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Speculation on Real Reasons Behind Apple Switch
/ASCII writes "There is an article over at Ars Technica with some insider information about the reasons behind Apples x86 switch, given that the new IBM processors seem to be a perfect fit for Apple. The article claims that Apple hopes to power its entire line, from Servers to desktops to iPods and other gadgets with Intel CPUs, and that by doing so, they will gain the same kinds of discounts that Dell get."
Does Apple really sell as much (volume-wise) as Dell does?
Congrats, you got the first post. Now go outside.
This is a really interesting take on the switch that I hadn't considered before. This move to intel makes all the sense in the world if Apple is trying to cram an intel processor inside the iPod, and for pure volume discounts alone, this could really help apple's overall profit margin.
I'd worry about putting all my eggs in one basket, but I suppose as far as baskets go, intel is a relatively safe bet overall.
:::: the insomniac's digest
Right now, Apple has to market Apple machines vs. Windows machines, and they are hard to compare. When the PPC is better, people don't believe it. They are either behind in performance or MHz/GHz, or something.
This lets a comparison with Dell/HP be VERY clear.
If the Apple hardware is $100-$200 more than a Dell, it is a straightforward question, is it worth this premium to get OS X. It makes for a straightforward comparison. In addition, if Apple's manfuacturing gets better (and they grow their share from the #8 player in the PC space to #3/#4, which is probably around a 10% market-share), then they can price equally to PC players and STILL make good margins, because they don't have to pay MS their fee.
Forget JUST the processor difference, they can really enter a straight competition with a minor price premium for a superior system... Plus, if Microsoft stumbles and looks vulnerable, they can compete in the OS market.
Also, think about Government/Corporate contracts. Someone can write an RFP: runs Linux + random software that is x86 only... or runs Office XP... Since the Apple can, they can now compete for that contract.
Lots of good things for Apple, and some minor fears for those of us suffering the transition. (I have in-house Cocoa apps that will now need to be QA'd on two platforms, even if development is "click a button.")
Alex
Doesn't the choice to change processor basically give Apple and their users more options? If Apple release hardware that can run not only their own much loved OSX operating system, but also Windows, Linux and *BSD that it removes one of the major arguments about getting an Apple. Namely, "I can't run XXX piece of software, it doesn't support Apple". As long as a dual or even triple boot is possible then I can't see any reason to not get an Apple.
Ultimately look at it this way, If the Mohammed won't come to the mountain, get a big crane and get ready to do some heavy lifting.
misspelled Teh
And why does Apple need to switch from plain-Jane ARM processors to Intel's greased-lightning XScale? What do they need that extra power for? Why, to bring back the Newton, of course!
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
My god, that's crappy. Don't preview, but at least make sure the selection box is on Plain Old Text, next time.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
Lord Steve may seem insane, but if so, one of his disorders is obsessive-compulsive. He would not pull such a major change as switching to Intel unless he had a thick contract in hand with every i dotted and t crossed.
If this theory is in fact the plan (for large values of if) then it's not just hope. It would be written in stone.
There is an article over at Ars Technica with some insider information about the reasons behind Apples x86 switch
Ars Technica is damn lucky it's not an apple fansite. Otherwise it would have been sued by Apple.
Inside the big switch: the iPod and the future of Apple Computer
By Jon "Hannibal" Stokes
Sunday, July 10, 2005
If you've been following the Apple-to-Intel transition, you're going to want to read this whole article. Why? Because I'm going to do something that I almost never do: spill insider information from unnamed sources that I can confirm are in a position to know the score. Note that this isn't the start of some kind of new trend for me. It's just that all this information that I've been sitting on is about to become dated, so it's time to get it out there.
As I said in my previous post on the 970MP and FX unveiling, the new PowerPC processor announcements from IBM raise a number of questions about timing, like, when will these parts be available? how long has IBM been sitting on them? why the apparently sudden leap in performance per watt on the same process after a year with so little improvement?
The announcements also raise serious questions about why, if these great parts were just around the bend, did Apple really jump ship for Intel? Was it performance, or performance per watt, as Jobs claimed in his keynote speech, or were there other, unmentioned factors at work?
I have some answers to those questions, and I'll pass them along below. However, those answers come complete with their own vested interests, so feel free to interpret them as you will.
First, let's talk about the broken 3GHz promise. It's apparent in hindsight that 3GHz on the 970 was never going to happen on a 90nm process without lengthening the 970's pipeline, which is a fairly significant change. Who knows why IBM promised Jobs 3GHz? All we know is that IBM tried to hit that target without the needed pipeline change, and missed it.
The laptop G5, which is the long-rumored and now-announced 970FX, has supposedly been ready to go into an Apple laptop since at least early last month. And for what it's worth, yes, Apple was offered the Cell and other game console-derived chips. In fact, IBM routinely discloses its entire PowerPC road map to Apple, so pretty much anything PPC that IBM puts out is not only not a surprise to Apple, but it's potentially available for Apple's use.
So why didn't Apple take any of these offers? Was it performance, as Jobs claimed in his keynote? Here's something that may blow your mind. When Apple compiles OS X on the 970, they use -Os. That's right: they optimize for size, not for performance. So even though Apple talked a lot of smack about having a first-class 64-bit RISC workstation chip under the hood of their towers, in the end they were more concerned about OS X's bulging memory requirements than they were about The Snappy(TM).
One of the major factors in the switch was something that's often been discussed here at Ars and elsewhere: Apple's mercurial and high-handed relationship with its chip suppliers. I've been told that the following user post on Groklaw is a fairly accurate reflection of the bind that Apple put itself in with IBM:
I've worked with Apple
Authored by: overshoot on Sunday, June 12 2005 @ 08:56 PM EDT
and I can tell you, there's a very good chance that they outsmarted themselves into a "no bid" response from IBM.
Part of Apple's longstanding complaint against IBM was that Apple would announce a new computer with a new IBM processor, sales would skyrocket, and IBM wouldn't have adequate supply. We've all heard the story. Here's my take:
Apple negitiate for a new processor chip. Being Apple, they want "most favored customer" treatment, with fab-fill margins for the vendor. What's more, they want this for what amounts to a custom processor chip, so any oversupply will just sit on the shelf until Apple decides they want them, and sometimes Apple will let them sit a while to see if they can get a price break -- it always pays to remind the world that one is, after all, the Steve Jobs.
With terms like that, custom chip vendors only start as many lots as the customer contracts to accept
If such a move was made, does this make AMD's anti-trust case against Intel more convincing?
Maybe now (because of the lawsuit), intel will not provide such deals to Apple. Is then, Apple in deep shit?
Yes!
Are u kidding, these G5 cpu's would melt the plastic cases they came in in seconds. yeah they may be good chips but to compete with the windows market this had to happen, a not so perfect fit after all.
To Hell with the Queen of England!
Apple is planning to do for hot air what they've done for music with iHeat, the world's first ergonomically-designed space heater. iHeat will be the first space heater to use Apple's exclusive scroll wheel technology for setting the temperature, and only Intel has what it takes to get the job done.
And what about men who are quite clear on their sexuality however deviating from mainstream it might be?
If they get their act together they will do Apple too.
Aren't these the same discounts that Intel is being sued for under anti monopoly laws?
This isn't a switch, Apple will continue to push both proc lines as it see fit. Xcode should make that possible.
I guess I can understand the advantage in maybe a midtier box or mainframe or larger, but it seems to me that any processor instructions not supported by the RISC chip would have to be emulated in software - and on a multimedia desktop PC I don't understand the advantage of RISC over CISC.
Can someone enlighten me?
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Irrespective of whether The Steve dealt properly with IBM, the reality is and has been for many years that developing their own CPU (or having it developed for them) was just too expensive for Apple.
The original idea of the Apple-IBM-Motorola coalition was that they would be able to compete with Intel by combining forces: CPUs for servers, workstations, and embedded systems; and by creating a third-party systems market to drive demand for these CPUs (PReP). This never really took off, so IBM and Motorola were stuck with having to compete with Intel for price/performance for a single customer that would only buy a fraction of what Intel and AMD would churn out. I have no idea how much it costs to keep up a competitive CPU architecture, but it must be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions per year.
Cell might be cheap, but it doesn't allow Apple to compete with PCs on a price/performance or performance/watt level. And paying IBM to continue to develop the 970 architecture was just too expensive: people might be willing to pay a bit more for Apple systems, but only so much.
Just look at all other contenders in the high performance CPU market: there's nobody left except for Sun and Fujitsu/Siemens, and they announced last year that they will cooperate on SPARC. From a pure market standpoint, Apple had little choice.
Intel have been working on something big. It was previously rumored that this something was the Pentium V and that Microsoft would be releasing a special version of Windows specifically for the processor.
"Windows Elements"?
What the hell is that? I'm thinking that the Pentium V has something so revolutionary that it prompted:
1) Microsoft to release a special version of Windows, specifically for the processor and,
2) Apple to change sides.
I also think that Intel expected to be much further along on the Pentium V at this point. It seemed like they were expecting to use it in order to quench AMD's 64-bit lead and, when the design was set back, they scrambled to come up with EMT64 as a stop gap solution.
So just what is this Pentium V and the "stackable" design, anyway? IMHO, it will be unified processor and NVRAM (not flash, something new). There will probably be at least a few gigs of a very fast NVRAM right on the processor. This NVRAM will be as fast or faster than SRAM so there will be no need for a cache or external system memory - the operating system will be installed right in the processor. The stackable design is for expansion.
Intel's NVRAM page. Nothing to indicate that any of this is true but some interesting reading, nonetheless. This could also explain MontaVista's PRAMFS.
If the backing-store RAM is comparable in access speed to system memory, there's really no point in caching the file I/O data in the page cache. Better to move file data directly between the user buffers and the backing store RAM, i.e. use direct I/O.
The second coming of Newton, a video iPod or perhaps a PSP killer. Or all of the above, but with an integrated cellphone. And a pony!
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
I have to post this anonymously... You'll see why below. The real reason Apple switched from IBM is because IBM just hasn't gotten their shit together with 90nm. I know this because I recently left a job at a large semi-conductor manufactorer that used IBM for our digital fab. IBM repeatedly promised, "we'll fix the problems in our process" for YEARS, and just couldn't get their act together. With run after run of silicon, IBM couldn't manufacture the parts correctly (or other other customers parts). Finally, my company became fed up, and bit the bullet to switch to another manufactorer. It was a 4 engineer year sunk cost (to update some the design), and the design worked out of the chute (and at pretty good yields). You heard it here first... IBM just doesn't have their shit together at 90nm.
The cold, hard reality here is that the Mac is Apple's past and the iPod is Apple's future.
I find it hard to believe that anyone who purports to know the inner goings-on at Apple could come up with such a ridiculous assertion. The author seems to believe that those products cannot exist in parallel...
Perhaps he's just trying to encourage debate, in which case IHBT.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
This is one of the dumbest posts I've seen in some time, and thats saying something. This doesn't even qualify for "Troll" status
Mod point free since 2001
"Intel CPUs, and that by doing so, they will gain the same kinds of discounts that Dell get. If price of cpu's were really such a big factor, AMD might have been alot more willing to offer discounts than Intel.
They claim -Os is to remove bloat, not increase performance :-) Thing is, for kernel type code the resulting code is actually _faster_ than with gcc -O2, since there is a lot less cache pressure.
The Fedora kernel people have benchmarked this quite a bit (and now compile kernels with -Os too), the difference is quite measurable, 5%:ish in some benchmarks.
Whatareyoutakingaboutthegppostwasperfectlyeasytore adbutwhatIlikedbestwasthathemanagedtousethebtagbut notbr.
You know, if you haven't RTFA, you should avoid trying to summarize it. That is in no way, shape or form what the article says.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Thanks - the image of Isaac Newton with two bolts to his head (and stitches) growling "I live again" will haunt me today.
Yep, that's why I always put a router between my Apple MAC and the Internet.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
It's too bad they didn't go with AMD processors instead. Then the iPod could have doubled as a hot plate / coffee warmer. That would be a useful technology fusion if you ask me. Far better than a crappy cell phone in an iPod!
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Hmm - ISTR ARM9 and above are faster, clock for clock, than the XScale.
NO YUO
Woah, you mean Apple is a for-profit business and its leaders have made a crucial decision to ensure future profitability?
Why, as an Apple user or an Apple stockholder would I not expect this? What about the WWDC keynote didn't already make this clear?
The reasons given in the media, by Apple, have included supply line issues with IBM based on performance, efficiency, heat, cost, and availability. What's so shocking here?
The "real" reason? Please. The posted needs to ask FOXNEWS for a job.
First off, I RTFA... It implies that the iPod & iTMS, not the Mac, could drive Apple's future. What is Apple without the Mac? What is Apple without OSX? If the simple answer is a "portable media player company with ties to the RIAA & MPAA", then so be it - But that answer is shortsighted. This can be seen by Microsoft's foray into this arena (witness Windows Media and Media Center PC's), along with Linux's abilities (Myth) in this same subset of the market. It's the Media stupid! The media is *not* the player. If Apple, which the article supposes, is out to drive the hand-held player market with it's technology, then it may very well succeed - In hand-helds that is. If it ignores the Mac as the center of *their* digital world, they may end up with a cute player and nothing more.
You are a liar and/or a troll.
Obviously you want people to flame you for spelling Mac in all caps when everyone knows MAC is something different.
And, you want people to flame you because you can right click with a 2 button mouse on a mac or control click with a single button, and of course you can't loose data from 'not being able to' use a contextual menu.
Please...
I've been upgraded to "bad"!
What's so insightful about this? The public statements Apple has made about this all explicitely refer to contract negotiations. "Insider information"? ... give me a break.
You know Apple's not the only PC manufacturer that's been pushy. Dell has been dropping hints about using AMD for some time now and you can believe that everytime they do, Intel gets to shell out for another advertising campaign or something. I mean, how much 'testing' does Dell have to do to magically realize (like everyone else has) that AMD has the upper hand in most performance areas? I say that Dell merely does this to get more consessions from Intel.
But look at it this way. Intel knows that Dell secretly fears Apple in it's space. What this is REALLY all about is Intel getting more leverage. I can just hear it...
INTEL: "Oh? What's this Dell? You want to use AMD? Ok, then I guess you won't need this advertising spiff more than Apple will..."
Intel is the real winner in this scenario, not Apple, although I have no doubt that Apple will thrive regardless.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Compiling with "-Os" (optimize for smaller code size) is not always at odds with speed, as is implied in the article.
While for some trivial benchmark code -O4 may generate faster code, for real-world applications keeping your code in cache is worth more than loop unrolling - so in real-world stuff often -Os is better than -O[2345].
www.eFax.com are spammers
With its switch to Intel, Apple is going to succeed where MS couldn't: build a "proprietary" PC that doesn't rely on anything legacy such as the BIOS.
Nearly everything except the BIOS will be standard on the Mactel platform. Seems to me like the perfect occasion to introduce a "trusted", DRM-enabled platform from the ground up.
Now Apple can tell the RIAA & MPAA: on our platforms, your stuff will be secure.
