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."

Comments

Apple v. Dell?

[PlancksCnst]

Does Apple really sell as much (volume-wise) as Dell does?

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[Dagny Taggert]

Good point. I would assume that sales volume would have to be very, very high to receive a Dell-like discount. I don't think Apple qualifies. Then again, Intel might give them a good discount to keep them onboard. Apple could always re-marry IBM.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[Knome_fan]

If you consider consumer products like the ipod (and in fact the article speculates that Apple will be focusing more and more and these kinds of products) they are selling quite an impressive volume I would guess. If it's as big as Dell, I don't know, but it probably is big enough to be awarded discounts.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Then again, Intel might give them a good discount to keep them onboard. Apple could always re-marry IBM.

Or just use the oldest trick in the book ("We are looking at using some chips from AMD."), and then see what "discounts" you qualify for ;-)

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[weg]

Apple could always re-marry IBM.

Of course. Apple users have already become used to this kind of changes..

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[bemenaker]

It's not all about volume. This is one of the points of the AMDvsIntel lawsuit, (not illegal in and of itself, but how it's accomplished is the question). Intel will give you a discount if you switch your entire product line over to them. If you RTFA, he discusses this well known fact.

It is pretty common for suppliers to give you breaks like that. It would behoove Intel to offer a discount on pentiums to move more xscale. Right now, xscale is still playing catchup to ARM which had a three year lead on xscale, (if my memory serves me right).

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[CUGWMUI]

Well, it may not pay off much in the short run.. but Apple may be hoping that as they grow and market-share improves, the discounts increase.

Although, Intel will be only too happy to give them a decent discount in the short-term. It increases their revenues, and helps them beat AMD in the brand game.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[alfredo]

I think a combination of non computer items like the iPod, prospects of rapid market share growth, customer loyalty, and mindshare could give Apple leverage when it come to price per unit.

Let's face it, Intel would love to be associated with a company that seems to have a touch of genius in marketing and design.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[Wdomburg]

ARM is an instruction set, not a processor. The XScale is an ARM processor.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[fitten]

Yup... Good points.

A friend of mine and I were talking and he came up with this:

If you could spend just a little more on a machine and get one that would run OSX and Windows vs. the cheaper one and just run Windows, which would you get? We talked and came up with stuff like this:

$0: no brainer, sure get the OSX-able one
$100: probably get the one that runs OSX
$200: probably not get the OSX one

As you say, the Mac faithful will buy whatever Steve puts out for them to buy. However, some of the Windows folks might just shell out a little more to get the option (even if never used) to be able to run OSX... if the price difference is reasonable enough. I think Apple will gain by switching to Intel parts, even if the performance is comparable, it just allows a wider market easier access to Macs and OSX.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[Austerity Empowers]

No, the larger the volumes you have, the lower the prices you can get. There's no unit step at a certain volume although if you are the single largest consumer you can probably get an even bigger cut. Either way they'll get lower prices on Pentium devices than on PPCs, and lower prices on PC components than traditional Apple/PPC components. The simplest reason is that the PPC volumes are low enough that R&D & other NRE expenses are a significant portion of the per device cost. On a mainstream Intel processor, those costs are divided amongst every consumer, it's almost invisible.

High end PPCs are used in a lot of places, but not in significant volume (when compared to a Pentium).

I don't see why anyone cares what hardware is under the hood in an apple, no one uses an Apple because it has a PPC. They use it because Apple owns & supports the entire system and the OS is good.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[gabebear]

Does Apple really sell as much (volume-wise) as Dell does?

Not even close.... yet.Apple has about 3% of the world's PC market and Dell has about 18% of the world's PC market.

Apple is probably counting on this deal to increase their volume of sales considerably.

• It will help Apple's supply chain dramatically
• It may lower the price they pay on higher end CPUs
• Some organizations will buy mactel in place of wintel and then install Windows
  Reasons:
  1. Bulk discounts
  2. Less types of computers for IT to support
  3. What organization uses Dell's Windows support?
  4. Many organizations have site licences, so they won't have to shell out any extra money for MS Windows.
  5. Possibility of switching to OSX down the road

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[nutshell42]

I don't see why anyone cares what hardware is under the hood in an apple, no one uses an Apple because it has a PPC. They use it because Apple owns & supports the entire system and the OS is good.

There are a few who care. And the likelihood that a random Mac user who also frequents /. cares about the CPU should be much, Much, MUCH higher than that of the total population (of Mac users =)

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[falcon5768]

well the truth is schools is a misconseption. the install base for Dell in schools is MUCH lower than they claim, their turnaround rate though is much higher which is why they can claim they sell to more schools, BUT in truth there are almost the same number of computers as before, they just replaced their 1.5-2 year old Dells which crap out extreamly fast in a school enviroment, sometimes within a year (thank god for service plans)

Macs on the otherhand last a MUCH longer time. Up untill 2 years ago I still had fully used and working 5500s in some of our buildings in some labs. We still have at least 200-300 1st gen iMacs and infact barely ever buy macs, even though our install base is over 1500. They barely break and are easily repaired and do everything they need to do so why replace them. The only time we ever actually replace them is either cause the CRT goes out, or the motherboard dies. harddrive and optical drive problems are easily repaired by ordering parts even on iMacs.

If anything Apples biggest problem is they build things too well so the numbers dont match the actual install base. Wasnt there a /. article a month ago talking about that fact that Mac are actually 11-15% and not the horrable 2-5% some people give it.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[Phillup]

Does this take into consideration having to shell out the $$ for the Windows OS?

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[Okonomiyaki]

This fact actually hurts them in more ways than just making their numbers appear lower. For years, this has given the company a bad name with kids. Most high school kids either have or know someone who has a fairly recent PC at home so when they come to school and see ancient Apple hardware they get the impression that Macs just can't compete. This led to Apple having a very uncool image for a long time.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[Temsi]

Let me put it this way:

As someone who is OS agnostic, dislikes M$ but doesn't feel Linux can replace Windows completely any time soon due to lack of software (no flames please, I'm talking about Photoshop, Avid, After Effects etc), I'd love to have OS X as my system (especially since I love BSD).
However, Macs are terribly expensive. I think that's mainly what has been keeping them at 3% of the market.
If they can lower their prices (which I'm sure had something to do with the decision to switch), and I can run Windows, Linux and OSX natively on the same hardware, I'm switching - simple as that.

In fact, I'm sticking with my AMD64 for a little while longer until Apple announces their prices... then I'll decide.

