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Apple Switch to Intel Not a Big Loss for IBM
KaushalParekh writes "An interesting article about how Apple's switch to Intel chips may not be that bad for IBM after all. "Apple sees an opportunity with Intel. But IBM continues the same chip development that allowed Apple to claim several firsts and fastests. Now, Big Blue will plow its research efforts into processors for game consoles and other consumer products that might one day knock the PC down a rung." Also, "a lucrative avenue for IBM in China, where the marriage of the Linux OS to PCs armed with [IBM] PowerPC chips presents some intriguing possibilities." And, "Large firms like Sony, Microsoft and Comcast are betting that a home-entertainment device, evolved from a game console or set-top box, will replace many of the PC's functions. IBM plans to be inside these new systems.""
It was already known when Apple announced the switch that it wouldn't mean a huge financial loss for IBM.
;)
The demand from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo is a lot higher so IBM doesn't need to cry
Yesterday I went to a client's home that has 2 PCs and 2 Macs, they are the Design/Publicity kind of crew. They are utterly unaware of the switch, and believe me, the will remain so AFTER it. IBM is probably right in pursuing this path, but I dont honestly see embedded/game consoles taking over corporate turf anytime soon.
Apple and Intel strategically have very little issues (aside from Intel's current partner Microsoft... but that's another story)
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I will play Mr. Smith: It was inevitable.
The cost of producing new leading edge semiconductor processors has always, and will always, grow at a very high rate. The cost of a chip fab is outrageous. It has been doubling for many years now. A new chip fab today costs about $4 Billion US!!! (For a 65nm fab) Most companies have started renovating there fabs to use ever larger wafers instead of building new fabs. Currently many fabs are using 300mm wafers. Many of the older 150mm fabs that have already upgraded to 200mm don't have the room to upgrade further.
Some big new 300mm fabs are:
D1C in Hillsboro, Oregon
F11X in Albuquerque, New Mexico
F24 in Leixlip, Ireland
The "break even" point for development costs has been skyrocketing!
In the 1980's and early 1990's 50,000 units were required to recoup development costs on a chip. At 130nm, fab costs hit more than $1 billion and the break-even point for chips was about 500,000 units. A chip made with a 65nm process needs approximately 5 million units to break even on development costs. With 45nm processes at the edge of the current horizon for chip manufactures, how many markets are there for a chip that has to sell 50 million units to break even!!!
For many years Motorola, AMD and other chip makers were moving steadily away from having there own fabs. Motorola was outsourcing 7% of its chip manufacturing in 1997, and over 30% in 2003. It seems this might have been a bad idea. Apple sited manufacturing capacity as one of its reasons for choosing Intel over AMD; and well, Motorola it seems just lost the Apple contract... (AMD is expanding its Dresden "Fab 36", and considering building a new fab to be opened early 2008. In the mean time they signed Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor to help make AMD64's starting in 2006.)
Currently chip fabs are operating at about 85% capacity; new fabs traditionally start getting built when 90% capacity is reached.
The biggest financial problem that chip manufactures face is the wavelength of light. For several generations of chips we have been using 193nm light. How is this possible you ask when chip feature sizes have been shrinking well below that size for several years now? Well I will let someone else explain:
Quote:
Since the 180nm technology node, the feature size has fallen BELOW the stepper wavelength. How can a 193nm wavelength of light expose gaps and widths that are 180nm wide? The laws of optics tell us that in order to resolve or "see" a gap of X nm in width, we must use a wavelength of light that is itself LESS than X nm in width. Today's feature sizes are down to 65nm and are still being printed with 193nm light! This seeming violation of the laws of physics and optics is being achieved by very clever techniques generally known as RET or Resolution Enhancement Techniques. Since the 180nm technology node, RET has been growing in cost and complexity from simple OPC (optical proximity correction) to PSM (phase shift mask) to the combination of OPC plus PSM, and now on to SRAF (sub-resolution assist features) which is ushering in a new category of RET called X-RET or Extreme-RET. The industry could have reduced the stepper wavelength from 193nm to 154nm, but a detailed analysis showed that simply shortening the stepper wavelength would be cost-prohibitive! Instead, use of 193nm has been extended to the 45nm technology node, but the gap between 193nm and 45nm is quite large and cannot be completely resolved even by the most advanced RET.
Fortunately, something called Immersion Lithography has been introduced. It has been tried before with mixed results, but the need for it has never been as urgent as it is now. By immersing the wafer in water, one can reduce the effective numerical aperture (NA), allowing 193nm light to act as if it were a shorter wavelength. The wafer now has to be immersed in water, however, and this creates new challenges for new types of resist and topcoat materials that can withstand the effects of water contamination. Today, however
"one reason Apple switched is because it said IBM could not keep up with Intel's power-consumption technologies" A simple chart on power consumption of Intel/Itanium/AMD/AMD64/AMD_Opteron processors shows that Intel is far behind on increasing performance while stabilizing growth in power use in wattage. While I don't have data on PPC chips - AMD is clearly the leader in keeping power consumption down, while increasing processor performance. The article comment seems a little backwards to me... If taken literally, yep, Intel is on top of sucking more and more watts with each release, and although Intel states they will stabilize power use by 2007, I don't see the trend today.