The desktop wars are over. Commodity IBM PC-compatibles with Microsoft OSes and Intel chips won. Sure the market is HUGE and niche markets (even #1 player Dell doesn't dominate the market, it owns the niche for moderately supported business machines with semi-custom orders) remain extremely profitable if done right, but Intel and Microsoft have extracted most of the profits. Even highly innovative AMD can only capture 20% of the market.
.Mac system, where the cost of the storage is going to zero but their annual subscribers are growth.
.Mac subscription (or some similar number). That means that Apple can sell a low-margin system like the Mini, pocket $100 on the system, and hope to grab another $200-$300 in software sales over the system's lifetime... So a $500 Mac Mini sale is as good for Apple as a $2000 PowerMac with 40% margins was 5 years ago.
In 1996 Fortune interviewed Steve Jobs and asked him what he would do if still running Apple. He responded that he would "milk the Mac for all it is worth and move on to the next big thing."
This doesn't mean that those of us with an investment in Apple hardware (or more risky, custom Cocoa software like we have) mean that Apple is going to abandon the Mac....
They are going the milk it for all it is worth.
With OS X, we have a NeXTSTEP/Mac fusion that Steve likes, and Apple will keep profitably pushing out software updates that they sell, but that isn't Apple's growth.
Their growth operations: software, when Steve rejoined they had recently gone from free OS upgrades to selling two upgrades, OS 7 and OS 7.5, IIRC, maybe 6 was sold as well.
Now, Apple sells new OS Versions every 1 - 2 years. They put out an iLife upgrade annually. They will probably put out iWork annually. And they replaced their free iTunes system with a nicely growing
The average Mac customer pre-Jobs bought a Mac and used it for 6 years.
The average Mac customer post-Jobs buys a Mac, and uses it for 3-4 years with 2 OS upgrades, 1 or 2 software purchases, and 20% of a
Apple will keep innovating the Mac to milk the cash cow... They will NOT enter price-wars or otherwise fight with MS or Dell or HP for market-share. They will milk the cash cow, try to execute and expand markets, but they are NOT interested in growing to a 10% market with the SAME profits as now by cutting their margins by 75% which would make the software developers happy.
It isn't a zero-sum game, they are selling the iMac or Mac Mini as a digital life system. Sure you have a Windows machine for whatever... but add a Mac Mini and a KVM (and annual OS X + iLife upgrades) to easily put your kid's Soccer Games on DVD and send to his grandparents. That is their "growth" strategy.
It isn't a bad strategy, but selling easy-to-use digital toys is how Apple is a growth company, and Microsoft is becoming a mature company that will steadily increase its annual dividend.
Good for Steve Jobs, good for Apple shareholders, and hopefully good for its customers as long as Apple keeps putting out new products that we want to buy because we are the cash cow to be milked, but we aren't going to benefit from price cuts from a price war because market-share and PC growth just don't interest Apple...
That said, I'm sure at some level Apple sees Linux entering the network market for office networks, and realizes that with the best (and easiest to use) desktop Unix... he can enter that market. If you like Linux, if Apple gets the BEST WINELIB performance, the BEST Qt performance, and best Gtk performance, and has KDELIB and GNOMELIB ported... well how tough is it that Apple is able to compete with Linux for SOME share of the corporate desktop market.
Apple is in a position to make SOME gains in PC market-share, but growing back to 10-20% over 10 years isn't giant tech growth... the iPod and OTHER SIMILAR projects is.
It's a smart business move, and Apple has set themselves up to grow profits steadily in their core markets, and then swing for the fences with new products like the iPod, iTMS, etc.
Alex
And all this time I thought putting the "Intel Inside" stickers on the MACs when I was in in college was a cruel gag done to piss off the MAC users. Not I'm a bloomin' prophet.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Actually it would seem that YOU are the TROLL around here.
My personal theory of what's going to happen over the long term is that Microsoft will discover the benefits of running on a closed hardware device (no more pesky driver problems from marginal hardware makers!) and will port Windows to the Intel Mac where it becomes a best seller.
Chip H.
IIRC i read that the new iPod will be moving to use 2 ARM9 processors, instead of the current set up(2xARM7 and a ARM9). ARM9 processors are generaly 'quicker' than XScale processors, not necessarily more MHz but like for like, ARM performs better! (trust me i work for ARM)!!!
.
First, we had the Wintel monopoly.
Then some competitors came along and the non-Intel processors running Windows carved out a large enough market share to justify splitting the terms off into ChipZilla and Wintendo.
Now, we have MAC going Intel. What the HELL do we call this?
MacTel?
Intelmac?
Apptel?
Intenapple?
What terms can we use now???
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Is it just me, or are the "insiders" who can't even spell just a tad less than credible?
Why can't anyone take the announcement at face value? Clearly IBM (and Moto/Freescale) don't want to develop new top-end chips for a small market. Who can blame them?
But Intel is going to build their next generation anyway. Apple's small marketshare is meaningless in this context, they're in a race with AMD for a huge market no matter what else happens.
Let's remember that Intel has been courting Apple for well over a decade now. They're also clearly unhappy with the crappy boxes being offered by their existing vendors. Having Apple onboard making cool products with their systems must be a dream come true -- "See, THIS is what an Intel machine can do".
But no, not enough of a conspiracy in that I suppose.
Why does this surprises us at all? It was a bit obvious that the switch had to do more with money (since IBM didn't want to lower their prices for Apple) than by the mere ideology of which processor Apple feel is better. Hello, wake up.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Ohhhhh.
The perfect camping hardware.
It's a grill, it's a music player.
What do you call Smores made with an iPod?
iSmore?
iSugar?
If they can keep decent battery life, I see this as a perfect chunk of camping hardware. It would still be cool in the office though. You could get a decent coffee maker attachment for your iPod!
Of course the filters for the iFrenchPress would be three times as expensive as filters for a regular coffee maker, even though the only difference is the Apple logo, but because it's an iProduct, people will eat it up.
Well, drink it up.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
-1 Troll
These posts are seen on Slashdot all the time, and they're still incredibly annoying.
You, sir, seem to be suffering from a serious humor deficiency.
My recommendation: Go read America's finest news source until you begin to laugh again. Then come back here.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
mmmm Throughput.... Tastes like... vectory....
I love to slaughter the english language.
My Powerbook boots faster than my new Thinkpad. So this could go the other way. Apple fans could find that the Apple hardware my behave considerably different. Even if not, now Apple has to compete with high-end gamer boxes when trying to be the fastest. Perhaps they won't try to be the fastest, but faster than Dell/HP. It's going to get very interesting, to say the least.
What is so surprising is that so many people don't understand that it was illogical for Apple to use higher-priced parts for 20 years just to be different.
I expect further incursions of logic into Apple's business practices. The use of aftermarket motherboards and fungible accessories, e.g.
Its days as an iconoclast are over.
Which means its days as a boutique development shop are over.
So if you're a hardware designer working for Apple, you'd better either start sucking up hard hoping you're one of the few who are kept, or start buffing your resume', and maybe learning Chinese.
This is no troll. This is business, and Apple finally joined up.
I tried using the MAC cloning feature of my router, but websites still kept on identifying my machine as running Windows...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
I'm wondering if the 360 has something to do with this, or if it at the very least nudged Jobs over the edge.
;-)
Hear me out. Most people have heard about Jobs' pathological reaction when he loses face, and everyone knows that he *hates* Bill Gates, right?
So awhile back Jobs' predicts 3Ghz G5's in 2005 (which I guess became the "3GHZ Promise"). IBM fails to deliver. However, Microsoft announces shortly before E3 that the 360 will use a 3.2 GHZ triple-core G5. I can only imagine that Jobs was pissed on some level that Bill Gates trumping him in Apple territory.
Of course, there have been a few reports that the 360's G5 is essentially crippled, and that the chip will effectively be only twice as fast as the original xbox's cpu. Even if it's true, I don't think that changes anything. Jobs may have figured figured (and I'd be inclined to agree) that even if the 360 chip is not really as powerful as it seems, it represents time&effort that IBM was dedicating elsewhere instead of working on improving it's offerings to Apple.
In fact, when you consider that IBM is working w/ Sony and Nintendo on other customized G5's, it seems pretty clear where Apple stands in terms of priority. Not that I blame IBM -- why the hell would you care about the rantings of Steve Jobs when you are going to be selling your product to 3 out of the 3 biggest players in the console market, with each one amounting to way more sales that what you'd ever get with Apple.
Not sure if it's the case, but it sounds plausible enough. At least he kept the promise though, right?
No he doesn't. In fact he expicitly states that in the article:
Yes, I saw that. However, he states unequivocally that (A==B) in the middle of the article and then states just as firmly that (A!=B) at the end; this is a poor example of communication. The author should not expect those two statements to carry equal weight - which does he actually believe? The disclaimer-like language in the last paragraph struck me as an effort to weasel out of the strong point he tried to make earlier.
As an aside, I don't read this guy's column and was not inclined to look for the "previous article" he mentioned.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I suppose Einstein, with his hairdo, will make a fitting bride of Frankenstein... :)
Think about this folks.
Apple did everything ti could to kill the old architecture. What better way to force people to upgrade to OS X software than make it impossible to run "Classic Mode" applications without the performance hit from running a PPC emulator on Intel?
And think about this, IBM is a major force behind Linux. What's an OS that's a threat to Apple? Gee, you think the FREE Unix based OS with the most momentum could be a threat? In which case, why on Earth would they want to pay money to IBM, a company contributing vast swaths of code to Linux, one of Apple's competitors, and an OS it's trying to steal developers FROM.
And by the way, this switch makes it easier to lure Linux and BSD developers away from their OS of choice.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I wonder what The Steve will break in a fit of rage if and when AMD's case against Intel results in a ruling that renders the volume deal illegal and void. You'd almost think that AMD (lawsuit) and IBM (PPC announcements, Cell) banded together to flip The Steve the finger after he had already made the decision.
That means that they're clearly confused.
In all the discussion of Apple's switch to Intel I haven't seen any mention of an interesting possibility: That the switch will enable Apple to sell Windows computers.
Why would Apple want to do that? Because Apple is a very vulnerable company. Right now the iPod gives them the illusion of stability and market security. But they need to keep innovating to sell iPods and Macs. They are currently on a several year winning streak. But what if things don't continue to go so well?
It isn't hard to imagine Apple strategists asking questions like, "How can we use Microsoft's market dominance to OUR advantage?" One answer might be to sell Windows computers. They would compete with Dell and offer Windows users computers that cost the same as Dell's, plus Apple styling and a Windows/OSX dual boot. Maybe better performance too. This would remove huge barriers to OSX
And it could give Apple the stable revenues they need to survive and to keep making the kinds of products their user base loves them for. Apple would continue to be Apple, but it would have a much more secure position in the market. What about it?
(trust me i work for ARM)!!!
This simply means you have a vested interest and are therefore less trustworthy. Aside from that, multiple exclamation points are a sure sign of mental disturbances.
You must be new here.
The Pentium V "tejas" was canceled.
0 0.asp
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,116053,
Especially the menion of Ovonyx- apparently, they may well be finally commercializing Ovshinski's toy in something other than rewriteable CD's and DVD's. Not that Stanford Ovshinski's discovery is anything but amazing- it's just that it's taken them over three decades (They'd discovered this tech in the 60's and developed the first ORAM, or Ovonic RAM, back in the early 70's.) just to see the real fruits thereof and to have part of the big boys to take long enough to take them seriously. Can't wait to see their uber-Flash finally take off and to see some of Ovshinski's other brain children to leave the nest- there's some pretty impressive things that he's come up with using amorphous materials tech... This includes rechargeables using fuel cell tech (!) and amorphous solar cells that produce more juice than just about anything else (save the nanotech ones which are in the same power class...) and make solar a viable possibility for power generation.
Now, having said all of this, PRAMFS isn't a response to this tech, per se, because of the company in question (Embedded systems have something resembling this sort of thing in many cases, using battery backed RAM disks, etc...)- but it's NICE to know that they have something akin to this in hand in development because if they DO release the OVRAM product idea in it's current incarnation, we'll have a leg up and be able to hit the ground running with Linux using something like this out the gate.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It'll be interesting to see if OS X runs comparable apps faster or slower when they're running on nearly-identical hardware.
.02 or .04 seconds to run, as long as it is still responsive.
Benchmarks and even performance measurement of real apps isn't all of it. One nice thing about Apple is that they usually look at the subjective performance as well. Sometimes an app will work slower but feel "snappier" because of good human-factors design, and in many cases that's actually more important. If you're writing a document it doesn't much matter whether the spell check takes
But even without that, it'll be interesting to see whether OS X or Windows is actually "faster" for certain benchmarks, just to answer some of these questions once and for all.
It's been obvious for a while that the "real reason" is that Apple's needs are met better by Intel's roadmap than IBM's, and Apple doesn't have enough marketshare to make it worthwhile to change that.
Yes, the new 970FX chips are an improvement over the current tech. On the other hand, it's not mind-blowing compared to Intel's current line-up, much less what's in the pipeline. I'm supposed to be impressed by an announced 13W @ 1.4GHz and 16W @ 1.6GHz when Intel has been selling 10W @ 1.5GHz for months?
Even the dual-core Yonah core, slated for volume production first quarter of 2006, is quoted as staying within a 25W envelope @ 2.13GHz. Speeds for the low voltage, ultra low voltage, and single core parts aren't released yet, but Intel has made it clear that it's aggressively pursuing lower power designs and that notebooks based on the next generation of chips will "use approximately 33% less power".
except that IBM is already supposed to be shipping 90 nm CPUs, isn't he?
You forgot to mention the "Intel inside" sticker on his forehead.
As to Overshoot's comments, no.
The 970 wasn't intended to be a "custom processor chip." Had IBM hit its performance targets, it would have had ample alternative outlets for the 970. The great speculation was that IBM would push its own line of inexpensive 970 based Linux servers. But IBM wasn't up to the task.
And the suggestion that Apple isn't flush with cash? Again, no. Apple's sitting on a mountain of it.
Finally, Apple, no matter how egotistical its corporate culture may be, would never think itself large enough to bully Intel for volume discounts.
No, the reason Apple has switched is because marketing told it to stop fighting the dominate paradigm. When the Macintosh runs on the same base hardware as everyone else, marketing can concentrate on the OS and sundry applications. Sure, Intel *probably* sweetened the offer knowing that Apple's cutting edge design would reflect well on it. And the Apple premium will probably justify selling top of the line chips, forcing Dell and the like to buy premium chips for marketing purposes.
The only thing surprising about the decision to go with Intel is the fact that Apple thinks it technologically and commercially feasible to run on multiple architectures. Once Apple became convinced of their ability to do so, the decision made itself.
I thought this story was about Real switching exclusively to Apple. Unless the term you wish to create a page for is a proper noun, do not capitalize second and subsequent words.
rofl, that made my evening. Thanks for the laugh :)
and older Imac tray loading 266 mghz for my daughter to put some of her educational software on that she never uses - I put ubuntu on there and I love it.