If their prices come down enough to warrant a switch, I'll switch. Having been a PC guy for 20 years, that's big - and if even 10% of the market thinks like I do, Apple's market share can easily quadruple in a year. Now, that should be incentive enough for Apple.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[stevenbdjr]

well the truth is schools is a misconseption. the install base for Dell in schools is MUCH lower than they claim

Do you have data to back this claim up?

their turnaround rate though is much higher which is why they can claim they sell to more schools, BUT in truth there are almost the same number of computers as before, they just replaced their 1.5-2 year old Dells which crap out extreamly fast in a school enviroment, sometimes within a year (thank god for service plans)

I'm a network admin in a school, and we still have Dell's from 1999 kicking around. They're being replaced this year due to speed, other than that they're fine. Even the hard drives are still good. My experience with Dell equipment is that they're well built cheap machines that last. I am, of course, talking about their business line (Optiplexes). I wouldn't put Dimensions in a school (or any other large network) because they're not designed to handle that level of abuse or management.

Macs on the otherhand last a MUCH longer time. Up untill 2 years ago I still had fully used and working 5500s in some of our buildings in some labs. We still have at least 200-300 1st gen iMacs and infact barely ever buy macs, even though our install base is over 1500. They barely break and are easily repaired and do everything they need to do so why replace them. The only time we ever actually replace them is either cause the CRT goes out, or the motherboard dies. harddrive and optical drive problems are easily repaired by ordering parts even on iMacs.

My experience is that hardware-wise, Mac's last just as long as PCs. Software-wise is a different story. We're usually pushed to upgrade our PCs sooner due to newer software and OSes that slow them down. Mac's don't seem to have this problem, which is nice.

I'm not trying to argue against Mac's here, just dispell some Windows FUD that is so prevalent on Slashdot. I'm writing this from my 15" Powerbook, so I'm obviously an Apple fan. Additionally, at this point I can't see any logical reason for recommended PCs over Macs at schools these days, especially in an already mixed or a brand new environment. OS X clients and OS X server are like Oreo's and Milk, way better than anything from Redmond. But, if I could run OS X on Dell hardware, I wouldn't think twice about doing it.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[matthewmichaelagee]

I'm a geek. ;)

No, really, without getting into all the greeblies of X86 vs. PPC CPU design, at a primal level I can probably best characterise my preference that I'm drawn to purposeful design over attrition. That's not to knock X86 performance, and that's not to say that PPC is by any means perfect, but they're driven by different design philosophies (and different strengths) and I find the Power architecture to be a much more elegant expression of deliberate intent than X86's design-by-attrition: for example, regardless of how clean things may be at the microcode level, X86's ducttaped front end strikes me as a redundant kludge.

Putting all that aside, I really favor diversity in the desktop ecosphere, and let's face it - PPC is the last truly viable alternative to X86. Apple's machines have been great desktop PPC implementations (well, at least the Newworld G3s and the new G5 towers) in much the same spirit of clean and purposeful design, and a heck of a lot more affordable than IBM's Power offerings. PPC is well-supported by GNU/Linux and I expect to get at least a good decade out of my G5. Heck, the only reason I had to let my G3 go after eight years was that I foolishly bought into an Oldworld system and found myself painted into a corner.

Now if only the HURD were to reach that same degree of maturity and platform viability...okay, off to traipse blindly through my field of idealistic daisies! ;)

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[Austerity Empowers]

I believe Apple's higher end workstations are going to stay PPC for a while. No need to go blue just yet.

Second, why are you tied to a hardware architecture? Is it because you truly believe it is vastly superior enough that you are willing to tolerate vendor lock-in? Or is it because you hate Intel?

If it's the former, educate me. What about the apple architecture is so superior that it's worth locking in to? Why is the IBM architecture, although not as ideal, still so preferable as to want to lock-in?

If it's just hating Intel, I'd suggest that is the wrong attitude. We can distrust Intel, but tolerate them as long as there is AMD. We ought to similarly distrust IBM, but tolerate them as long as there is Motorola(Freescale?). Locking in everything to one vendor is in all cases the wrong thing to do, unless whatever that vendor offers is so incredibly superior, that it's just impractical to consider anyone else.

I have seen no evidence that the Apple architecture is supremely better. It is better from a customer support standpoint, and always will be. It is inferior from a price standpoint, and for the same reason, always will be. I don't see the Apple architecture suffering even one bit from using a Pentium instead of a PowerPC.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[toddestan]

I don't know about K-12, but at college I observed that the PCs were under constant use by the students, while the Apple computers generally sat around in sleep mode, waiting for someone to get tired of waiting around for a "real computer" to open up. Probably the reason the Dells don't last as long is that they simply see a lot more use/abuse by the students. That and the fact that low end Dells are pretty crappy machines anyway.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[soft_guy]

Yes. I had a friend come and rave to me about her new Windows computer and how much better it was than a Mac. I asked her what kind of Mac she looked at to compare it to. She said that she *had* a Mac. I asked her which model. She said, "Mac Plus".

So, this was in 1997 and she's comparing her 11 year old Mac to a brand new Windows box and thinking that is a fair comparison.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[nosphalot]

Just out of curiosity, what is it in the hardware architecture that makes you want to use them over other architectures?

• More than four general purpose registers.
• A vector engine that doesn't require a context switch to use, unlike one hacked onto the floating point stack
• RISC
• Shorter execution pipeline with more efficient instruction completion

The PPC is just a plain better processor. The x86 has done well, and I'm impressed how far it has come from a chip that originally wasn't powerful enough to be a calculator. The PPC was designed recently, and there fore suffers fewer legacy issues. I mean, Pentium 4's still have real mode, for example.

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[MadMidnightBomber]

The ARM2 processor was the first RISC chip that came in a home microcomputer. It was clocked at 8MHz and appeared in the Acorn Archimedes range of computers. Acorn also licensed the chip designs to third parties, including Intel.

It's low-power, it has a clean instruction set and a relatively low tranistor count.

And, yes, it does run Linux :p

Re:Apple v. Dell?

[arminw]

....but who out there wants to buy something that's purposefully crippled?.....

What makes you think that Apple will purposely want to cripple their OSX? Have they not always designed their hardware and software as a unit, regardless of the different chips they used over the years? Why should they design their products now with any other consideration besides building a reliable over all system? If that means the OS and hardware are tailored for each other as before, it is highly likely that the software will not run on an existing generic white box x86. A processor alone is still a long ways from a complete integrated computer system, encompassing all aspects, including all sofware. Apple will certainly not supply all the software for a million different PC designs, as Microsoft does now. They are also not very likely to release a set of specs to computer makers, detailing exactly what is needed to make an OSX compatible box.

