/Itanium license.
I also understand that IBM is to make a significantly improved proposal to Apple about PPC supply and development within two weeks.
If much of this is true, Apple would have interesting options.
IIRC, USB was an Intel spec. And intel shipped it, and it worked, and nobody - I do mean NOBODY - gave a shit. Good luck finding hardware, etceteras.
Then in late '98, Apple dropped the iMac bomb.
Not only were they using Intel's USB, they'd dropped everything else. You either got on the boat or you stayed behind. Now EVERYTHING ships with USB - a spec everybody refused to touch until Apple made it trendy and sexy to do so.
Apple + Intel == a very, very good thing. Both companies will get to bust ass doing what they're best at.
Feel the love.
Remember, a PC today is still based on the design of an XT. You've got bizarre things such as the 20th bit of the CPU addressing being disabled at boot time. Multiple interrupt controllers and DMA controllers cascaded off each other. You reboot a PC by sending a signal to the keyboard controller.
PC motherboards are really weirdly designed, and have accumulated quite the collection of weird hacks to work around the early flaws. Since Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility with older PCs, they can quite simply design a motherboard without all that crap in it. Enable the A20 line at boot. Replace the DMA and Interrupt controllers with better ones. Get rid of the memory gap between 640KB and 1MB.
Get rid of the legacy PC crap and it'll require some rather serious hacking to get the code to run on a standard PC.
I worked for IBM's fab in Vermont for 15 years.
They "cheated" on Apple in the early nineties, putting PPC production on hold, at a critical time for Apple to maxamize profits on other chips.
How many times do you need your "domestic partner" cheating on you before you bail on the relationship.
(Hi to all of my friends that laid off but came back as contractors!)
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
3) (Reserved for future use.)