I like the bios/eeprom of the machine and overall design - I upgraded the hard drive and memory and I got decent machine that I can move into any room.
It blows my old intel pentium two away at the same speed that I had at one time. it is much quicker and more responsive - the upgraded hard drive even made it quicker.
> Right now, Apple has to market Apple machines vs. Windows
> machines, and they are hard to compare. When the PPC is better,
> people don't believe it. They are either behind in performance or
> MHz/GHz, or something.
I don't believe it either, and it's not "just marketing".
I bought a 17" 1 GHz PowerBook G4 back in April 2003. Then in January 2005, the hard drive failed on that PowerBook, and I didn't have time to deal with it (and I couldn't be without my PowerBook), so I went out and bought a 17" 1.5 GHz PowerBook. A month later, I finally got around to swapping out the hard drive in the first 17" PowerBook, and I gave it to my wife.
My intention was to replace my PowerBook G4 with a PowerBook G5, but to my shock, there wasn't a G5 PowerBook.
When I took home my new PowerBook, it was almost exactly like my previous PowerBook. The first 17" PowerBook G4s were released in January 2003 and in the two years that had elapsed, there was no real difference in performance. In fact, I forgot that I had actually replaced my PowerBook -- that's how similar they were.
Note that while desktop machines are stagnating in sales, laptops are where the growth is. The fact that Apple's flagship portable had basically remained the same for two years is horrible. Contrast this with the changes in operating system. Mac OS X 10.4 is wildly better than the OS that came with my previous PowerBook. So from a software perspective, Apple's doing great. From a hardware perspective, the changes just aren't keeping up.
Ars seems to downplay the fact that IBM missed their 3 GHz target for the G5. More than that, they missed the laptop ready version of the G5, which some could argue is even more serious. People seem to want to blame Jobs or Apple's arrogance, but the point is, IBM hasn't been delivering. Results matter, and Apple's hardware is falling behind. Jobs is a smart guy to say, "we can't keep doing this" and he found a solution in Intel. I say, good for him. Now give me a laptop where two years of progress is noticeable.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
I wonder what The Steve will break in a fit of rage if and when AMD's case against Intel results in a ruling that renders the volume deal illegal and void.
Good point
You'd almost think that AMD (lawsuit) and IBM (PPC announcements, Cell) banded together to flip The Steve the finger after he had already made the decision.
That, I don't believe. More likely, Apple was simultaneously bargaining a deal with AMD, IBM, Intel, Sony - and anyone else they could hustle. IBM lost, but being grown-ups didn't complain about an ex customer.
AMD, on the other hand lost a deal that could have been a (near) deathblow to their archenemy intel. Since they lost it the same way they have been loosing all major deals, they finally decided it was time to make a stand.
--
Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there -- Sydney J. Harris
Seems to back up this fairly depressing review of Tiger/G5 I've just finished reading. Say benchmarkers comparing Tiger to Linux on XEON:
Top level of the review here. Note this review is really only relevant to high load server applications.
at Ars was from the author of the article Jon "Hannibal" Stokes
"If Intel's volume discounts aren't the reason for the switch to x86, and this was purely about performance, then Apple would've gone with AMD's Opteron."
He is right (mostly). Apple went with Intel over AMD due to price/discounts, and probably also partly due to volume (the amount Apple needs is miniscule compared with the amount Intel makes, whereas with AMD, its still not sizable chunk, no greater than 10%, but about six times more when expresed as a percentage of total chips shipped.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I can't dismiss your post, but I swallow it with a very large grain of salt.
The true reason? :)
Power comsumption! Burning iBooks just drain the battery too fast
My own tinfoil theory on the switch isn't only that Apple had grown weary of IBM's under-delivering, but also that IBM could not afford to keep Apple as a customer.
;)
Limited fab capacity? Check
Huge orders coming in from next generation console manufacturers? Check
Struggling to meet future demand, IBM had to choose between Apple and console manufacturers. IBM chose the latter.
just my 2cp, of course
To... get... a... discount... DUH!
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
The Xbox 360, PS3, and the Revolution are all supposed to be powered by PPC chips. IBM Can't keep demand as it is. Alot of time and effort will be placed on the console gaming system chips. Apple had to leave IBM becuse there is no way IBM would have kept up with demand.
Apple can allocate their OS Development costs whereever they want. The can "charge" the hardware division $30/machine (or whatever the MS fee is) and try to make their hardware division compete with the Dell and HPs over the world, they can charge $100 to allocate development costs, or they can charge it $0 and make the Software division make its money from selling "upgrades."
:)
The marginal cost of one extra copy of OS X is ZERO, so Apple DOESN'T have to factor that in. Fixed costs need to be recovered, but Apple DOESN'T need to factor it into the profit margin discussions.
Cost accounting is an entire field of accounting, not a Slashdot thread...
Alex
With all the horseshit I've seen on this topic, I knew there had to be a pony around here somewhere.
Some guy at Ars quotes some guy on Groklaw named "overshoot" who says he "worked with Apple." Very contrived scenario is presented, "The Steve" is teh suck. IBM rules (and is a "Class bunch".) Steve should stop lying and just admit that Apple is a gadget company (...and get out of computers?)
There is even a wonderful RFT (request for trolls) in the update section for those "Mac Faithful" hovering undecidedly over the send button in Apple Mail(tm)
Overall, I give it a 4 on the John C. Dvorak "I can't believe I get paid for this" scale.
I've seen Apple's Pony offerings. Smaller than a clydesdale, no wireless. Lame.
For long-time Apple watchers, this was pretty much anticipated.
Back in the 1996, when Jobs was still at NeXT, he gave an interview where he said, "The PC wars are over. Microsoft won a long time ago. If I were the head of Apple, I would milk the Mac for all it's worth and then move on the next big thing."
Granted, the Mac has come a long, long way since 1996, and for the first time is being taken seriously in the enterprise, with its Unix underpinnings. But Apple's chance of dethroning Microsoft? Practically nil, and Jobs knows it. The Mac is destined to forever be a boutique computer. But hey, it's still generating a lot of revenue for the company, and when Apple goes to the bargaining table with IBM or Intel, it allows them to factor in several million more processors that they need when arguing for a volume discount, so it serves a purpose.
I'm kind of surprised that Apple hasn't yet latched onto the idea of using the Mac Mini as a media center PC, but maybe that's still coming. Especially if Apple is developing a video iPod; record TV on your Mac Mini, upload it to your iPod for later viewing. Or connect your iPod to the Mac Mini, and stream content to your TV (rather than trying to watch it on a 2" screen).
Honestly, how popular are movies going to be on the iPod and the PSP? I really can't see that segment of the market being more than a curiosity.
OpenLDAP / Kerberos is a dream on OS X, and a nightmare on Linux.
:)
:)
For a while I had ONE OS X Server (now I have 3, one in each location) to serve up LDAP and Kerberos... and some AFP/NFS shares because I can.
mod_auth_kerb for authentication on Webservers
netatalk for kerberized AFP to Linux machines
If you need any COOL networking, the open source/open standards that underlie OS X rock...
Join Joel of AFP548.com in bugging me to finish my RHEL 4 on a OS X Network write-up...
Alex
By the same logic, Mercedes should use cheap GM engines. Like Rolls Royce did for many years. In fact, the Rolls Royce was basically a GM truck with a more carefully assembled engine and a very expensive body. And look at them now. Owned.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
the switch was because IBM's chips were to hot, they were making good speed, but apple had to water cool the things, they will be able to get higher speed and lower temps with the new systems, and stay competative. IBM just maxed out there tech for the time being.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
It isn't about market-share. The win/loss is as follows:
:)
Businesses care (should care) about the net present value of business decisions.
If you can establish a monopoly in say, 5 years, like MS did going from 3.1 -> 95, then it is okay to make "okay" profits or even losses for 5 years because the NPV of a 10+ year monopoly is HUGE. Otherwise, market-share is IRRELEVANT, because it doesn't get you monopoly rents.
Job's doesn't win/lose based on market-share.
He wins/loses based upon the NPV of future cash flows based upon his current decisions, which will effect Apple's long term financial outlook and whether he has returned an adequate return to his investors based upon the estimated Risk premium of Apple's business.
Right now, based upon Wallstreet's evaluations, he has returned a terrific ROI to shareholders from the time he joined Apple. However, now Wallstreet pays more for a dollar of Apple's earnings, so to maintain that ROI, he needs to increase his cash flow faster to make an investor in 2005 happy.
He doesn't fail if market-share is 5%, he fails if he fails to make an adequate return to his investors.
Alex
You didn't work for Xilinx did you? -Altera Boy
WTF? What pocket universe have you been living in? One of Apple watchers' biggest complaints about APPL is that they have been sitting on a tremendous amount of cash for years, when they could have spent some of it to shore up their market position in many, many different ways. I argue that one of the biggest mistakes Apple made was not buying Netscape before Sun and AOL divided and conquered it, or CS&T/Steltor before Oracle subsumed it. Think of where Apple might be today if we had an improved Netscape SuiteSpot running on Mac OS X. What if Apple spent some of those billions in cash developing a successot to the Apple Network Servers to run the above server software? Wouldn't you like to see a product that could absolutely destroy Microsoft Exchange using Internet Standard protocols?
And, speaking of Oracle, how many years did Larry Ellison sit on Apple's board without producing an Oracle server for an Apple platform? But, I digress..
Motorola in particular, has written off hundreds of millions of dollars in losses caused directly by the erratic actions of Apple Computer
Umm, how about..."Motorola in particular, has written off billions of dollars in losses caused directly by the erratic actions of Motorola? Hey, let's just completely ignore MOT's complete mishandling of the entire PowerPC agreement/concept. We weren't stuck at 500MHz because of Apple--it was MOT's inability to make a gracful transition to a new process line that caused *that*. Not to mention Motorola switching all internal operations machines to WinTel and ditching *their own product* in favor of a competitors?
And how, exactly is the example of one of IBM's "regular" customers in any way relevant to Apple? You may have forgotten that Apple *owns*, at least partially, the PowerPC IP, not to mention the fact that *no other manufacturer* uses PowerPC in a general purpose computing application, other than Apple and IBM, themselves. Yes, IBM has "other customers", but none of these have the same needs or relationship with IBM that Apple has. IBM is doing as much damage to their own product line by not moving the Power and PowerPC lines forward as aggressively as possible, unless of course IBM intends to pawn off their workstation, mini, and mainframe lines to China, as well...
The bottom line is, no matter how much Hannibal would like to wish it otherwise, IBM screwed up royally, and in the process, screwed Apple and Steve Jobs. You may want to go back and read my Slashdot post from 2005-04-15 to see my evaluation of the possibility of Apple moving to Intel (which , I may add, was well before any speculation/rumors on the part of C|Net or the WSJ).
May I direct you to http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=146200&c id=12245408 ?
And I quote:
Maybe your design sucked. Or maybe you're from Xilinx.
I think IBM had the ability to produce chips that were what Apple wanted in terms of power (as the article points out - the newer batch of PowerPC chips are more like what they want).
What does Intel have that IBM didn't? Better support for DRM type stuff in the processor. From http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,1 2449,1504558,00.html
Here's my theory. Steve Jobs has a long-term goal to position Apple as 'the' online media company. He already dominates the online music business with the iTunes/iPod combination. Now he wants to repeat the trick with online movies.
But Hollywood studios won't do a deal with him because they are worried about piracy. They want a platform with rock-solid 'digital rights management' (DRM) built in. And it just so happens that Intel has been moving technical mountains to build strong DRM into its processor architecture, whereas IBM doesn't see it as a priority.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Oh, you stupid people, you don't grasp what's really happenning here. I have to tell you everything.
:-D
Apple is turning to Intel because The Evil Empire (AKA Microsoft) will at last buy 100% Apple stock and Mac OS X 11.0 will be the much-hyped Longhorn.
Think of the switch like this:
Having the ability to switch to Intel processors makes sense because IBM now sees that switching over to x86 completely is quite credible.
Beforehand Apple hadn't any credible threats of going to another supplier, and wasn't a big enough customer of IBM to demand lower prices.
What will be interesting, is how Apple will market it's boxen, no they can't get away with saying G4s etc. are actually much quicker processors yada yada. Expect much more competitive prices from Apple!
John.
I expect that apple is aware that they've got a target on their asses as far as portable media is concerned. Everyone is following their lead, but they're going to get caught in Apple's dust only so often before they catch up in one way or another.
Every incremental advance Apple makes in interface or capabilities for their media devices can only stay a true advantage for 5 to 6 months before some company hacks a piss-poor mass-marketable approximation.
One way they can again leap ahead of the competition is to introduce a complete system for video instead of a gradual release of supporting products.
If apple can integrate DRM into a MythTV style family mac to satisfy content providers, produce a vPod and begin offering H.264 video content on the iTunes "Media" Store, they will have a fully integrated solution available for the public at least a year before anyone could compete directly with them.
That would mean a rise in hardware sales, a tighter grip over portable media content sales, and a glut of leverageable IP patents for future licensing.
Gross speculation? Of course, but is it possible? Certainly.
:::: the insomniac's digest
It could be, you know, that they're looking say, a bit further out that six months from now. Come on, people. Do you honestly think Apple made this decision spur of the moment? Do you think they didn't talk to both Intel and IBM in depth. Do you think IBM wouldn't have shown them their future roadmap and do everything to keep a large client and likewise do you think Intel wouldn't have done the same in order to get a new client? The switchover isn't going to be complete for a couple of years and even then there will be a bit of a transition period before much of a benefit and "x96 mac only" apps start to appear. Whether or not Apple was correct will remain to be seen but this decision was based on where they see things being 5, 7 or 10 years from now. Not on whatever new chips IBM is going to have tomorrow or on comparing them to the chips Intel has today. Any new "news" we hear about this chip or that being released in the next year isn't going to be news to Apple, isn't going to affect their decision and isn't going to be mean much as far as judging whether their decision will end up being the correct one or not. So... let's just keep our heads, shall we?
mark parent up!
RISC is a type of instruction set, of which the ARM instruction set is one. ARM also refers to the company that created it, to several of the processors they themselves produced (e.g. ARM 2, ARM 3, ARM 600, StrongARM) and to the cores they sell to other people.
XScale form Intel will cost less then ARM from anyone else as they will probably get deep discounts for using general processors/chipsets in their Server/Desktop/laptop line and XScale in their ipod/consumer electronics line.
no sig yet
The human mind has a ridiculous ability to nasty rationalize situations into something more palitable.
"I'm a fat, stupid, lazy pig and my spouse just left me"
becomes
"I was too fucking hot for my spouse"
Not that that example has anything to do with IBM and Apple...
Put more bluntly, Apple is switching to Intel so that Wine and VirtualPC/VMWare will work at full speed. Right now, I know many many people who would switch to a Mac in an instant, except they need some small, vertical application that only runs on Windows. By switching to Intel, Apple gets the opportunity to build Windows compatibility into their OS (using WINE code, customised) and capitalize on that market.