I suspect that some very highly skilled geeks, such as those populating /. will figure out how to get OSX running on a few select non Apple machines, but the vast majority of users will buy an Apple product with OSX pre-installed. If, and that is a big if, Apple's new x86 systems sell in huge numbers, such as their ipods, someone big like Dell may try to make a computer compatible with OSX. At that point Apple will have to decide whether to use their legal department to stop that on the basis of some patents or whatever. Hopefully, they'll decide at that point, that licensing their exact designs would be better for their bottom line.

interesting take on ipod centric-business planning

[J Barnes]

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.

It's also about marketing

[alexhmit01]

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

Re:It's also about marketing

[Name Anonymous]

You're joking right? $200 difference? In your (and my) dreams maybe.

You're talking about the current price differences. The poster of the original comment was saying what might happen with a switch to Intel processors. And this theory (that the switch is to be able to lower the price of Macs) was pushed in a lot of articles about the PowerPC->Intel switch. So the poster's conditional statement is a very valid point.

Re:It's also about marketing

[adjensen]

Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't it be easier to write software for a Mac there was only the OS difference to grapple with and not a different CPU architecture to struggle against also?

Only if you write exclusively in assembly code and you don't use the GUI, in which case you're not likely to sell many copies to Mac users anyway.

Computing has changed since the 4502 days... you're writing to an OS, not an architecture, unless you're writing the aforementioned ultra low level code. You can write cross-platform stuff, but that either marginalizes the interface (ala java) or provides wrappers for everything under the sun, neither of which has any relevance for the underlying CPU architecture.

That said, once upon a time, Objective-C (the language for Cocoa programming) could compile to a Windows application (remember those Rhapsody days?) I haven't looked lately to see if that's still the case (and kind of doubt it,) but I wouldn't be surprised to see that Cocoa has also been living another "secret double life" and Steve will trot it out for Windows at some future WWDC.

Apple supports Carbon, but they really, really want you to use Cocoa.

Re:It's also about marketing

[bloosqr]

I think it cuts both ways. W/ the PPC processor the idea of performance could always be a bit vague. Yes you were paying $2k to $3k for a desktop but because the G5 ran faster on some codes and/on some benchmarks it could be justified. Now that they have switched to intel, they no longer can make the high profit margins. People are willing to pay $100->$200 (maybe) a premium for same performance for a better OS, but the $400->$500 margins are no longer going to work. Dell sells platforms for btwn $300->$1500 for the top of a line, If apple goes much beyond that the obvious question is why pay X extra for an OS that doesn't even run the equivalent amount of software (from a user perspective). Oddly, they seem to be going the route that low end SGI/HP/IBM UNIXers have gone. Intel/AMD/Opteron single or dual processor chips w/ a premium sticker attached to it which comes w/ a Unix that is either the same as what everyone has (Linux) or worse.

Options?

[Steinfiend]

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.

Re:Options?

[shadypalm88]

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".

What may be more important than the ability to dual-boot is Virtual PC, which would then be able to run at close-to-normal speed.

Re:Options?

[hackstraw]

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.

Only to a slashdotter does it make sense to buy a nice Apple computer so that it can run non-Mac programs and other operating systems like you can on a cheap PC.

To other people, Apples are nice because they have a mature robust operating system thats integrated with top of the line hardware and applications to match.

Case in point, recently I hooked my powerbook up to my iMac with a single ethernet cable (not a crossover cable, no switch or whatever) and transfered 50 Gigs of data in about 1/2 an hour over a gigabit connection that took me less than a minute to set up. Its hard to believe that in 2005 that only Apple has thought of making something so useful and trivial both possible and easy to do. To my knowledge, this is not even possible on any other equipment without 1st having a gigabit switch lying around, or take an order of magnitude hit in performance with a 100mbit switch, and 2 ethernet cables, and then trying to coerce the OS to share over the newly established link (probably accompanied by a few reboots if using Windows).

So do I wish I had BSD, Linux or Windows on any of my Macs? Nope.

Snappy

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

misspelled Teh ...

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[Ed Avis]

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!

"hope" has nothing to do with it

[frankie]

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.

Re:"hope" has nothing to do with it

[no_barcode]

Every iDotted? Of course! He got an iContract with iNtel. iThink you've nailed iT. iNeed coffee.

Re:"hope" has nothing to do with it

[saider]

The article seems to indicate that Steve's contracts are short sighted because Apple does not want to risk taking delivery on components for products which might not sell. IBM would not produce excess chips for Apple because the chips Apple ordered were not in demand from IBM's other customers.

If Apple ever ordered chips from Intel, Intel could overproduce and then if Apple never followed up, Intel could sell the excess to another vendor.

Basically, Intel is designing products for personal computer makers. IBM is designing products for embedded or big-iron makers.

If this had been an apple fan-site

[aussie_a]

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.

what about AMD?

[utopicillusion]

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!

Article is crap, I know the real reason!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The real reasons are obvious

[ryanvm]

Is it just me, or aren't the real reasons for Apple's switch obvious?

• Cheaper processors due to economies of scale. Also cheaper because they will constantly be fought over by both Intel and AMD.
• Running Windows apps in Mac OSX becomes much more feasible since they can now do virtualization instead of emulation. Dual booting between Mac OSX and Windows will now be a possibility as well.

Re:The real reasons are obvious

[Fahrvergnuugen]

If you honestly think that one of the two reasons that apple switched to x86 was so "Dual booting between Mac OSX and Windows" is possible, you're smoking crack.

If that were true then it would mean that Jobs secretly thinks that windows is somehow better than OSX and that it needs to be supported by their hardware in order for Apple to survive.

Re:The real reasons are obvious

[ryanvm]

If that were true then it would mean that Jobs secretly thinks that windows is somehow better than OSX and that it needs to be supported by their hardware in order for Apple to survive.

It doesn't mean anyone thinks Windows is better than OSX. It just means that Apple would be delivering the most flexible solution. People used to have to decide between Windows or OSX. Now they will be deciding between a Windows-only machine and a Windows/OSX machine. That makes the Mac a much more attractive solution.

High handed or not

[stefanb]

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.

Elements

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Elements

[ceeam]

Wow! Do you think perchance that this Pentium V will also have something to do with "code morphing"? I heard this technology should really be revolutionary!

Re:Elements

[cide1]

Why is this modded up?
1.) First of all, the article is ancient (Sept 2003).

2.) Second of all, the revolutionary thing promised was 64 bits, which we have today.