I'm not looking for this to be good enough to kill the market for native Mac apps (let's face it: emulating Windows is hard)--just good enough to let me continue using the 2-3 windows applications that I absolutely must have to do my business.
I can tell you this: the instant an Intel-based powerbook is available, I will be buying it so that I can run Windows in VMWare (or equivalent software) and get rid of my Windows laptop at long last. It's a convenience thing.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Is this the same IBM that co-develop fab tech with AMD, who currently have the lowest power consumption 90nm core available?
IIRC, SOI and strained silicon are both IBM patents that Intel has been itching to get their hands on, but IBM will only license them in exchange for IP that Intel isn't willing to part with. As such, Intel's current deeply piplelined, high clock arch is kinda sunk on their current 90nm process.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Ahh, the tinfoil hat conspiracy mongering at Slashdot.
While I'm sure Intel chips will cost Apple less than the IBM chips, and could lower their costs, this wasn't about price. This was about saving Apple from death in the PC business.
Fact: despite the early promise of PowerPC, Intel's offerings are beating the dog shit out of that line. There's no comparison in performace. Yes, PPC does more work per clock cycle, but they're so far behind in terms of clock speed that it doesn't matter. There is no megahertz myth here. Clock speeds DO matter. And no one making PPC chips, Freescale nor the mighty IBM, can keep up with Intel. For PCs, Intel is the king . AMD makes some better desktop offerings, has some better prices, but doesn't have Intel's product range, especially in laptops.
Make no mistake...while OSX is the best PC operating system on the market, the supporting hardware was starting to suck. Compared to the PC world, most of Apple's offerings were stuck in late-90's levels of hardware performance, while charging a premium price. Is it any wonder that some anaylists were predicting a drop of Apple's market share to around 1.5 percent by 2008?
Apple did this so they could be a viable competitor. That's it. Intel has better chips, especially for portables. No one makes anything as good as the Pentium M for laptops. Not AMD. And certainly not IBM. Big Blue was never going to get a G5 into a Powerbook anytime soon. And when they did, it would still lag performance-wise (especially in battery usage) compared to it's Intel rivals.
Apple cannot survive at their present size on Ipods alone. This was a cold, calculated decision by Jobs and Co. to get competitive again. You can now take off those foil hats.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It's an old handle. For those who do more gaming than engineering, it has to do with signal integrity. Which in turn has to do with how I know things about being an Apple chip supplier.
As for anonymity, I rather doubt that said Apple supplier would appreciate being named. Deal with it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
They were supposed to hit 3.0GHz many months ago, and they still haven't. They're stuck at 2.7GHz, well, at least the current chip is. The next chip IBM has announced (last week) tops out at 2.5GHz. How's that for progress?
And the yields. Ugh. The 90nm G5s became "available", but were only used in the XServe for a long time because so few chips were available they couldn't spare any for desktops.
The real thing is they were supposed to produce a chip useable in a laptop a year ago, but they still haven't, well, perhaps the one just announced. But I think that was just too late. And it's still not going to get the battery life of a Dothan or Yonah CPU.
There's an additional issue at play here. Currently Apple designs their own north and south bridges, to go with the CPUs. This takes a lot of Apple's time and costs a lot to do. And north bridges are getting far more complex. To make a truly cost-competitive mainstream machine (think iMac G5 or Mac Mini) in the future, you're going to have to have a north bridge with built-in video. That will add a lot more difficulty/cost/time to designing a north bridge. But if you go Intel, the 955 has pretty good (non-gamer) video built-right in. And it's only going to get better by the time Apple ships their machines.
But really, it comes down to what the other poster said. IBM can't get it together on the PPC at 90nm. I saw a couple of the timelines of machines Apple planned to make. Every 6 months a new timelime would come out, removing machines because the promised high speed, high yield or low power chips didn't appear on time. There's only so much of that Apple could take I guess.
I'd dig a pony. And they can integrate any chip they want, yes, they can integrate any chip they want!
Just add grass!
Pentium M x86-64, and Centrino/Son of Centrino chipsets.
Please. Apple couldn't even eat the scraps off the Sony PSP table. Doesn't matter how many stupid U2 commercials they throw behind it. Portable (or otherwise!) gaming takes developers, which Apple doesn't have and never has. Hence, the perpetually sorry state of gaming on the mac.
The only company that could touch the PSP is Nintendo and even that is in question, due to their Sega-esque "3 headed monster" portable offerings of the Advance, DS, and advance successor.
Microsoft could buy their way in, but they want your living room, not your backpack....but I digress.
I don't buy this for one second. The article basically boils down to "Apple is switching their whole line to Intel to get better deals on Xscale CPUs". The iPods currently run a cute little dual code ARM7, which I am guessing costs them about $3-5 dollars (maybe less) in the volume they get them. To move to the latest XScale from Intel, even with REALLY good discount I think they'd have to be paying on the order of $20-25 per chip. Low volume vendors pay around $40.
Also, the Xscale is not the most power friendly ARM cpu in the world - far more expensive than the current ARM7 the iPods use.
So unless you really need the power of an Xscale (and an Xscale won't be able to decode video at a resolution high enough to pipe to a TV), then you don't use it.
With volume manufacture, every cent of cost comes directly off the bottom line and you use the absolute minimal parts that will get the job done.
While Apple may put out an Xscale device, I really doubt they switched their entire line to get a few dollars discount on the CPU purchase.
Damnit - I wanted my nick to be "WouldIPutMYRealNameOnSlashdot"
Don King would be better.
We are porting (planning to) an app from a CURLhandle (a libCURL wrapper) to CFNetwork. I poked through Tiger CFNetwork code, and see references to compiling on Win32.
I have seen it in other parts of Apple's code.
I believe Apple maintains Yellowbox/Win32 (which was their name for OpenSTEP/Windows) at least for their internal apps. Remember, NeXTSTEP (whatever the hell the capitalization was) was a brilliant if ahead of their times technology system that built a flexible OO environment that could run on whatever platform they wanted. They were multiple CPU friends, and mulitiple-OS friendly (their OS ran on top of Unix, they ported their APIs to other Unix companies like Sun, the ported to Windows), and they even got toll-free bridging between Java and Cocoa going...
The NeXTSTEP tech is really cool, and it appears that Apple still maintains it... Apple Engineering still maintains and enhances it, even if marketing/Steve Jobs chooses to not market it for strategic reasons. I guess that iTunes/Windows runs inside of Yellowbox/Windows to some extent, but no clue.
Apple keeps LOTS of cool tech going... but they market the hell out of their brand. Doesn't change the fact that 5-10 engineers on a team working on a cool piece of technology is $1m-$2m a year in R&D expenses, which isn't that much for a company of Apple's size IF AND WHEN they decide that it is a $50m/year market that they want to explode.
Apple has a lot of strategic options. They could license the NT kernel from MS tomorrow, OR the Kernel+Win32 environment, and STILL have an option for Cocoa apps running, which is pretty neat.
Alex
if Apple thinks the Mac platform is going to die, and the iPod is their future, then why wouldn't they switch *only* the iPod to Intel chips? That would get them their volume discount - those few fading Macs wouldn't make the difference - and it would save them a lot of hassle. So this article doesn't make much sense.
I too have to post anonymously because of where I used to work (Apple), and frankly your story is a load of shit.
I was part of the project team that maintained the x86 core of OS X and we in on a lot of the conference calls that Apple had discussing the impending switch. What acually happened was that senior management was extremely unhappy with IBM sharing the PowerPC technology with Apple's competitors Sony and Toshiba (via the Cell work, as well as other stuff that hasn't been announced yet). Apple disagreed with IBM as to what their technology licensing agreements said they could and could not do, so Apple basically laid it out on the line and told IBM to cease sharing the technology with Apple's competitors or they woud go somewhere else. I wasn't there when IBM said no, but Jobs was livid at the last meeting I was in on, and demanded to know how soon we could get our work out the door into some Intel based systems.
I've always wanted a pony!
Brought to you by Team SPAM! where we believe: "Information in the noise!"
I know it doesn't seem like it, with all the devices out there that use it, but it's over.
XScale is ARM10 basically. It was the next faster core after ARM9, and ARM sold it lock, stock and barrel. But Intel, the current owners, don't know how to do much with it. They seem to have stopped updating it and it's dying.
ARM has released ARM11, is pushing hard with it. It's synthesizeable and thus a lot more flexible than the XScale. It also has a lot higher clock speeds (presumably meaning higher performance) than XScale at low power.
So, in short, you'll see a lot less switching to XScale in the future and a lot more switching from it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Some guy didn't know he couldn't right click, so he lost a giant project?
Goddamn, buddy, your coworker is just a moron who you didn't train enough.
This isn't Apple's fault. They don't cause trouble. Instead, your utter lack of training of the staff caused it.
How much productivity would've been lost if you had a two-hour basic training session for members of your staff? Not much, and it would've saved lots of trouble.
Jesus Christ, don't blame Apple for your shortcomings.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Will Apple now announce/leak out that each post-Tiger OS is also compiled in the lab for PPC platforms?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have not had the patience to explain this to people here, but the Powerbook line right now is simply outgunned by laptop computers that sell for 1/2 to 1/3 of its cost.
I've wanted to buy a new powerbook for a year to replace a G3, but I won't do it because the G4 used in the PB is simply old news at this point. And since its so old, you keep thinking "I'm going to wait another quarter; they can't keep this G4 PB line going much longer".
Now, if Apple wants to sell 15" powerbooks for $1200, then they'll sell some. But they won't (15" prices are hovering in the $1800-2300 range). And if I'm willing to pay top dollar for a top PB performer... I can't. Not for any price.
Right now, PB sales have got to be in the dumper.
And a pony!
You forgot the partridge in a pear tree.
Speculations made by computer literates who are grammatically challenged, and don't spell check should be taken with a grain of silicon.
What might be a killer app to design a video iPod around is the DV (or HD) camcorder. Clip your iSight onto your iPod. Now you have a camcorder that's smaller than any other on the market and records approximately forever, strait to hard disk, no messing with tapes. Maybe in H264. I think that's what a "video ipod" is going to be.
Have and iPod Video and want an HD camcorder? It'll cost a heck of a lot less than buying a DV camcorder, all you need is the iSight, which, by the way, you can still use as a webcam. Want to upgrade to an HD camcorder? Instead of giving Sony another $1000 to replace your DV camcorder with HD, pay Apple a quarter as much for their new HD iSight and plug it into your existing iPod Video.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
So what's this about "any" P4 vs A64 tests that show that P4s are superior in audio & video compression?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
What's to prevent the Apple software from being ripped off once it can be run on a Intel box?
Funny... people were saying this about Apple when the iPod was announced, and look how popular it is now.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I'm sorry, Apple's as subject to the Bathtub curve for electronics hardware as much as anyone else.
Things either go really wrong right away, or at the end of the product life cycle.
Also, there are effect of environment as well.
Stick a Mac in a dust-choked closet and it'll suck up and die just as quickly as Ye Olde Dellboxen.
Before talking about how indestructible Mac hardware is, try catching some of these people who've gone to the Apple forums to get hardware issues resolved...at least before the Apple guys delete the posts.
Before you kill this post with "-1, Troll" markdowns, do a few searches for "Broken iPod", "Problems with Apple Hardware", and browse articles on ArsTechnica, Insanely-Great, MacAddict, etc. Then tell me I'm trolling.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's Intel's CeleronM ULV chips (Dothan). AMD can't measure up on those in performance/Watt or overall power consumption.
5 13.HTM
And Intel has already been using strained silicon for some time. http://www.eetasia.com/ARTP_8800262619_499505,499
Why do people assume Apple is after the P4 chips? Look at Dothan, look at Yonah. Those make a lot more sense in an iMac G5, laptop or Mac Mini than a P4 does.
If Steve Jobs makes proper investments, and returns a good return to investors, then he will be able to make more investments and develop more technology that should also make a good return to investors and enhance humanity.
If he develops good technology BUT NOT a good return on investment, then he will have developed that technology but not be able to develop future ones because they don't make a good return.
If you succeed on the ROI front, you get to keep succeeded.
So from a human perspective, making a good return on investment begets other investments, while your "human success" without ROI means not having the capital to make future investments.
Alex
See, I believe this story.
It makes Jobs out to be the worlds biggest fucktard, which we already know that he is. The story fits, therefore it is correct.
Steve Jobs just fucked over every Apple user and Developer because of a compeltely meaningless tiff with a supplier.
Steve Jobs takes his ball and goes home, even if it means making the lives of every apple computer user hell for the next several year.
And of course, IBM not caring one bit as Apple did virtually nothing for the bottom line and was the most irritating chigger that IBM had.
Completely believable therefore completely true.
"And why does Apple need to switch from plain-Jane ARM processors to Intel's greased-lightning XScale? What do they need that extra power for? Why, to bring back the Newton, of course!"
An iPod with PDA functionality. Like it or not, the *iPod* is the brand/trademark that matters, not the Newton. Only techies and longtime Apple fans (not the recent switchers) have any knowledge or care-in-the-world about the Newton, no matter how groundbreaking it was.
The Tablet Mac is also another possibility too.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
IBM does _not_ produce any AMD64 chips for AMD.
Even though they share process technology their processes are different.
IBM have had real problems with 90nm.
Some of them have been fixed now though.
Some guy didn't know he couldn't right click, so he lost a giant project?
Jesus Christ! Only a true Mac zealot would be humourless enough to respond angrily to a post like this.
It's a joke alright? It's a joke so fucking obvious that I am actually seriously concerned about the mental state of the person that doesn't realise it's a joke.
Maybe you should gather up all your Apple products and smash them into tiny pieces? After a few days without you may just start to regain some intelligence.
And the thing is, I'm probably going to get modded down for trying to help you.
Considering all die size improvements and heat and electrical improvements that AMD has put into their procs, and that they all came from IBM, I really have a hard time fully believing this. IBM even produces a large amount of AMD's chips.
Where does this persistent misconception come from? AMD and IBM have a joint process development agreement. This means that they share process technology both ways, not just from IBM to AMD. IBM does not produce any chips for AMD whatsoever. AMD's flash memory (Spansion) is manufactured in Texas and Japan, and all AMD microprocessor products are manufactured at AMD fabs in Dresden, Germany.
Just thought I'd set the record straight.
There are other reasons for choosing Intel too:s .aspx/featured_desktop1?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs) and think that Apple's are crap for performance and cost too much. If Apple can sell the same configuration as Dell for $100 more, people can justify the premium while not wondering about performance. I'm one of the most pro-Apple and pro-MHz-myth people out there, but I have a hard time believing that a 1.25GHz G4 is going to compete with an Intel processor over 2.5GHz.
-Intel delivers new processors on a more regular basis than IBM/Moto's fits and starts. It's not because IBM/Moto are incompetant. It's because Intel makes its money off the fast moving consumer market while IBM and Moto make designs for more of the long haul. Think of SPARC chips. They don't progress at the steady rate that Intel chips do. They progress in larger leaps at longer intervals and Apple has had that same problem with IBM/Moto (and it's really only a problem when selling to consumers).
-IBM's ability to deliver. This might be Apple's fault as the article suggests, but even if it is Apple's fault, Apple doesn't want to commit to huge purchases they might not use. Intel offers them the chance to say "we want 100,000 chips" and then a week later say "we need 250,000 more" and get the extra 250k a week after they receive the 100k simply because Intel sells these chips to more than just Apple and so they continue to make them unlike IBM.
-Public Perception. I think this is one of the biggest. Using Intel chips lets the avoid the crap that people say against the processors that Apple has used. I'm sure there are a lot of people that go into a store, see a 1.25GHz Mac mini for $500 and then see a 2.8GHz Dell Dimension 3000 with monitor, kb and mouse for $450 (http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/feature
-Motherboards. Right now, Apple has to custom build most of their stuff. With Intel, Intel would be more than happy to sell Apple a fully tested, reliable system to install their OS on. No more in house chipsets, motherboards, whatnot.
-It's easy/foolproof!!! This is the best reason. Going with Intel makes you like every other manufacturer out there. When they have problems, you do and so your sales don't slump against their's. You don't have to worry about making sure people know your chips are competitive, you don't have to worry about IBM/Moto keeping interest in a market that doesn't make them money, etc. Apple doesn't have all these worries with Intel. The OS is a big enough draw, especially now at a time when Mac OS X is just beautiful and Windows is getting nastier and nastier to run.
There's a huge difference between playing mp3s (essentially) and portable gaming. Anyone can make an mp3 player. Apple made the iPod hardware all pretty and slick, but it takes much more than packaging to win in gaming. You absolutely need developers to make games for you. Sony and Nintendo have these relationships all sewn up with exclusives or platform bias. Apple doesn't have deep enough pockets to make this happen. End of story: Apple can't kill the PSP. However, I could see Apple doing a portable movie player to compete with UMD on the PSP. Just like music, anyone can play a movie file.
I'm kind of surprised that Apple hasn't yet latched onto the idea of using the Mac Mini as a media center PC, but maybe that's still coming.
I expect to see something like that in the future. One problem is that the mini (as well as the iBook and Powerbook) isn't fast enough to decode full screen HDTV or H.264 video, which I suspect is a major reason for the Intel switch.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Steve has burned his bridges behind him with Motorola, now IBM, and when he becomes an annoyance not worth the trouble for Intel to bow to him, AMD's the only place left to go.
As you confess to yourself, you are only repeating things others have already said. But since most people seem to have missed it, it should clearly be repeated more often. ;-) Video playback is at best a nice side benefit from creating a convergence device, not a killer app. An iPod that is also a tiny digital video camera, that also happens to play videos might be a killer app. Or Mozilla, with the claws that scratch and the jaws that bite, standing 100 feet tall, tearing down buildings and devouring humans by the hundreds, that is a killer app.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
I dunno.
I really don't think that the storage solution is what makes or breaks an HD recorder's size or pricepoint. If it were, then sony / jvc would just make an ipod-ish module and build their HD recorder around that.
Secondly, I'm not at all sure that an ipod is the best solution. I'd expect laptop drives to offer more bang for the buck, and since you need a lens assembly anyways, the physical size of the drive isn't the limiting factor. Similarly, the fragility of the lens limits how robust the drive needs to be, which is the other reason for wanting a small one (resistance to g-shock is proportional to inverse size).
Currently development is done on Apple PowerMacs. Development could be done on Intel's but usually you want to the development machine to be as close to production as possible. Hence the use of the G5. But if Apple switches to Intel, Xbox developers would either have to buy up all the existing Power Macs or buy IBM Power workstations (which start at $5K apiece) to develop on a similar machine. Developers could develop on Intel machines but there would be much more work invovled to make sure that the games would work on the Xbox 360. Certainly a games company could overcome these obstacles if they wre willing to spend the money and/or resources, but it's another barrier to overcome.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Roy? Is that you? It's Joe! =P
This is a lame excuse. Steve was just in a hissy fit, decided to break up with IBM, and now IBM has just made a liar out of him, perhaps for spite.
intel provides everything as amd does but with other stuff such as chipsets (desktop, workstation, and server), network components (until 10gb!), wireless chips (wi-fi, wimax), i/o processors (which probably majority of raid controllers use), software (compilers) and a whole bunch of stuff that apple will probably not need such as optical components (transceivers), telecom components (voice, data, fax), and others in between.
this alone makes it technically and economically feasible to get everything like a one stop shop. it would be difficult to get cpu from amd, chipsets from nvidia, gpu from ati, manufacturing from asus, etc. this alone i think is the reason why dell doesn't even want to touch amd. with intel, you talk with one company that can supply majority of components. with amd, you talk to them supplying only a fraction of the entire pie. intel also has the capability of delivering all those chips in one go with amd now barely keeping up with demand. this is no different from fast food.
with apple diversifying their products from the pc, i believe they can get majority of products from intel. people in slashdot may laugh now but who's laughing years from now. we may see ipods with wifi/bluetooth and raid for protection. powerbooks with wimax. to probably extending it to make their own mobile phone.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
no one uses an Apple because it has a PPC.
;-)
That isn't strictly true. There are tons of people, myself included (to my shame), who find alternative technologies attractive. I mean, let's face it, Windows _would_ let me do everything I need to, but I use Linux because of basically irrelevant technological advantages it has. The same goes with PPC. Sure, it might not *really* matter, but PPC is sexy, PPC is "cool," and PPC is a selling point for Apple machines.
To be quite honest, I think OS X is the worst of the three OSes I use regularly. It's really polished appearing so long as you only do a certain limited set of things, but I constantly run into its limitations and vastly annoying bugs. Apple sold its hardware to me because the hardware was better; perhaps not technically better, but better by my own standards.
I'm not in the least alone on this, either. Alternatives are "in." Some people dye their hair blue, some people pierce every part of their body, some people wear black fishnet stockings on their arms, and some people buy Apple products.
There is only 1 manufacturer making the G5.
There is clearly competition between Intel and AMD.
Without any competition, the Power chips have less appeal.
Of course, I personally can't wait for a cell based Linux box. And it's gonna be about $500... time to brush up on vector coding...
I'll believe it when I see it. I certainly don't see anything about it under the "Hot News" on Apple's website. Till then its vaporware, just like the Phantom. (Well maybe not quite that bad, but you get the idea.)
Apple is behind in the laptop market, which is expanding. They are continuing to fall behind because they have no top end, (64 bit) laptop. They have to change or die.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Dell has to pay Microsoft for each copy of Windows that they ship, somewhere in the $20 - $30 range.
Apple has to pay its employees to develop OS X, but they don't pay them "per machine shipped."
If Dell ships 1 additional computer, they pay Microsoft an extra $25 (I'm simplifying, I'm sure that they buy in lots > 1, whether it is per 10 or per 100 or per 1000 computers).
If Apple ships 1 additional computer, they don't have to pay ANY MORE for "OS X" development.
The operating system is a variable cost that Dell needs to factor into their pricing model.
The operating system is a fixed cost that Apple needs to factor into their BUSINESS model.
If Apple wants to make $200/machine, they need for sell for $200 more than the variable costs. Dell has the additional Variable cost of $25 for Microsoft.
Apple needs to recover that OS development cost, but they don't need to "per machine."
That is a MAJOR difference in divisional pricing structures and underlying economics.
Doubling Apple's machines has no increase in their OS costs.
Alex
Yeah, their group sucks. Server 10.2.8 broke my Xserve and shut down mail. I call support, and the "Enterprise Support Group" was all "in a meeting." We ended up upgrading to 10.3 Server which had different problems, but broken system pushed the upgrade a bit faster.
That said, for a SMALL network, OS X Server is a pretty neat way to get an LDAP/Kerberos system running... The poster that I replied to was playing with Unix networking... and OS X Server is a neat addition to the mix...
Alex
" And why does Apple need to switch from plain-Jane ARM processors to Intel's greased-lightning XScale? What do they need that extra power for? Why, to bring back the Newton, of course!"
They want to support ogg?
Vote for Pedro
It's the mods way of joking.
Eh? Why do Apple have to synchronize their computer processor and their digital player processor? The current iPod processor is not PPC and the OS is not Mac OS X Lite and yet, iPod and Macs works well. Hell, iPod even works well with non-Apple, Wintel/WinAMD computers. If Apple wants to move iPod to Intel processor for discount purposes, they can do so without the complexity of moving the entire computer architecture, hardware AND software AND the whole third party apps.
OK, so Apple may have a price break on the iPod processor, but will Apple get the same price break on the higher end Mac processor? Will adding Macs to the count increase the discount? I doubt it. Macs sales and iPod sales are of a different order. If performance and price and processor family are of consideration, why not standardize on PPC? PPC makes very good embeded processor.
I think before people start making wild guesses, they should apply Occam Razor. In this case, the main reason is very likely what Jobs alluded, with DRM, discount etc. a nice bonus thrown in.
So does this mean my sleek mac with no stickers advertising ATI or NVIDIA or PowerPC is now going to have an "Intel Pentium D/4/M/C" sticker on it? :( A sad day for Macs everywhere.
Craigy
Pfft...
Sure, Apple doesn't want PowerPC tech getting into their competitor's hands so they go and make a switch to an architecture whose tech is in the hands of just about everybody (including Sony and Toshiba).
Yea, that IS completely believable.
A similar point was made at ahref=http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/ os/macos/story/0,10801,102335,00.html?SKC=macos-10 2335http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os /macos/story/0,10801,102335,00.html?SKC=macos-1023 35>
True, but rock bottom price wasn't the goal here.
1- Apple wanted not only better chip prices, but better laptop chips. While AMD arguably has better desktop processors, they have nothing that can compete with the Pentium M in terms of performance and battery life. And the Powerbook is what drove this change, not the desktop stuff.
2- Steve Jobs is a label whore, marketing gear to the label whore public. In his mind, Intel = Levi's, while AMD = Wrangler. Good jeans, those Wranglers, but only those low class Wal Mart rednecks wear them. It just wouldn't do to put those low cost AMDs into an Apple.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Well, it wasn't completely meaningless. Jobs found it VERY hard to work with IBM because they compete with Apple on so many other levels. It wasn't just the fact that IBM was sharing the PowerPC technology with Sony and Toshiba. It was also IBM's growing support for Linux on PowerPC in the HPC and renderfarm markets.
"I have to post this anonymously... You'll see why below. The real reason Apple switched from IBM is because IBM just hasn't gotten their shit together with 90nm. I know this because I recently left a job at a large semi-conductor manufactorer that used IBM for our digital fab. IBM repeatedly promised, "we'll fix the problems in our process" for YEARS, and just couldn't get their act together. With run after run of silicon, IBM couldn't manufacture the parts correctly (or other other customers parts). Finally, my company became fed up, and bit the bullet to switch to another manufactorer. It was a 4 engineer year sunk cost (to update some the design), and the design worked out of the chute (and at pretty good yields). You heard it here first... IBM just doesn't have their shit together at 90nm."
People forget IBM also bungled up production of the Atari Jaguar back in 93/94. There were several production problems (because of IBM) and thus Atari had to transfer production to Flextronics. Today, Flextronics makes the Xbox for Microsoft.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Nice troll.
? i=2456&p=5
:(
Hmmph. If anything, I'm an AMD fanboy. All my home PCs use Athlons.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
Look at the Windows Media Encoder 9 benchmark and see that of the CPUs that "normal" people can afford, the P4s were faster.
But, now that I look at it again, I see that the numbers were's that much better.
I guess my info is out of date...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The reason for the switch is to directly compete with Microsoft in the desktop space; indirectly boosting the legitimacy of Linux. Apple and Linux win, Microsoft takes a beating. it's brilliant.
Versus Intel who hasn't done anything to help Linux out. Nor does Intel sell CPUs to Apple's competitors.
Glad we got those misunderstandings out of the way.
Look at it this way: If Apple was mad at IBM because they weren't getting enough sales because their processor speed wasn't fast enough, it doesn't make any sense to announce that they are going Intel, which seems to be a much better method of kaboshing their sales.
Perhaps in the long term they will do well with increased sales, but this article rings true, it's all about money.
And as far as this dedicated Apple user, the reason I've been dedicated is because I was using a bunch of legacy software, but Apple has solved that problem!
Picture Mel Brooks on a wooden table, yelling, "FREEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!"
I might stay with the Mac, it's os is good, but it will be because I choose to. And I think the best option for me is to buy a new G5 is six months or so, then use it for 10 years and blow off the future improvements.
Apple recently doubled it's marketshare in the computer market and this guy seems to discount it completely. I would not be surprised if their marketshare in europe had grown even more.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I too have to post anonymously because of where I work (Best Buy), and frankly your story is a load of shit.
None of us here (at Best Buy) can figure out how Apple competes with Sony, much less Toshiba. Music players I guess, but Sony would actually need to be competing in that market. Za Zing.
Seriously, only Phil here (at Best Buy) thinks your post is even remotely plausible but Phil is stoned and honestly on the fence as far as his job goes. I think he has been taking the clearly labeled as my own, fat free fudge pops from the company fridge and may also be stealing PS2 games and DVD-Rs from the store(Best Buy). (sorry Phil)
My friend has a job at another company (Circuit City), we both check receipts at the door-what are the odds-anyhoo, from my paraphrasing of your post in a short but memorable cell phone conversation while I had a smoke, he said quote "You called me before 9:00pm to tell me this? I am already over my minutes. God you are a dick." I called him a "fag" and then he hung up or we were disconnected because you can never tell.
My bet is that the move had something to do with Intel's DRM, and making the Music Industry happy - since Apple's focus now is iPod/iTMS.
Also, each iPod sale is a potential "switcher". iTunes is available for Windows, yes. But each iPod sale is a person who may be curious about OS X, might actually buy an iMac, or Mac Mini. (the Mac Mini is aimed at "switchers" - who already have a keyboard, mouse, monitor, but want to front a minimal investment to switch platforms, just replace the CPU.)
But what if iPod potential "switchers" can't be supplied with enough PPC-powered Mac Minis, or Mac Minis are still a tad too costly, or what if Apple can't slip a powerful enough chip into that enclosure due to heat issues? The switch to Intel chips solves all of these issues. The difference between a Windows iPod/iTMS user, and an OS X iPod/iTMS user? The OS X "experience" - the same schlock any cross-platform software producer can do: make their Native version better than the ports. Like IE Windows compared to IE Mac. iTunes Mac will be kept more up to date with features than iTunes Windows, and it will only cost an iPod/iTMS user a couple hundred bucks to switch. And with Intel chips, they can ramp volume to meet demand now.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"This is a really interesting take on the switch that I hadn't considered before. This move to intel makes all the sense in the world if Apple is trying to cram an intel processor inside the iPod, and for pure volume discounts alone, this could really help apple's overall profit margin."
As another poster mentioned, the current iPods use chips assembled by Texas Instruments. It would be helpful if Intel could produce a combo USB/FireWire chip (if they don't already) so it would be yet another chip Apple could purchase from Intel to further qualify for the volume discounting.