3.) Intel is not behind AMD in 64 bit chips. AMD chose a differant design, which sacrificed a lot of transistors for x86 compatibility, limiting the scalability and performance of their chip. It makes sense now, but it further embeds x86 cruft in the market place. Intel was working on 64 bit chips when AMD's main product was making pentium 1 clones.

4.) 90nm wont allow for gigabytes of memory on the die. Cache SRAM takes 6 transistors per bit. There just arent enough transistor now to do it. In addition, regular SDRAM cells take a transistor and a capacitor. They are the same speed, no matter where you put them. Delays from SDRAM sense amps aren't going away, either. I know it's a nice concept, but the L1 / L2 cache structure won't be changing drastically anytime soon.

5.) The last point just doesn't make sense to me. Backing store is normally a fancy word for a hard-drive, which virtual memory uses to store pages that are not in main memory. RAM and system memory are the same thing. All modern operating systems are smart enough not to cache file's in the on-disk memory backing store, because the same data is already located elsewhere on the drive. Why cache the data twice? To extend this concept further, the user can use mmap to map a file into user space as a memory block, and work with the file as if it where a block of memory.

Re:Elements

[bemenaker]

Intel is not behind AMD in 64 bit chips? Have you even seen a comparison review of the two chips lately? Put the crack pipe down.

Re:Elements

[Waffle Iron]

Intel was working on 64 bit chips when AMD's main product was making pentium 1 clones.

Unfortunately for Intel, multi-year schedule slips and disappointing real-world performance results make that irrelevant. Starting earlier to develop something doesn't matter if the results of your efforts turn out to suck.

Re:Elements

[Roliverio]

Umm.. a Intel fanboy

As has been said in previous replys to your post, it's obvious that intel (altough keeping it's position as a player on the microprocessor ground) it's really falling behind competitors, such as IBM itself and obviously AMD, wich has demostrated recently that can do more than just "cloning" PI's or PII's

It makes me wonder why Apple didn't choose AMD, we all know that in terms of price AMD is also winning, and could pretty much kill Intel in the foreseeable future.

New players come in to town with different architectures such as IBM/Sony with their Cell chip, and only IBM with the new line up for the PPC cores, so ...

Definetly something that will we need to follow later on.

You're right in that Intel started developing 64 bit chips earlier, but as already said, they did it the wrong way.

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[/ASCII]

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!

The real reason... IBM can't get 90nm together

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

AMD

[rerunn]

"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.

Compile flags

[pp]

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.

Re:Compile flags

[Wdomburg]

Especially on the G5, with a relatively small L2 cache (especially for a 64-bit CPU) and exceedingly high memory latency.

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[ceeam]

Thanks - the image of Isaac Newton with two bolts to his head (and stitches) growling "I live again" will haunt me today.

If they'd gone with AMD...

[doublem]

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!

Re:If they'd gone with AMD...

[FidelCatsro]

but now they could shove a pentium 4 in it and double it as a portable grill

Re:If they'd gone with AMD...

[LWATCDR]

Actually AMD has a really nice chip that competes with the Xscale http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/Pro ductInformation/0,,50_2330_6625_12409%5E12410,00.h tml
IBM and Freescale also have some PPC chips that are used in embedded systems that could have also worked for the IPod.
The Dell comment does make me think though. I would if it not the server market more than the IPod that is driving the change.
It is very likely that IBM is limiting Apples access to server cpus. Why are there now 4 or 8 cpu Apple servers? Maybe IBM does not want Apple to compete with IBMs Power based servers?
Intel would have no problem with selling Apple any thing they want.

Re:If they'd gone with AMD...

[LWATCDR]

Actually IBM got out of the PC market. They kept there server line. There business consulting and servers fit together very well. An IBM server running Linux, DB2 and Websphere make a good one stop solution. Also Servers are one place where hardware companies can actually make good money.

Re:If they'd gone with AMD...

[GutBomb]

one runs 65c and the other runs 63c. they are both pretty damn hot. that being said, the jokes are old

iPod is Apples Future?

[brockbr]

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.

Funny - IBM is to Apple as Intel is to Dell...

[Chordonblue]

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.

-Os

[wowbagger]

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].

Re:Wait a second...

[/ASCII]

No. Volume discounts are not illegal. Only offering volume discounts to customers who stay away from your competitors products might be, but that is not the same thing.

If bulk discounts where illegal, Wallmarts would be out of buisness and everyone would have to shop at 7-11.

Proprietary PC

[fbonnet]

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.

He's right about the Mac being "the past"

[alexhmit01]

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.

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 .Mac system, where the cost of the storage is going to zero but their annual subscribers are growth.

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 .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.

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

Re:He's right about the Mac being "the past"

[venicebeach]

This is interesting and all, but I have to say that it is really unfortunate if we view a computer company's success strictly in terms of its market share, or even in terms of its profit. If you do, you end up making statements like this:

The desktop wars are over. Commodity IBM PC-compatibles with Microsoft OSes and Intel chips won.

I think what really matters is who makes the best product, and in my opinion the success of Apple is in the acheivement of OS X. Now, I am not so naiive to think that the business side of things does not matter; in order for OS X to continue to exist Apple must be successful financially as well. I just think we'd all be better off if we reoriented ourselves towards what success really is. Part of the reason OS X is such a success is because SJ is not only concerned with market share. He's not thinking he failed if market share is 5%, he's thinking he failed if the computer sucks.

Re:(Mac == past) && (iPod == future) ???

[Knome_fan]

The author seems to believe that those products cannot exist in parallel...

No he doesn't. In fact he expicitly states that in the article:

"If you read all the way to the bottom of this article, and you think that my basic thesis is that "the Mac is doomed and Apple is planning to quit selling personal computers," or some other such fatuous nonsense, then you need serious remedial help with reading comprehension. I already made my point about Apple's shift in focus from the desktop PC (as exemplefied by the Mac) to the post-PC gadget (as exemplefied by the iPod) in a previous article, where it didn't occasion nearly this much contention and idiotic, defensive ranting."

Re:I don't understand the advantage...

[timster]

You misunderstand RISC. As do most people these days, it seems.

Back in the olden days, when chips were still designed by small teams on reasonable budgets, somebody noticed that hand-written assembly was rapidly becoming passe. When the assembly is being written by a compiler, it makes sense to design the chip with that in mind, and make an instruction set that is efficient at the kind of simple instructions that compilers like to write.

This led to a simpler design that could be made somewhat faster than a complex one. This led to many predicting the demise of so-called CISC chips. This prediction, like the "Internet in danger of collapse" and "Apple to go bankrupt" predictions, is no closer to actually happening than it was when it was first made.