I'd also like to speculate regarding the chances of getting past the (apparent) prohibition of using DSP audio chips in Macs due to the prior settlement(s) with Apple Records concerning audio in Macs. Back in the day, there was a really nice Motorola DSP (56001?) that was integrated into the NeXT machines and the Atari Falcon, but never in the Mac line.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
"Apple doesn't have deep enough pockets to make this happen."
While I agree with most of your sentiment, if you flip your argument, Sony should have deep enough pockets to beat Apple in the MP3 player market. They have deep pockets, but they've done jack to dethrone Apple. Sony has deep enough pockets to make Sony Connect successful, but they haven't. Sony has deep enough pockets to make MemoryStick to become successful, but they haven't.
Substituting the name Microsoft into such an argument also is noteworthy. Microsoft has enough cash to make anything successful, but it hasn't worked. The Xbox would be dead if it were not for the Xbox Live system and Halo. Using your argument about developer relationships, Microsoft should be #1 in videogames considering their relationships with the game developers and the fact that the Xbox is easier to program than the Playstation2. But reality paints a different picture.
"End of story: Apple can't kill the PSP."
Apple doesn't have to kill the PSP because Nintendo will do the job just like it has done to every other handheld competitor. The PSP is awesome, but it is the 2005 version of the Atari Lynx, which judging from my user name, you should conclude that I am very fond of. Twenty + year olds are buying PSPs, not the kids nor are the parents buying them for the kids...just like with the Atari Lynx 16 years ago. The kids still get the Gameboys. All Apple has to do is add videogame functionality and better movie playback to a video iPod and it would split the demographic that the PSP appeals to. Even more so when the Video iPod is coupled with an Apple online movie store which would demolish the Sony UMD market for PSP movies.
The games would just have to be nice. Couple that with Apple's "cool" factor and its advertising campaign, and the Sony PSP would be toast. Having the absolute best technology in the handheld gaming area has never led to success. Otherwise, the Atari Lynx would've won out over the Gameboy. And the Gameboy did not have great third party support when it debuted. Its success was due to its low price, the leveraging of Super Mario Bros. on the machine, and the fact that Nintendo had a larger production run and better distribution than Atari with the Lynx. Third party title strength came later.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
"I suppose Einstein, with his hairdo, will make a fitting bride of Frankenstein... :)"
The real Albert Einstein or the Yahoo Serious Einstein?
My money's on the Yahoo Serious version.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
A real killer app would be a cell phone that actually works, and doesn't sound like the two tin-cans with string that I used to talk to my next door neighbor over.
Ahh, but I digress.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Can I just get that without all the electronic crap?
Seriously. I'm getting worn out on all the gadgets that <random-company-of-the-week> wants us to buy. I already have a cell phone and a PDA and a laptop. I am connected enough and have access to enough information to choke my information bandwidth 24 hours a day. Why do I need a video iPod to carry around, too?
Unless, of course, Apple wants to give it to me for free. Which is the real issue... Who actually has the money to keep buying, upgrading, maintaining, and buying content for all of this crap? Or maybe I'll need the pony to carry around all of it...
That is all.
"I was part of the project team that maintained the x86 core of OS X and we in on a lot of the conference calls that Apple had discussing the impending switch. What acually happened was that senior management was extremely unhappy with IBM sharing the PowerPC technology with Apple's competitors Sony and Toshiba (via the Cell work, as well as other stuff that hasn't been announced yet). Apple disagreed with IBM as to what their technology licensing agreements said they could and could not do, so Apple basically laid it out on the line and told IBM to cease sharing the technology with Apple's competitors or they woud go somewhere else. I wasn't there when IBM said no, but Jobs was livid at the last meeting I was in on, and demanded to know how soon we could get our work out the door into some Intel based systems."
Riiiight. So when is Apple going to sue IBM/Microsoft/Toshiba/Sony/Nintendo for IP infringement under this scenario? Is Jobs waiting for the machines to hit the market before he unleashes the lawsuit clusterfrag? After all, Apple does own a chunk of the PowerPC IP. Surely they'd want a licensing agreement, especially from the PS3 sales.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
For many years now, the PowerPC consortium has been roiled by Steve's understanding that an Apple is, at its heart, a word and that IBM is simply a bunch of letters. Sensitive people like Steve understand that there is something inherantly wrong, something unnatural about acronyms. It was clear to Steve that having this piece of acronymic impurity at the core of his machine was too much to bear. Intel is a bunch of letters too, but it's a bunch of letters that actually spell a word, like Apple (note that this is the reason why Steve couldn't use AMD, either). I hope that this clears up the thinking behind this.
>>For example, any Anandtech P4/eMT64 vs. AMD64 comparisonf x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html)
>On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_
Tom's Hardware took over Anandtech?
Wow. I did not know that.
" I say, where's the 4Ghz Pentium 4 that Intel had roadmapped for the end of 2004?"
Well, they got to 3.6ghz which missed by 10%.
As opposed to pretty much the same thing in PPC land.
The big difference, of course, is that with AMD, the PPC is simply no match for the best of x86. There may be a ghz myth, but the PPC isn't a good example of it. clock for clock, a P4 is the same as a G5.
The Pentium 4's design is superior in the ranks of a server chip, but I'm afraid they simply over-designed it to the point they're carrying too much baggage in the means of pipeline stages to keep encoders happy. And I really hate AMD users who validate everything by the benchmarks since almost any benchmark currently available is optimized either which way, and the only way to really tell is to use the damned hardware and get a feel for it.
Of course, it may seem trollish to bag at benchmarks, but really, I simply don't feel like they prove anything anymore. None really test for what they need to (multiple instructions? multiple threads? Fully qualified float, integer and vector math? Please, 3D mark used to be good, but they've been caught cheating, so let's not go there.
I really love and admire both AMD and Intel (and these days I'm really more on AMD's side, simply because I'm rooting for the underdog, and I'm a poor college boy), but I feel like neither of them are playing fair anymore. AMD gets a rush off copying every implementation Intel's ever made, and yet, when Intel does the same they cry foul? That's not sportsmanly at all, that's just being a whiner. AMD's still a multibillion dollar corporation, and they CAN catch Intel; they just need to do it and shut their upper lip about it.
Intel on the other hand, still employs a great deal of engineers that sit on their asses because of their current marketing team. There is so much they could be doing with Pentium M that they simply won't do, hopefully this deal with Apple will help them to. There's so much they could do with BIOS that they just won't do, hopefully Apple can alleviate this as well. There is simply so much innovation to be had, and it's so stifled by old technology, bad marketing and biggotry.
On a side note; if Intel went with the Pentium M now, that could really be a sign of monopolistic behavior that AMD could use. The Pentium M was designed by nature to run cooler, period, and thus, can outclock its competitors. I believe the IPC is still a bit lower than A64, but mainly due to A64's bitwidth. We'll see in about a year.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Substituting the name Microsoft into such an argument also is noteworthy. Microsoft has enough cash to make anything successful, but it hasn't worked. The Xbox would be dead if it were not for the Xbox Live system and Halo.
Sooo..... You're saying that the Xbox would be dead except for the fact that Microsoft spent cash on making it successful?
which , I may add, was well before any speculation/rumors on the part of C|Net or the WSJ
But Dvorak called this years before you. Does that make him God?
Da Blog
Another major factor in the GB's success over the Lynx was Tetris. I don't have the link handy, but I've seen stuff out there that shows just how much of an impact having the one true version of Tetris and packing it in with the GB had for Nintendo in their fight at that time. As for Apple versus the Sony PSP, I don't see why they couldn't take it on. I own a PSP and as much as I love it, I sadly see the future of the device being a portable media viewer and not a gaming device. There are very few games in development for it, and since launch almost every title has been mediocre. The only thing getting any sort of strong support are the movies. And while UMD's are selling pretty well despite their outrageous prices I think the market could be there for a competitor.
There will be a transition phase down the road anyway.....why not give people the choice? Windows runs on a lot more than just 2 CPU's (barely) What if OSX was available for multiple platforms as well? We've been told the expense of porting the dominant application base is a minor expense...why not maintain both markets?
Actually, Subtract, Store, Jump on negative; you have no way to negate.
I don't wanna discount!! I want a good processor! "I want my Alpha! and I want it NOW!"
What?
Complete troll but I'll bite.
Perhaps we are talking about hardware that ships with only one mouse button, apparently under the assumption that their developers are smart enough to create an intuitive UI that doesn't require two or three. However, if you feel inclined to use two or three, you still can - and the functionality is even there out of the box.
They seem to be doing a pretty good job of it, too. Unlike you.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Forget the cellphone and the pony. Call me when it runs emacs.
Occurs to me that the reason for Intel Vs. AMD aspect of this is Xscale and WiMAX.... Apple needs mobile power for iBooks and iPods (Xscale and WiMax) more than they need desktop power. Perhaps Intel plans on integrating the WiMax stuff with their mobile chipsets???? That would put Apple instantly competitive in one of their more important/profitable markets (laptops).
.02, anyhow. Except for 3D gaming and the like, I think that the desktop power race ended at 2GHz... (wow, firefox really opens fast these days! :)
I haven't read too much on this, but I kinda doubt that the PPC architecture is dead for their workstation line...
That's my
This point was totally unsuported in TFA other than to say that Apple wants a volume discount. Even though Apple grew desktop market share over 3x compared to the mareket in Q1, the volumes still are small when compared to the overall industry. Even when you compare Macs + iPod's Dell is buying way more chips. The whole "Let's expend a lot of effort to move OS X to Intel so that we can buy chips for the iPod from intel." line of thought makes no sense and to make the move away from PPC for the Map about the iPod, is just twisted and ignores the entire emphasis of Apple's announcement at WWDC.
Who cares about migrating to a new architecture? Let's ignore the consumers who have been conditioned, via marketing, to think that a new chip really makes them happier or more productive than what they currently have. OK, so the question isn't quite right. Who NEEDS to care about migrating to a new architecture?
The answer of course is developers developers developers. . . . er . . .
Seriously, how many iPod developers are there? We don't know b/c they all work for Apple. Fact is Apple could switch the iPod to any chip architecture they wanted and no one would notice. They can manage that transition totally internally w/o any market impact.
In June at WWDC, Apple did what it needed to do to keep the Mac busines line, which still generates most of the company's revenue and profits, competitive. And to do that it needed to show the OS X developer community both the technical and the business way to move forward. It all comes down to providing tools to quickly generate universal applications that support both architectures in the same binary. There was no discussion at all about iPod in the context of the Intel announcement.
I'm not saying that Apple will never sell an iPod or follow on product with Intel technology as the engine. However to make that the driving reason for Apple's desktop announcement is missing the obvious straightforward point. And yes music is huge and will likely grow even larger but that doesn't mean that a company wants to neglect a multi-billion dollar business like the Mac.
It's all about the games, and for games AMD owned Intel. Besides, real haxx0rs download their warez pre-encoded.
Yes, IBM's new CPUs seem adequate. But what about next year? And the year after that? And the year after that?
Given their history, I don't think they can be depended on to keep revving the line quickly enough.
To get the latest G5's out, Apple probably had to shovel truckloads of prunes into the goddam fab.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
It's a Mac, not an Apple MAC. Why do people who have never used a Mac capitalize it like it's an acronym? It's very strange...
Any three button/scroll wheel USB mouse you can find will work on a Mac, right clicking inclued, out of the box. You don't even have to install any software. So, how stupid would you and your "co-worker", combined, have to be to not realize that? I use an 8 button cordless (Logitech MX700) mouse with my Mac.
Do you know why Apple refuses to "sell" a two button mouse? To keep programmers from becomming dependent on a right click to do anything. It forces them to simplify usage and GUI layout. And guess what, it has worked beautifully.
Now, I would suggest you actually go out and use a Mac (running OS X) for some time, and then make up your mind. But, don't come back here to tell us, we stop believing liars, as we should.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
"Silicon Graphics."
SGI tried this. They built Windows NT PCs, in attractive custom cases, with workstation-derived interconnects and graphics. Basically all the hardware advantages of an SGI workstation with the software base of a Windows OS.
Sounds great, right?
Not only did they flop in the market, but it basically destroyed SGI. The PC people thought they were too expensive compared to Dells, and the SGI-IRIX loyalists felt abandoned.
Sooo..... You're saying that the Xbox would be dead except for the fact that Microsoft spent cash on making it successful?
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Well I don't agree. I think video playback on the iPod is going to be the next major kick ass thing that it'll eventually do.
I am imagining a day when I can be having lunch with a friend and make a joke, referencing the latest episode of Family Guy. If they haven't seen the episode and therefore don't get the joke, instead of explaining it to them, I can just pull my iPod out of my pocket, skip to the scene in question, and let them watch it.
Maybe iPod Linux will get there first. And maybe it'll only play xvid. Or maybe Apple will do this, and it'll only play Quicktime. I don't really care. I'm willing to spend a few minutes converting my existing videos into a reduced resolution xvid or Quicktime format to be able to watch them on an iPod. The quality loss won't matter much on such a small screen.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
"Sooo..... You're saying that the Xbox would be dead except for the fact that Microsoft spent cash on making it successful?"
Reread what I wrote. I was making the point that all the cash in the world does not guarantee success, in terms of the argument that Apple does not have enough cash ($5 billion +) in the bank to ensure a video/videogame iPod could not beat the PSP when compared to Sony's cash. Microsoft has something like $50-60 billion in cash and the only thing they've been able to do with the Xbox is keep it slightly above the Nintendo Gamecube here in America. When you compare the installed user base of the Playstation2 to the Xbox, the Xbox may not be dead, but its practically "undead." If there was no Xbox Live - and more importantly the Halo franchise - it would be deader than the 3DO or the parents on Party of Five. To me, Microsoft is fighting a war of attrition against Sony. Although if they keep playing their cards, they might be able to knock Nintendo out of the market as a hardware company. However, their #1 priority is to make sure the Xbox360 doesn't get "Dreamcasted" in the wake of the PS3 coming to the market.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Let's look at a typical scenario.
I'm looking up possible solutions to an SQL problem during lunch. I'm eating with one hand, while using the mouse with the other. Before my hand became occupied with food, I used it to type some search terms into Google.
I now want to skim through the first 20 or so hits on both Google and Google groups.
On Windows or Linux, I fire up my favorite web browser with tab support, and middle click on the relevant links. By the time I finish clicking, the first few links have loaded. I go skim through each page, looking for something that's helpful.
On a MAC laptop without an external mouse, I have to put the food down and hold down the Option key to do what evolved operating systems simply give you a button to do.
The simple fact of the matter is, Mac is using the "Better UI design" claim to cover up the use of inferior hardware. Their marketing has been so effective that Mac users have actually convinced themselves that having fewer features and more restrictions is somehow better. This isn't even feature bloat we're talking about here, but useful features that Apple just can't be bothered to actually make easy.
The "aesthetic" is always more important that actual utility with Apple. If the feature would save the average user time, but require something that doesn't fit Steve's vision of what the OS should "look" like, the feature just doesn't happen.
Don't give me that "Better UI design" crap. Scroll wheels and three mouse buttons are damn useful things, and anyone running around saying otherwise is just kidding themselves. It's the whole "I can't have it so I'll mock it," mentality.
Keep in mind, we're talking about a company that took until version Ten to add a command line to the consumer OS.
Hardly a sign of an advanced OS in my opinion, given how much faster and more elegant a command line can be.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Anyway, taking a look at the page you provided, a 3400+ AMD chip running at 2.4 GHz is faster than a Pentium 660 running at 3.6 GHz. These are real chips that normal people can afford ;) My point that raw speed no longer matters, which is why AMD has adopted the "+" numbering scheme for ease of comparison against P4 chips.
A later poster mentioned the Pentium M, which imho is a very, very nice design. I don't like participating in AMD vs Intel holy wars because I think that both have their place - AMD is currently the king of the desktop, and Intel the king of the notebook, bar none. Anyway, sorry for coming across like a jerk; nothing like the internet to bring out the worst in people (esp. proofreading skills) ;)
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
"Another major factor in the GB's success over the Lynx was Tetris. I don't have the link handy, but I've seen stuff out there that shows just how much of an impact having the one true version of Tetris and packing it in with the GB had for Nintendo in their fight at that time."
I forgot about that. Good catch. But I wouldn't refer to Nintendo's version of TETRIS as "the one true version of Tetris." It was the "one true legal version of Tetris" at the time. Good for the author of the program, but disasterous for Spectrum Holybrite and disasterous for Atari Games/Tengen who had the best and funnest version of Tetris, both in the home and in the arcade. And consequently, disasterous for Atari Corp. and its Lynx game system because they couldn't get Tetris on their machine...whereas if Atari Games/Tengen had turned out to have held a legal claim, it could've been easily ported since Time Warner would've ordered Atari Games to have complied with the porting request. Unfortunately, the Lynx had to wait until Atari Games brought out "Klax" to the arcade and then ported it to the Lynx. And while Klax was awesome, it didn't have the impact of Tetris. And consequently, Nintendo has been able to pass off their inferior handhelds to the large gameplaying public for the last 16 years and as such, an undeserved/illegitimate de facto niche monopoly.
I actually hope Sony can make a dent in Nintendo's Gameboy charmed armour. I was hoping I'd win the PSP in the McDonald's contest, but alas, I won a PS2 yesterday instead.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
With barely above 2% market share, Apple is irrelevant to Intel or the PC market. Linux is a far more important OS for Intel than Apple.
Apple doesn't compete with Sony or Toshiba on anything that uses big CPUs.
And Cell doesn't even share any technology Apple developed. It uses the PPC instruction set (designed by IBM) but has a totally different architecture. It doens't even have Altivec (designed by Motorola).
Nice AMD bias.
On one of these tests (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f x57-07.html, http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-08.html), encoding lame mp3, the P4 came out on top of the A64 FX-67. On five others, encoding mpeg1 to mpeg2,
The $1042 A64 X2 4800+ tied the $544 Pentium D 840 (1:17 vs 1:18). In single-core performance, the $610 P4 660 beat the $1101 A64 FX-57 (1:35 to 1:44).
mpeg2 to divx,...
Results were very similar to above, except the $1042 AMD dual-core beat the $544 Intel dual-core 3:30 to 3:44, and AMD's $1101 single-core tied Intel's $610 single-core (4:58 to 4:56).
Hardly.
The comment you called a "troll" admits that he thinks AMD64 beats Intel EM64T in everything except multimedia encoding. At worst, he might have a reasonable misconception. He is not a troll.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Actually, I'm not joking.
I'm trying to look at things through the eyes of "I'm the center of the universe" Steve Jobs.
We are talking about a man with an ego larger than Microsoft's finical war chest.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The only thing holding Apple back from making serious inroads into Microsoft's market share is the perceived lack of applications for the Mac! Now imagine a world in which any Windows applications runs just as well or better on a Mac. This holy grail of computing is the only rational reason I can imagine for Apple to switch to Intel processors... IF they can pull off the Windows compatibility.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Huh?
The agreement between Apple and IBM (and Motorola, BTW) did not explicitly cover the situation in a way that was acceptable to Apple's interests. Indeed, IBM's refusal to even consider amending it to protect us was one of the reasons why we had no choice but to go with Intel. Although we discussed the possibility, suing IBM was not an option. When it comes to lawsuits, IBM can outspend ANYONE, and can retaliate with enough patents to put any company out of business permanently. I doubt Apple will ever get into a similar situation with Intel or any other company in the future.
An iPod with PDA functionality.
Mmmm, now that's something I could get behind. Screw all this picture/cellphone/video-iPod nonsense; I don't need or want that, nor could I effectively use it.
But I could use a compact device which played and stored music like an iPod and had all the PDA functionality of my basic Palm.
Specifically, combine the pointer / touch screen / graffiti / beam and basic todo list, address book, calender, and memo apps of my PDA with iPod's size and music-related functionality, and I would happily replace both my Palm and Archos jukebox. If I'm carrying around one, I also have the other-- why not combine them into one? I know you can get basic apps like a calendar for the iPod, but I just can't see using them with the scroll/click-wheel. Give me a PDA interface (not that micro-keyboard, though) in addition to the click-wheel, and I'm set.
Not this red herring again. I can see VMware being the cat's meow on this (and you can bet your bottom dollar that Jobs has already called up the bigwigs at EMC and said "Yo, guys, what can we do about VMware for OS X on ix86? This is something I think we need, and you could make good bank on"). But Wine on OS X? No. Not even Not a chance.
Why? Because it'll go one of two ways:
- Wine will continue to be what is has been on Linux - useful for certain (commodity) apps that stick with the documented, well-established APIs, but melts down in ugly ways with apps that make liberal use of the many poorly (if at all) documented APIs in Win32. Apple won't go for this, because it _must_ "just work".
- Apple expends huge amounts of work into eking out all those undocumented API hooks, and makes Wine work flawlessly. Well, that's great - they've now entirely obviated the need for OS X ports of their apps. All major developers will say "wow, we can write/build for Windows, and get perfectly working software on OS X as well? Gee, no more Apple specific builds! Saves us a bundle! Let's snort some more coke off this hooker's ass!" (Okay, they probably won't say that last part. Maybe not. Okay, they might...)
Either way, it's not going to happen. Either scenario. Because whatever else you can say about Steve Jobs, he does have a sense of self-preservation, and I don't think it would fail him in this case - he'd see what a huge blunder that would be and declare "That's the dumbest suggestion I've heard all month. We're not doing it. Not only that, whoever suggested it, and anyone that supports it, is fired." (Again, he might not say that last part, but who knows.)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
I think this clears the way for IBM to buy Apple. Look at what's happening with Big Blue:
- no more hardware (Lenovo)
- becoming software and services-based
- wants to fill the pain in their side that is a competing operating system to Windows
If IBM bought Apple, it would get one hell of an OS (that runs on Intel chips), loads of decent HCI-type people (which IBM lacks, as blatenly apparent in anything it makes), and significant entry into the SMB & Consumer markets.
I bet within two years, we see an announce that IBM will buy Apple.
I think you mistyped "penis" as "grain of salt." Typos happen to the best of us!
"Mmmm, now that's something I could get behind. Screw all this picture/cellphone/video-iPod nonsense; I don't need or want that, nor could I effectively use it."
Exactly. There's no reason convergeance could not happen between PDAs and MP3 players. I'd much prefer that than convergeance with mobile phones, where the trend is making the smallest phone possible at the expense of the screen size.
I'd say the best candidates for adopting PDA functionality are the iPod (minus the Shuffle, of course) line and the Sony PSP. Why there isn't an option to download (for a price) PalmOS for the PSP is beyond me.
If you want a mini-OS X, PalmOS, or a revised version of NewtonOS on an iPod, write to Apple. They do have a suggestion area on their website for iPods, here:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html
That, or go buy some Apple shares and complain/recommend through that avenue...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
First off, this is not a troll. I agree that such things need to be repeated more often.
However, I ride the train to work off and on, and the questions I have to field are an indicator that mobile video playback *is* something that the masses will pay for.
Background: I've carried a PDA around with me for years. I'm a bit behind the times, so I just recently bought a Dell Axim X30 (old, I know, but it's nice). Every time I ride the train, I am either busy watching a TV show, watching a movie, or playing my NES games. At first I just get some odd looks, but once people see what I'm doing they ask me what "that thing" is that I'm carrying, and what it does. I show them the movie playback, the TV shows, and even some light gaming or MP3 playback. They are always amazed, and wonder how to get one.
That is, until I tell them the storage capacity: 1GB on an SD card. They always fall off at that point, with the statement that "my son/daughter/own iPod has a 20GB drive." Even my explanation that the price is well below the price of an iPod, and that it does 4x more than any iPod (while looking better doing it) does nothing to change their minds.
The answer?
Apple should bring back the Newton, in a way. Use the iPod as the base (style-wise), with the large drive capacity and brand recognition, and push it as a true convergence device. People *will* buy it, especially if it's only marginally more expensive than an iPod (easy, since the iPod is a cash-cow ripoff).
Disclaimer: Obviously I don't like the iPod. I hate any fixed-function device. I would never buy an MP3 player, or a simple pocket rolodex, since I can get the two combined in a quality PDA for the same or even a lower price. Multi-function is my mantra, and the more expensive fixed-function devices get, the more I loathe them. This is my personal *opinion*, and nothing more.
I use an Axim X30H, 624mhz, nice chips, crappy proprietary though, struggle to remove the 'toy' OS it ships with, and get real power out of it.
:-) Apple to move into sex PDA sector? Forgt linux on PDAs? Stick MacOSeXI on your PDA? nice
But, shock horror, are they implying Apple made the decision to swich to intel based on business and financial decisions a planning?
They must be mad, I just know there is a conspiracy somewhere!
Apple PDA soon? (ARM architecture?) Like the OQO?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I too have to post anonymously, because I don't work... (oh the shame)
however, what I heard from my grandmother's friends niece's boyfriend's brother's hairdresser, was that an intern accidentally placed an order with Frito-Lay for 1,000,000 bags of chips, rather than IBM, four months ago. Like Hannibal at Ars said, IBM needs a 6-month lead time for new chips, so that's why Apple switched and went with Intel... since they had a supply of chips ready to go without another 6-month lag in performance.
I do, however, also hear that Apple will be entering the salty snack-food business shortly... if you don't believe me, ask the hairdresser... they know everything.
The real reason you have to post anonymously is because you posted the original anonymous post claiming IBM have problems moving to a 90nm fab.
BZZZT!! I'll take uninformed idiots for $200, Alex!
On a MAC laptop without an external mouse, I have to put the food down and hold down the Option key to do what evolved operating systems simply give you a button to do.
Or, you can click on the link, and hold it down for two seconds which will give you a contextual menu to do exactly everything you could do with a right click. Any more pearls of wisdom?
Don't give me that "Better UI design" crap. Scroll wheels and three mouse buttons are damn useful things, and anyone running around saying otherwise is just kidding themselves. It's the whole "I can't have it so I'll mock it," mentality.
Just because you use it doesn't mean everyone else should be forced to. I used to do phone support, and 75% of the WINDOWS users I got didn't know the difference between left click and right click; and these were people installing their own video cards.
Besides, anyone that actually used a Mac in the last SIX YEARS would know that they CAN have it if they feel it necessary. Mouse scrolling and multiple button support is built in if you need it. The new PowerBooks have the best scrolling of *any* notebook out there - you use two fingers on the trackpad instead of one. OMG HOW INCONVENIENT.
Hardly a sign of an advanced OS in my opinion, given how much faster and more elegant a command line can be.
Yet Microsoft has crippled their command line environment, and I'm afraid that Linux can hardly be referred to as "elegant" from an end-user perspective. Yes, it has some great stuff under the hood, but I'd rather not teach my mom how to recompile a kernel to get her new Electro-Widget 9000(TM) to work.
Please, try to know *anything* about a subject before sounding off like an expert. I know it's hard, but you could at least try.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You heard it here first... IBM just doesn't have their shit together at 90nm
Yeah, that'll be like hearing all of that other scoop $#!+ first on slashdot - you know, like Natalie Portman likes bathing in hot grits in soviet russia because everyone's new here.
BTW, you forgot to add "FP" to your subject line.
Mobile video playback just isn't a killer app.
Unless the owner of the vPod is a teenager who is buying video clips from the iTMS to show their friends.
Good enough resolution to be watchable on a small screen and maybe even doubled for play on a standard def TV, but not good enough for mass duplication ("don't steal video clips").
People mightn't watch full movies on one of these things, but they will watch video clips. The iTMS has them already. And people will show videos that they've shot themselves. Think "iMovie -> Share -> move to vPod".
Picture Steve on stage. Music video clip playing in the background. Jumps to another clip. Then another one. Steve's controlling the output with a vPod hidden from view. Another clip. Then the vPod interface shows on the big screen. Steve reveals the vPod. Crowd goes nuts. Product is an instant success. I'd buy it.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
The G5 was a dandy machine, and our customers couldn't get enough of them. The trouble is, neither could Apple!
Apple was leaving a pile of money behind, every single quarter that they had to put up with IBM's supply limitations. I didn't have access to the figures, but I would estimate that sticking with IBM was costing Apple upwards of a billion in revenue per quarter.
One thing that Apple knows they're going to get from Intel, is reliable supply of all the CPUs they can use.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apple never, ever had sole use rights of the PowerPC. The PowerPC is widely used in the embedded space. I believe there were WinCE handhelds running on PowerPC.
And Apple doesn't compete with game consoles.
So, you're pulling this out of your nether regions.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
What acually happened was that senior management was extremely unhappy with IBM sharing the PowerPC technology
Oh that makes sense, they'll get exclusive technology if they to Intel. What a load of shit.
Actually this whole thing is subterfuge for the soon to be released power e-i-macpod IIcx. It's a mac in the form factor of an ipod with a color screen and an integrated power supply. It has all the best features for big corporate partners and every trendy business process:
* High failure rate integrated power supply. (GM Model)
* Color display incompatible with cheap add-on monitors. (Proprietary Lock out Model a-la old IBM)
* DRM so you can lock users out of their data and sell them the keys (Ceasar Business Model)
* iTunes (Razor Blade Model)
* Only sold direct (Dell Model)
* Backwards instruction set incompatibility (Apple Model)
The real question is what does an e-i-macpod ii cx look like? If you know, put a website to meet Apple's latest marketing strategy: leak info, then generate press by suing some poor geek who is trying to survive off of Google AdSense and Claria pop ups...
-- $G
If you put in some Centrinos, I wonder if you could make the leap to get to "Crapple"?
Then again, that might offend the Cheese Whiz^W^W err, the Snapple people...
...which was a Mac cloner back in the day of the clones. I think they also made processor upgrade cards for powermacs of that era, but I'm not sure.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
I was wondering if a large set of goggles could fool a person into thinking they're in a theater? Do your eyes work differently in each setting, or is it possible to simulate a giant screen that way?