The surprise was that Intel wanted a chip that had the speed advantages of RISC but used the same interface as their older chips, so they designed one. So they built a chip called the Pentium that translated CISC instructions into RISC ones. Since this operation is essentially O(n), they got good performance, and they've continued that basic design to the present day.

So to answer your question, it's already true that any operations that are not simple are emulated in software -- it's just that in x86 processors the emulation is on the CPU. Today there is no important difference between CISC and RISC, whether we are speaking of mainframes or desktops.

I thought I was kidding

[doublem]

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.

The Microsoft Factor

[chiph]

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.

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[SilentSheep]

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)!!!

Whatever the plan, we need new terms.

[doublem]

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???

Re:Whatever the plan, we need new terms.

[Helmut Kool]

Well, Apple seems to be trying to trademark Mactel.

Bah

[Maury Markowitz]

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.

Yeh, Surprise... yay!

[jvd]

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.

Re:(Mac == past) && (iPod == future) ???

[Iriel]

I believe that the author is thinking in the material world too much. It's not just iPod and portability that's been helping Apple lately, it the customization. Having your own custom playlists to carry with you where you go, your own set of widgets on the desktop and your own group of rss feeds. All of this housed in a smooth, sleek package. It's not just the hardware that propels Apple lately, has anyone ever told this author about something called Tiger?

Re:This is my experience with Apple MACs

[TripMaster Monkey]

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.

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[Zediker]

mmmm Throughput.... Tastes like... vectory....

Re:Article Text

[Linus Torvaalds]

they optimize for size, not for performance

What kind of moronic statement is this? Optimising for size is optimising for performance. What, does he think that the Apple guys are optimising for size to cut down on shipping costs?

Comparisons can hurt

[jav1231]

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.

Jobs ego factor and 360?

[nobodyman]

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? ;-)

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[utexaspunk]

I suppose Einstein, with his hairdo, will make a fitting bride of Frankenstein... :)

Re:I don't understand the advantage...

[TheRaven64]

but it seems to me that any processor instructions not supported by the RISC chip would have to be emulated in software

I'm not sure what you mean by this. You should read up on the Church-Turing thesis. Basically, it can be proven that a very simple instruction set (I think the minimum is 3 instructions[1]) can run any algorithm. The question then becomes, what instructions should be implemented as a single instruction on the chip, and which ones should be implemented as a combination of instructions. Generally, it turns out, it is a good idea if all of your instructions take the same length of time to execute - this makes interleaving different instructions much easier. It therefore makes sense to have a relatively simple instruction set.

The trend towards CISC ended with things like the VAX. Back when people used to program in assembly, it made sense to have complex instruction sets to make things easier for the programmer. The VAX included things like an evaluate polynomial instruction, for example. Of course, this was quite unwieldy, and so a lot of the instructions were implemented as microcode - you they were automatically translated to a set of simpler instructions.

With the development of high-level languages, it emerged that compiler writers were not using these complex instructions, they were implementing them directly in simpler instruction. It then made more sense to focus on making a small set of instructions run quickly (which, it turns out, is easier and therefore cheaper).

Note that `CISC' chips are not really CISC anymore. They do the same `emulation' that RISC chips do. When you run x86 code on a Pentium each instruction is broken down into simpler instructions and then these are executed on the RISC core. The Pentium 4 (and, I believe, the Pentium M) cache these micro-instructions, so they don't have to do the translation twice.

[1] Zero, Increment, and Conditional Jump, for example - try it, you can do addition simply, multiplication by repeated addition, then build more complex algorithms from there.

There are more pragmatic reasons for the switch

[doublem]

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.

Re:There are more pragmatic reasons for the switch

[rpozz]

I think the most simple answer is probably the right one.

Apple got pissed off that the PPC was getting very few performance increases compared to the x86, and probably had a poor price/performance ratio. They also would have liked to release a more powerful laptop.

They quietly had OS X running on x86 architecture for years, in case IBM fucked them over, and when they saw that Intel had a decent processor in the pipeline (pun not intentional), and know that AMD already has decent processors, they decided to make the switch.

Re:There are more pragmatic reasons for the switch

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Actually we switched from Linux to OS X for the hardware.

You can purchase a spare parts kit. In essence, it's an extra copy of all the components that could possibly fail. Between this and a call to tech support, I could have a server running in a few minutes. If I use a part, they ship me a new one.

Dell doesn't even sell spare logic boards. The last time we called for hardware support, the instructions they gave would have erased our RAID array. This for a simple diagnostic. The mac equipment will TELL you what is wrong on a happy JAVA app.

AMD timing?

[Zombie]

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.

Not really anything new here...

[Wdomburg]

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".

Inside Information?

[Snorklefish]

So Jon Stokes' "inside information" is from a guy who doesn't work with Intel, Apple or IBM and a five year old article?

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.

Re:Inside Information?

[Caiwyn]

Well said. Ars is a fantastic technical resource, but I don't think they're up to snuff when it comes to business world commentary.

The reasoning put forth in the article that Apple was too demanding doesn't hold when you consider IBM's "Power Everwhere" strategy. The parent poster is right -- IBM could've pushed the 970 into other markets, but they failed to reach 3 Ghz and couldn't sell it. Calling it a custom job for Apple after the fact is just sour grapes.

IBM can whine, but they used Apple to catapult themselves to the top of the list for custom processors for things like the XBox and the PS3. Once they had those contracts, Apple was a fish they could throw back. Bait, if you will. Meanwhile, the XBox 360 is water-cooled, and the Cell chip that powers the PS3 is not a viable desktop processor.

And let's not forget that the PPC970FX is horribly underpowered. Clock-for-clock, the G5 is shows no major real-world performance improvement over the G4. The main reason the G5 is so great is that it hits clock speeds up to 2.7 Ghz. The G4 is a full 1 Ghz behind. But the 970FX, IBM's "low-power" chip, is clocked even lower than the current G4, and its power consumption is STILL higher than the Pentium M. Meanwhile there are new G4 chips out NOW that reduce power requirements even more drastically.

The only thing the 970FX brings to the table is 64-bit compatibility, which is only necessary if you have more than 2 GB of RAM -- not a likely prospect in a laptop. The fact of the matter is that IBM's "low-power" offering is the weakest of all major chip manufacturers. Even Freescale is ahead of them. Intel is just plain out of their league.

With that in mind, Apple's reasons for moving to Intel were exactly as they stated -- better performance per watt. IBM couldn't hit the goal, pulled the plug, and is now trying to blame Apple for the fallout in order to save face with other clients.

Hardware is the problem

[sg3000]

> 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.