I suggest you read Slashdot
"The Pentium 4's design is superior in the ranks of a server chip, but I'm afraid they simply over-designed it to the point they're carrying too much baggage in the means of pipeline stages to keep encoders happy."
What does a deep pipeline have to do with servers? Not a bloody thing. A deep pipeline will if anything hurt servers more predictable code like multi-media encoding.
The P4s deep pipeline was served only one function. To allow Intel to crank up the clock speed. Intel was marketing clock speed and more clock speed.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That is total crap. Current 970FX are 90nm and have been for some time now.
I've been repeating this every time FUD about "the switch" comes up:
Apple announced a two-year long transition from PowerPC to Intel/x86 chips. Two years.
That's two years that at least some of Apple's computers will contain PowerPC chips. IBM just announced some tasty new PowerPC chips. Doesn't anyone else think that *maybe*, Apple is going to be buying some of them in the next two years?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Um.. Apple is not switching to Intel to save a few bucks. We're switching to Intel because of the lack of performance in the new dual core g5 procs. *shrug*
The P4 is superior in the ranks of servers because it has a really great data delivery system (800MHz FSB, quadpumped of course), a great set of very fast encoders, but I'm afraid that its pipeline was simply so long that after it's used its bus to fill itself up with data, it often has to flush it all out because it's a branch prediciting chip, and it's predictions fail often.
The P4 is a superior in the ranks of a server chip because it is fast. Even with a low IPC, it can get a lot of work done, simply because it does run so many cycles.
So yes, the pipeline was constructed to ramp the speed up, but it also facilitiates a crapload of in flight instructions, a crapload of code to be simultaniously executed (if you've got Hyperthreading enabled, you'll see this number continue to rise). But as SOON as you hit a branch, prepare to shutdown and lose 30 cycles of work.
The kind of server I seeing a Pentium 4 being dedicated to would be streaming media encoding or rendering. Since it doesn't look like Intel's going to give up on the Netburst arch, they're probably working their asses off trying to refactor the chip, and make a Pentium M of Netburst. Just because a chip was designed to be fast as hell, and not get much work done, doesn't mean that the archetecture was bunk, and that's what I'm trying to argue. But in the end, it really is just an experiment, the third coming of x86 implementations, super RISCy underneat.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I was wondering if a large set of goggles could fool a person into thinking they're in a theater?
I don't think so. If I remember correctly, the problem is the eyes' focusing. There's no way for the image on the goggles to be in focus unless the eyes are actually focusing on it. And the image is, like, one inch from your nose, so that's where you have to focus. And that is major eyestrain.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
of course, like everybody else interesting[sun, aol, etc], IBM recieved a cool half-Billion+ from MS plus discounts.. looks like any chance of the industry ganging up on MS to take them out.
I actually think that if there was a DVR that could store the TV shows to something like one of those portable DVD players that are so cheap now that a lot of people would use them at the gym - especially when on the treadmill or stair climber. Typically when I work out there is nothing but crap on TV.
Hello? I just say it, drink the wine.
I really favor diversity in the desktop ecosphere, and let's face it - PPC is the last truly viable alternative to X86.
I used to think the DEC Alpha would be a viable alternative to the X86, boy was that an expensive mistake. I ordered an Alpha from Microway that was setup as a dualboot with Linux and Windows NT. DEC as well as all the articles I read about the Alpha said that most any program that ran under NT could be installed on the Alpha yet I was only able to install one program I bought on mine, Borland's C++ Powerbuilder. Though it's sitting to my right within arm's reach I haven't had it running more than an hour in the past 5 years. Maybe when I get a network setup I may use it but I don't know. If I knew then what I know now I probably would of gotten a top of the line Mac instead. At least then I could run Windows as well as Mac software.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The writer shares a tidbit that OSX is compiled with optimizations tuned for size (as opposed to optimizing for speed). He mistakenly concludes that this is to reduce the size of code bloat. However, on most modern processors, it's measurably more optimal to keep the code small for good cache coherency than to unroll loops and other "speed" increases in legacy C/C++ compilers. I can only speak from my experience in the game development industry (where performance is everything), but we *always* chose the 'optmize for speed' option, pretty much ever since on-board caches became a prevalant feature on Intel and other competitors' chips.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The mere fact that they sell fewer desktops means that they have to be proportionally more expensive per unit, because they have to offset fixed costs like R&D and marketing.
On the face of it this may be reasonable, however if for instance they were able to sale 100,000 more Macs by reducing the price by $100 then they may come out ahead. The costs of R&D and marketing can be spread over more units sold.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Apple on the other hand takes the opposite approach. Anything that runs on their machine (or receives their logo), pre-installed or otherwise, must be tested to their satisfaction. That means of course far fewer options, but also far fewer bugs from a customer experience standpoint. You can buy hardware for your Apple and it'll just work. You can also call Apple, and they'll fix your problem, one way or another. This is why people think Apple hardware is better, but hopefully you can see it will always cost more.
Apple also has their Genius Bars in their stores where you can go get tech support, bring in your Mac and they may be able to fix for you right there.
FalconShould there be a Law?
for business a Windows machine is usually required because much special software for business only works with that OS
They said it had to be Windows, but they didn't say it had to be on a PC ;-) As it is now, and has been for many uears, you can run Windows on a Mac along with all the software you'd normally run in Windows. However you can't run MacOS or Mac software on a PC in Windows though you can software ported to Windows. With Macs you have both Mac and Windows, with Windows you only have Windows.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Hopefully, they'll decide at that point, that licensing their exact designs would be better for their bottom line.
Apple did for a short tyme license the Mac OS to cloners but when they brought Steve Jobs back he stopped it. Apple was losing more from the sales of clones or Mac compatables than they made from licensing. Apple is a hardware as well as a software company.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I think the only films Apple would NOT get would be Columbia/Tristar which are owned by Sony (unless Sony doesn't care WHO sells their movies)
Well frankly a lot of people already have their copy of XP. I've been looking at LongHorn and I just can't see any reason to upgrade. Seriously. XP is great. It crashes much less frequently that the old Win98 line did. Why exactly would I want to upgrade to LongHorn? So my faster processor can run the OS' new bling? OSX has better bling anyway.
I've heard from others how good XP is and yet the very first tyme I used in one of my classes within 10 minutes I had to reboot because I got the BSOD. If I recall right the computers were brand new Dells though I don't recall what models.
Of course they may run into some problems when their realize that their OS license is only valid for the hardware they purchased it on, but I suspect that will just cause them to pirate it.
As I understand it most editions of XP require activation which is why I decided the next computer I get will be a Mac and I don't plan on buying another Windows OS unless and until MS gets rid of activiation. Well, if I get a new Powerbookd soon I'll get Virtual PC with 2000 but that's it. If I legally buy something I see no reason I should have to prove to MS bought it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
From what I have seen hyper transport beats the P4s FSB hands down.
The one place that Pentium4 line does seem to have an advantage over AMD in servers is stabililty. An Intel CPU running on an Intel chipset are known for their stability. Even this advantage is more of myth these days. The AMD and Nvidia chipsets are very good.
You hit the nail on the head about the pipeline as soon as you hit an unpredicted branch loose 30 cycles of work. My experence is that server tasks tends to be VERY branch heavy. The AMD 64 seems better suited to server like tasks, even the tasks you list as good ones for the p4 like rendering and encoding media.
As for netburst, I think it was a failure or at least showed the end of the clock speed wars. For the next generation of cpus speed will come from more vector units, and more cores.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Wait. Are you saying that Apple's descisions, as a company, are based on . . .profit?! They're hoping to gain some sort of monetary benefit as a company?! What the hell do they think they're doing? Those . . . capitalists!
this is why they have LENSES to allow for the change in the focal plane (see Optics 101, or physics 201, or 8.021 8.022 at M.I.T.) :)
Maybe the eyes could be fooled using 2 seperate screens, shaped like little domes so that each eye can't see the other picture. Something like a 3-D effect, no?
...if milk is the only drink and you have to buy the cow to drink it.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
"I think the only films Apple would NOT get would be Columbia/Tristar which are owned by Sony (unless Sony doesn't care WHO sells their movies)"
:)
I doubt Sony (ahem, Columbia) Pictures gives a frak about what the rest of Sony does. The only strategic thing they've done for Sony Corporate lately was agree to issue their movies on the UMD format for the PSP. Before that, Sony Pictures supported DVD exclusively (and refused to license their films to Circuit City's DIVX joke-of-a-platform) and also agreed to provide content for Sony's mini-Beta (I forget the brand) portable video players. Video-8. That's what it was.
Of course, you can count on Sony Pictures not licensing any content to HD-DVD and will exclusively support Blu-Ray.
Music wise, Sony Connect doesn't seem to have that many more exclusive cuts available versus iTunes. Although that could be due to the influence of BMG, since they co-own Sony BMG Music. I noticed one exclusive track of The Killers that was available on Sony Connect and not iTunes, which did piss me off since I am a fan and got the rest of their music courtesy of Pepsi/Mountain Dew and their iTunes promotion.
Sony Corporate probably wouldn't care about an Apple iMovie/iTunes Movie Download service as long as their was a plug about viewing the movies in the living room on Sony LCD televisions...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Web browsing not up to date?
If you are a Mac user you should go visit iCab's web site:
http://www.icab.de/
They have had one of the best web browsers for the Macintosh platform for years though their version 2.X browsers could not render CSS based web sites properly.
Their new version 3 beta which came out about two months ago is fully up to date with web technologies.
And iCab (almost) does not crash, though if it does fold up, you can immediately relaunch it, even in Classic Mac OS as a disc check immediatly afterword has never found any disk damage from the iCab application.
Also very *very* nice is the ability to archive a web site into a single file on your disk, (which Apple has just adapted in Safari in Tiger).
The cost is $29 US and can be used for free in a non-commercial environment.
If you are running version 7 of Mac OS, you can still get their older 2.x browser which still runs like a champ.
I am looking forward to the Hybrid Power Mac:
1 Pendium D 830 Dual-Core Intel CPU &
1 970MP G5 Dual-Core IBM CPU
(for a total of 4 cpu cores)
DDR2 Memory (400/533/667)
SATA-300 3GB/sec Hard Drives
The newer Blu-Ray 25GB SuperDrives
your choice of the Latest Nvidia & ATi video card.
So, the new Hybrid Mac can run both OS X 10.4 and Windows XP-64 using the updated Microsoft Virtual PC software - greatly simplified since a true Pentium Dual Core chip is in the Hybrid Mac.
The good news of the Hybrid Mac is it will run everything, cost about as much as the current Power Mac, and be a solid choice for people who 'want to switch to Mac' but still need to run Windows and x86 apps.
It makes a nice transition machine, able to run everything from DOS & OS 9 up to Windows XP-64 and OS X 10.4
For everyone who wants just 1 machine on their desk, they can buy the Hybrid Mac instead of a Dell, HP or Gateway, a KVM switch and a Mac mini.
There were PowerBooks long before the switch to PowerPC. The first 3 or 4 generations of PowerBooks had 680x0 processors.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
The Pentium 4's design is superior in the ranks of a server chip
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Are you reading the right stories? Please, read:
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/opteron-
Please slashdot, clarify this if I've left anything out:
The Opteron has it's own memory controller. That means it is not sharing the single memory bus in multiprocessor systems like Intel does. The more CPUs you add to an Opteron, the better it scales. Somebody is likely better at explaining this than I can.
As for the "Apple switching to Intel Debate", slashdotters might find this of interest:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&
"BSD is about people pissing each other.." (Moid Vallat)
I wonder if perhaps the reason for the change is the ridiculously high thermals for the current G5s. From what I've heard, they run so hot that it would be almost impossible to consider putting them in laptops.
You're [secretly] getting a Dell!
Now, have you ever *used* Virtual PC? It sucks. Big time. S l o w as molasses, and lots of things (esp USB devices) just don't work. Using it is painful. Think Dad's going to trade in his 3GHz pentium-4 Dell for the equivalent of a buggy 200MHz pentium-2, and pay extra for it? Not going to happen. Not an option.
No I haven't used it myself but I knew a few people who did use Virtual PC and it's only been recently that I've heard this on /. I hadn't heard anything bad from those users I knew. Of course I prefered how it was done on Amigas, with a PC card installed instead of emulation.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Their share has been historically small, which makes them count pennies anyway, and they have some hard-won gains in the past 4 years they're not about to give up.
I guess it depends on what metric is used. I started using Macs in 1984 and as last as 1990 Macs held half the market for home or desktop computers. It was only after MS released Windows 3.x when PC compatibles overtook Macs.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Intel CPU's are definitely better for computational speed. However CS is not everything. You may be able to encode a single stream faster, sure, but proc up cubase and load 67 tracks with 134 plugs and tell me how your intel mobo does LMFAO.
I watched a dual xeon mobo melt down on that load. CPU's were at 10% usage, yet the project was unworkable.
My single cpu AMD64 3200+ played same project without breaking a sweat at around 60% utilization.
Snap, crackle, pop! Intel sucks for IO bound jobs. That's where AMD kicks it's ass. Database, audio/video production, and other such apps, require lots of system and memory bandwidth to support that fast raid. That's intel's bottleneck right now. All that computational horsepower does you no good if you can't get the data into and out of the cpu fast enough.
The phrase "suck a golf ball through a garden hose" comes to mind. For overall system speed where it counts, AMD is simply better. I think my system has 9.7 GB per second bandwidth capability on the mobo.
More system bandwidth = faster system. It speeds up the whole system.
Yea intel beats amd on some benchmarks, but that's about the only place...
The only benchmark that matters is the application you are going to run, the rest are next to meaningless. A benchmark that only tests file encoding, only tells you a cpu is faster at encoding that type of file, you can't extrapolate that statistic to the whole system.
l8,
AC
Ars Technica produces the kind of baseless speculation that would make Cringely blush; that leads to wrong-headed opinions that would make David Coursey blush, and coalesces into inaccurate predictions penned with a conceitedness that would make Dovorak blush.
This is all created with the kind of 'inside information' that would make the guy running Mac OS Rumors blush.
For an Ars Technica commentator, being embarrassingly wrong is a profession...and a cause for pride.
I got no problem voting with my feet.
"AMD gets a rush off copying every implementation Intel's ever made, and yet, when Intel does the same they cry foul? That's not sportsmanly at all, that's just being a whiner."
What are you talking about, copying implementations? They license Intel's proprietary instruction sets, they didn't COPY them. They are paying Intel to have them. And having them is important for compatibility reasons. EM64T is also licensed by Intel from AMD. Nobody is stealing or copying anything.
Did you even read the complaint against Intel? They have been using anti-competitive methods to keep OEMs pumping out more Intel and less AMD. They have even gone so far as to threaten company heads that were going to attend the Athlon64 launch parties.
Actually I must ask if you even understand what anti-competitive behavior is. Intel releasing the Pentium M, a cooler and potentially faster chip, is perfectly acceptable. AMD did it with the Athlon64, after all. Selling new and advanced technology that you developed is how those companies function. If the Pentium M just happens to be better than Athlon's offering at the time, that doesn't mean it's anticompetitive.