Re:Hardware is the problem

[ColdWetDog]

I dunno about that... My 2 year old P4 laptop is on the verge of expiring after being dropped, slopped and overheated on a regular basis. Looking around at both the Wintel and Apple offerings, not much has changed in two years. Hard disks are a bigger, video chips are a faster. A few more bells and whistles which I would likely strip out as soon as a I brought the machine home.

This is unlike the situation two years ago when I upgraded from a Win 98 / PIII / 15" XVGA laptop to my current XP / 3 GHZ P4 / 17" WUXGA / 2 GB laptop. Definately more bang for the buck there.

So, once again, I'm back to drooling over the G4, ancient technology notwithstanding. Urrgh.

Compiling for Size..

[delire]

Seems to back up this fairly depressing review of Tiger/G5 I've just finished reading. Say benchmarkers comparing Tiger to Linux on XEON:

Mac OS X is incredibly slow, between 2 and 5(!) times slower, in creating new threads, as it doesn't use kernel threads, and has to go through extra layers (wrappers). No need to continue our search: the G5 might not be the fastest integer CPU on earth - its database performance is completely crippled by an asthmatic operating system that needs up to 5 times more time to handle and create threads.

Top level of the review here. Note this review is really only relevant to high load server applications.

Re:The real reason... IBM can't get 90nm together

[bemenaker]

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.

I can't dismiss your post, but I swallow it with a very large grain of salt.

Did Apple dump IBM, or did IBM dump Apple?

[killbill!]

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 ;)

XBOX360, PS3, Revolution

[Vodak]

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.

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[bhurt]

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!

With all the horseshit I've seen on this topic, I knew there had to be a pony around here somewhere.

Re:I don't understand the advantage...

[VanWEric]

For a class last semester I designed a simple 16bit VVVRISC (very very very reduced instruction set) processor, did full layout (n-dope here, metal there), timing sims, assembly language, the whole schebang.

At one point I was deciding whether or not to put a multiplier in. Mind you, ever decent processor on the planet has AT LEAST one, but this was a one man effort. Adding this function would slow my clock by a factor of x10. The circuitry to multiply is just a whole lot deeper. I chose instead to implement multiply in my assembly using shifts and adds. It made my multiply instruction 3x slower than if I had circuited it, but it made all my other instructions hellafasta.

I know my example was bad, but it is how I grew to understand the difference.

The point is, RISC means the slower, less often used functions don't slow down the rest of the process. So lets say a CISC processor implements several multimedia happy functions, and makes them 3x faster in doing so. Now lets say the algorithm changes, and wants a slightly different function. Now the software must either do it the RISC way or do it the CISC+software_patch way.

RISC to me feels cleaner, and probably allows for more elegant pipelines - simple instructions often can use the same silicon (my ALU used parts of the adder to do XOR/AND/OR/etc, multiplier would have been off to the side).

Wrong about success

[alexhmit01]

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

I call bullshit.

[amper]

This article is so filled with misconceptions, revisionist history, wishful thinking, and downright FUD that it's difficult to extract the few relevant and correct facts from the story.

Apple not exactly rolling in cash

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?

IBM has other customers who actually pay up front for custom designs and who don't insist on having IBM tailor their product roadmap around a few million units a year

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:

...Darwin seems to work just fine on x86 hardware. In fact, it arguably got its start on x86 hardware. The guys at Apple are no dummies--the upper layers of the OS may not be open source, but you can be sure that they are sufficiently abstracted from the lower layers that it would be a relatively simple job for Apple to port to another platform. They might lose things like AltiVec/Velocity Engine, but vector processors are widely available elsewhere.

For the same reason, I don't buy the argument that Apple will never release an x86 version of Mac OS X--after a

Re:I call bullshit.

[Vitriol Angst]

Can we mod the previous post up to, like 10?

I am not a reactionary to all things not positive to Apple--but this seemed to be a total miss on what is usually technically astute reporting by Ars Technica.

One glaring issue that struck me (and I am not a CPU compiler professional; IANCCP), is that Apple was deliberately sacrificing speed for size by compiling for size. Wow. What kind of conspiracy would make that one profitable? More than likely, with the size of cache and the size of RISC instructions (and more so in 64 bit), size is more important to speed because it means you are less often having to read code from a disk. But, what, if anything has this to do with Steve Jobs moving from IBM because of a tantrum?

Why wouldn't Apple want to have leverage? And, if you can't have leverage, at least know that the company you are with is going the same direction. But now IBM is distracted by games and blades the way Motorola was distracted with cell phones and embedded system. I think Steve learns from his mistakes and he saw that after IBM had Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft-- Apple would not be getting as much service. So I totally agree with the previous post here from "amper". But I think that Steve's ego was less of an issue than what he thought was best for Apple's future (Steve is directed towards his legacy-- I think his poor temper towards fools gets mixed up with arrogance a bit). I would just like to add that it isn't just about costs or laptops or future performance--it's about all those things and probably about things that Ars Technica and the readers of Slashdot can only speculate about. Intel may not make the absolute best chip at every time of the year, but Apple will get to save so much in all the components that make up a motherboard. They can spend more time coming up with great software, and yes, a nice curvy case. From a marketing perspective, it gets rid of distracting issues of price versus performance (which most can't really understand anyway) and let's Apple compete based on a better computing experience.

But I don't think Intel is all a Panacea. There is a real issue with how Apple will make Windows applications compatible while still getting developers to make applications "Intel/Mac" compatible and not just "emulator" compatible.

But, I think that Jobs is smarter than that. He is looking at Cell phones and entertainment integration, and realizing that "Device compatible" will be more important to most home users than "Windows Compatible". So my guess is, that Steve will allow Windows applications to play, but only Mac compatible will get to work with iTunes, the set-top box and your cell phone. Steve has given up fighting for yesterday because he has confidence in innovation. I also think that is a win/win for people who stay with the Apple platform. I don't want to have headaches with Win/Tel just to ensure a profit margin.

IBM is not sitting still--I still think that their upcoming dual core will be a best of class CPU--but I'd be pretty worried if Apple were not involved in WiMax.I'd also like to know if the CELL chip will live up to hype and what it will be compatible with.

On a related note, did everyone know that Steve Jobs and Wozniak started by hacking set-top boxes? Follow the patents people.

DRM

[rishistar]

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.

Re:DRM

[willy_me]

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.

You can't be serious. IBM doesn't care about DRM because nobody has asked for it. If Apple wanted DRM they would simply ask IBM to include in into their CPU and it would be done. Another option would be to include it in the G5 chipset that Apple already designs. If Apple wanted hardware DRM they would already have it.

Microsoft

[paugq]

Oh, you stupid people, you don't grasp what's really happenning here. I have to tell you everything.

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. :-D

Re:Microsoft

[oledoody]

I don't know much but from what I do know...your theory sounds solid as granite. I mean they have VPC already. Damn, thats just depressing.

Re:I don't understand the advantage...

[putaro]

RISC actually refers to a bundle of tricks and optimizations. Most modern "RISC" processors are not all that reduced in instruction set size. Some of these tricks are:

Regular instruction set - all of the instructions are the same number of bits in length. CISC processors often have some instruction that are 2 bytes long, others are 4 bytes long, etc. Decoding this in a timely fashion was a problem back in the late 80's, early 90's. Today, there are lots and lots of transistors on the CPU to throw at this.

Single cycle execution - Originally RISC instructions were designed to be executed in a single cycle. CISC processors often had highly complex instructions that would take multiple cycles to execute (sometimes 100's or 1000's in the case of the VAX). Today, processors are pipelined but the idea is still the same - pump out instructions once per clock cycle. CISC processors tend to do this now as well.

Lots of registers - Registers are fast access memory inside the CPU itself. CISC processors varied in the number of registers available. Some, like the VAX and 68000 had lots of registers while others like the 80x86 have smaller numbers. RISC chips typically have large number of registers (unless you consider the 6502 as a RISC chip :-)). More registers make for faster code in general. I think that the new x64 extensions have increased the number of registers in the Intel architecture and, in any case, fast on-chip caches make the point almost moot.

Uncomplicated instruction set - The "R" in RISC usually really meant that all of the complicated instructions were thrown out and instead the compiler would just emit code to do them. Most of these terribly complex instructions (the VAX had a classic example which was the "evaluate polynomial" instruction) were actually microcoded (microcode is software that is a level below assembler, typically hardwired into the CPU) so they were not much faster than simply coding the routine using assembler. Easier to use if you're coding assembler by hand but who does that?

So, RISC was a lot more things than moving complex instructions from hardware to software AND the complex instructions that were moved from hardware to software were typically slow "in hardware" because they weren't really hardware but microcode. Most of the advantages of pure RISC are no longer as large as they were in the early '90's because the sheer number of transistors available (more transistors means you can make more difficult things run faster) is so large now that those optimizations don't buy you much. The battle now really comes down to how much money can you throw at the chip in order to produce new versions of it that run faster. When you look at the sheer amount of money invested in the Intel architecture vs PowerPC or SPARC or Alpha you will begin to have a lot more respect for what the RISC camp accomplished with a much smaller budget.

Re:I don't understand the advantage...

[IPFreely]

There are lots of good answers here concerning RISC vs CISC. But I doubt that is really what Apple was attracted to. In the early 90's when the 68K architecture was running out of steam and Apple was contemplating the switch to PowerPC, what they were looking for was performance. At that time, RISC design had a decent performance advantage over X86. It was thought that the baggage that was the X86 instruction set would hold that architecture back in the speed wars against RISC while the more elegant RISC designs around at the time would continue to have their speed advantage.

So Apple, thinking Intel would languish in their fat and happy X86 monopoly and X86 architecture difficulties, made the move to Power. It was fast and it had the backing of IBM.

What changed? Why didn't that hold up? AMD.
Prior to Athlon, Intel was on a fairly steady schedule of speed upgrades. You get a few 33's of Mhz every once and a while. They could take their time. Speed bumps were about money, not a race. When Athlon hit and Intel suddenly found themselves behind in the speed race with a processor that could run the same software, Windows, then their attitude shifted drasticly. From the 500Mhz intorduction of Athlon straight through to the 3+Ghz finalies. It was a rapid race to the top of the speed charts. Without that competition, I doubt Intel would have reached 3 Ghz by now.

That speed race also introduced enough new designs to overcome some of the advantages the RISC architectures had, either through redesigning the internal pipelining, or through material design and pure Mhz maddness that other less cash rich chip makers simply could not keep up with. So Intel caught up with PowerPC in the speed race and is in a position to provide cheaper prices to Apple. With the performance advantage gone, so is the incentave to go with something other than Intel.

AMD improved Intel enough to make them competative with all the RISC out there. They should thank AMD for the boost. Somehow I doubt they would be gracious enough to do it though.

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[J Barnes]

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.

ARM = lots of things

[Isvara]

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.

Re:ARM = lots of things

[Wdomburg]

ARM (the company) collaborated on desgin of the StrongARM, but it was DEC, and later Intel, who did the actual production. Even with their fully in-house designs, they've been produced by third party companies; e.g. VLSI was responsible for the ARM2 and ARM3.

The elephant in the bedroom that everyone ignores

[Fished]

Personally, I don't think Apple's decision to go Intel had too much to do with processor roadmaps. Instead, I think it was primarily driven by Apple's desire to ease interoperability with Windows.

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.

Crap, crap, crap...and more crap

[DesScorp]

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.

Re:Crap, crap, crap...and more crap

[evilviper]

AMD makes some better desktop offerings, has some better prices, but doesn't have Intel's product range, especially in laptops.

Nonsense. AMD has some extremely low-power processors that happen to be much faster than anything Intel makes, while still being cheaper.

AMD doesn't have a seperate line for their mobile chips, but Intel won't either as soon as they adapt their Pentium Ms into their desktop/server lines, which they are currently working on.

No one makes anything as good as the Pentium M for laptops. Not AMD.

No, AMD just makes processors that are better than the Pentium M for laptops. 64-bit, faster, just as low-power, cheaper, etc.

that were supposed to hit 3.0GHz...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[Vaunted236]

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.

The REAL real reason: Apple didnt like IBM sharing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is my experience with Apple MACs

[Stick_Fig]

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.

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[Phat_Tony]

Everyone says "video iPod," but I think they have the wrong thing in mind. Jobs has said before, and I agree with him, that mobile video playback just isn't a killer app. People want to listen to music in their car, working out, walking around, working- everywhere they don't want to watch TV and movies. People want to watch their movies on their giant home theater setups. Maybe a few people who take public transportation want to watch downloaded video on their iPods, but the potential market for portable video just isn't worth designing a product line to go after. Sure, if you can plop it into your existing product as a software addition, like the PSP (and probably future iPods), you might as well, it may be handy. But it's not a killer app.

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.

Re:Apple v. Dell?1

[Txiasaeia]

Nice troll. 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, mpeg2 to divx, mpeg2 to xvid, encoding to ogg, and normalisation of a 700MB wav file in cooledit, the A64 came out on top. In fact, in the ogg and normalisation tests, an A64 3800+ (2.4GHz) beat out a P4 660 at 3.6GHz.

So what's this about "any" P4 vs A64 tests that show that P4s are superior in audio & video compression?

Re:Slashdot title capitalisation

[brayniac]

i guess you need to learn grammar and how to read title case. Oh wait, I'm sure that confused you with a lower-case 'i'. Was that a proper pronoun? Grow up; (OMG it's a scary semi-colon) if you can't understand title case, then obviously you won't be able to comprehend an article. Very basic grammar rules here, nothing "challenging".

(mod me down, i know you will. just be sure to drag the trollz down with me.)

Apple Bathtubs as much as anyone else.

[Chas]

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.

Re:Slashdot title capitalisation

[cailyoung]

Ever heard of 'Title Case'?

Furthermore, for your inference to be plausible, there would need to be a posessive " 's " after "Real", which there isn't. The title makes sense.

Other Reasons

[saterdaies]

There are other reasons for choosing Intel too:
-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/features .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.
-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.

Lame

[umijin]

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.

PPC matters to some

[DreadSpoon]

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. ;-)

Re:PPC matters to some

[matthewmichaelagee]

That's exactly it. These days, choice of OS and choice of hardware platform is largely an aesthetic decision. Yes, upfront and life-cycle costs weigh in on that, but compared to the value of one's own time and enjoyment, they're practically rendered a petty afterthought. For me, it's all about the architecture. Same thing as folks caring about the engines in their cars. I can take any machine and put it in the box of my choice or throw in in a rack in the closet, play with multiple evolving OSes, but what's the one constant that I can't change without a major reinvestment? The hardware. So I go for what best appeals to my personal design and performance preferences as well my own judgement of long-term platform viability, mitigated by costs. And honestly, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a machine with as well-developed a longterm aftermarket as the Macintosh. I expect they'll keep producting PPC Powermacs for at least a couple more years, and wouldn't be surprised if Apple's 'Intel-only' move doesn't prove quite so cut-and-dry as they've pubicly stated at this point. Plus, Apple's nascent HPC market won't be quite so processor-agnostic, and if nothing else that might give a nice boost to economies of scale in IBM's future offerings.

BUT....

[DesScorp]

If price of cpu's were really such a big factor, AMD might have been alot more willing to offer discounts than Intel.

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.

The OS Xperience

[jafac]

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.

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[The Lynxpro]

"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.

Re:Apple v. Dell?1

[ciroknight]

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.

Trolling turned on it's ear! News at 11!

[MachineShedFred]

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.

Silly. The problem is NEXT year's CPUs, and after

[SteeldrivingJon]

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.

Two words

[Thu25245]

"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.

Re:Apple v. Dell?1

[MojoStan]

Nice troll.

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).

...the A64 came out on top.

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.

Re:The elephant in the bedroom that everyone ignor

[demon]

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.)

Guys, it's just not that complicated.

[jcr]

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

Apple will be using both!

[dr.badass]

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?

Windows in business

[falconwolf]

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.

Falcon

Re:interesting take on ipod centric-business plann

[The Lynxpro]

"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... :)

Re:And you are *still* wrong.

[MachineShedFred]

Well, that worthless tip doesn't help with the third mouse button, does it now?

If I tap out "Shave and a haircut" does it emulate a third button?

Oops, except "Open in new tab" is right there in the menu. You still don't know what you are talking about.

Tools seem inelegant to those who know not how to use them.

I'm not saying that the OS should be designed so you HAVE To use a command line, just give me the option. Do you have any idea how much easier it is to administer even a Windows server with Secure Shell instead of Terminal Services, VNC or PC Anywhere?

Yes, I do know, because I do it daily on the AIX, Mac OS X, and Linux servers that I administer at work... from my Mac, using SSH. Built in. Instead of third-party installed. Like Windows. You still don't know what you're talking about.

How about copying Tetrabytes of data from one server to another, which I have to do on a regular basis as part of my job? If you use a GUI, you have a lot of waiting around. The command line tools for moving data around are far more flexible. If I need to copy just the 900 GB that's been added since the last update, I can do that with a single command line in Windows or Linux. Until Mac was built on top of a decent operating system (BSD) and had a decent command line, the kind of data transfers I have to do would require hours of work by hand, third party applications or applescript.

I don't know what a "tetrabyte" is, but I'm really not interested in talking about the six-year-old Mac OS 9, which is what your entire experience seems to be predicated on. Go ahead and go back to Windows 98 and tell me how easy administration is, cause that's what you're doing here. This is a complete non-sequitur filibuster.

I'm sorry, but if you honestly think a command line is a bad idea, then you've already demonstrated that you don't do a lot of the things that require more advanced tools.

The dumbed down Apple interfaces are good enough for you. Glad to hear it. You shouldn't have to learn to program to use your computer. Apple makes a nice entry level computer, and it can do a lot of the things that most computer need.

But a Mac would be a pathetic joke for my line of work. It's less of a joke now that it's Unix based, but there's a lot of NeXt crap that needs to go before it's worth my time, and a lot of things that just can't be cone from a command line.

I do plenty on the command line, and I'm glad it's there. However, I'm also smart enough to realize there is value in having an OS that doesn't require it. This seems to be the point you are missing.

Yeah, I guess it would be a pathetic joke to have a system that talks to everything easily, without having to jerk around with it constantly. I sure have a hard time filling my day up without having to reinstall drivers, clean spyware, check for viruses, and pray that I won't have to reinstall Windows.

I work on windows, but I can work *with* my PowerBook.

Knowing how to do various things from the command line is a great benefit. Even when you have to use Terminal Services, it's generally a hell of a lot faster to log in, open a command prompt, and do what you need to do as opposed to opening a window, waiting 30 seconds, opening another window, waiting 30 seconds and so on for ten minutes just to get to an interface to check a setting.

Hmm, maybe this is why on Mac OS X you can type in ">console" at the login prompt, which drops you to a text console to do everything you're talking about? Oh, I guess you still don't know what you're talking about.

I'm sorry you're upset by my having seen your toy computer for what it is, but to tell the simple truth, it's clear you just don't have computing needs that are sufficiently advanced to encounter many of the brain dead ways in which Max is castrated. You're also so brain washed by the Mac marketing machine and the "cult of Mac" that you can't examine your OS objectively.

While you can call me all the names you want, it still doesn't change the fact that you are not playing with a full deck of cards. I say again, try to know something about a subject before talking about it.

Have a day.

Re:Apple v. Dell?1

[Pranadevil2k]

"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.