And everyone thought IBM was at a loss when it chose the three largest game console manufacturers instead of a computer manufacturer with 4% market share.
Mozilla stole tabs from NetCaptor. So what? Right?
Because Intel/AMD/x86 are not anywhere nearly as entrenched there as they are here, as very few people (percentage-wise) in China *have* computers yet.
This is a (nearly) level playing field for other architectures in China.
Also, if other architectures gain ground in China, they might start cropping up outside of China as well, giving us relief from x86 hell -- and a big boost to IBM's processor division.
Go IBM.
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What makes you say they could price it like a Mac Mini? The mac mini uses slow 4200rpm laptop drives and G4 processors. Suddenly you're saying they could make a dual core G5 system, price it the same and "make a killing?" Seems like a stretch to me.
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Because they ARE inside these new systems. The Revolution will use an IBM CPU (PowerPC variant). The PS3 will use an IBM CPU (Cell). The Xbox 360 uses an IBM CPU (Microsoft even dropped Intel to switch to IBM). The war will go on for years but IBM has secured quite a beachhead in the opening salvo.
"Yeah, well, so do Intel and AMD. Why does IBM think they have the inside track all of a sudden?
2 19.html
Furthermore, nVidia and ATI are marketing their GPUs as capable of taking over more primary PC functions, thus, thet makes 4 HUGE opponents for this kind of stuff. Personally, I believe this is IBM's attempt at wagging the dog. They're still screwed."
Except that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are already using IBM's PowerPC processors (yes, Sony's Cell has a PowerPC core as the primary processor). Which means that all THREE consoles are using IBM processors, for sure. And that means for the next five years, every console sold (about 150 million were sold this last generation IIRC) will have an IBM processor in it. There's only 10-20 million Macs, on the other hand.
Not only will these hundreds of millions of consoles have IBM processors...but they'll have to CONTINUE to use IBM processors to retain backwards compatability unless there is a massive speed breakthrough enough to get a competing processor and emulate the PowerPC's. That's why the XBox 360 will have to have backwards compatability with 'top selling games' via recompiled patches preinstalled on the hard drive; the processor architecture change. It won't have full compatabilty while PS3 and Revolution will.
So IBM is set for the next five years and unless the console manufacturers DESPERATELy want to change architectures and forfeit backwards compatability, they're set for the next ten.
IBM already is inside these new systems.
And the PS3, btw, may even boot Linux by default when you buy the hard drive, turning it into a full PC with six USB ports, a powerful graphics card, a decent processor, WiFi, Bluetooth, and three gigabit ethernet ports.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/09/news_6127
http://www.maconintel.com/news.php?article=29 ( MacOnIntel link )
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
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Yeah I don't get it. /.'ers angry at Apple, supporting IBM, looking forward to seeing the PC knocked down a rung. WTF!? BLASPHEMY!
IBM is every bit as Evil as Apple and Microsoft, they're just on our side temporarily. Let the big shots duke it out. What we want is deadlock, no party ending up with a significant advantage over each other, but seeing profit in code portability.
Nerds don't use computers, they sculpt them like artwork. The current generation has warts.
As little as 5 years ago, I would not have said this. Having a handful of PCI slots on board was essential for adding capabilities to a computer. Now, everything I might want to add comes in an external box - including TV capture hardware, sound interfaces, and even hard disks. I have a 500GB hard drive here connected via a FireWire 800 interface.
The only other computers I regularly use are a couple of headless boxes, one where I work and the other in a co-located server room. Neither of these need to be expandable because physical access to them is non-trivial.
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Of course, the folks at the wine store give me funny looks now, but they're just a bunch of snooty cheese-eaters.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
None. It was all pushed forwards by the high-end server market. The POWER line (which are really PowerPC these days, just to confuse everyone[1]) has seriously high performance. They have been shipping dual-core chips since the POWER4+ (the POWER5 is currently top of the line).
The chips they are selling Apple are cut-down versions of the POWER4 (not POWER4+, or POWER5) with a vector unit bolted on. They are not the fastest chips IBM make, they are the consumer versions of an old IBM design.
[1] Originally, there was POWER and PowerPC. These were two slightly different instruction sets with a large common subset. It was possible to compile code that would run on both, or that would only run on one. More recently, IBM dropped the POWER instruction set, and recent POWER-series chips have been server-grade PowerPC chips.
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My opinion, based on vague things I've seen and heard and a lot of guessing, is that IBM never really wanted Apple's business in the first place. The plan for the PPC alliance always seemed to be that IBM would take the high-end kinda stuff, Motorola would target the PPC area, and Apple would buy chips from Motorola.
Unfortunately then Motorola lost interest in the CPU market, their CPU group started getting neglected and sucky, Motorola spun off their CPU group into Freescale, and Freescale turned out to be sucky as well. So Apple wound up pretty much having to buy from IBM instead. But IBM never seemed very enthusiastic about this-- for example there were reports they didn't really want to bother with altivec/VMX/"velocity engine", and altivec was the or a cornerstone of Apple's CPU strategy. (Though, ironically, VMX is a really big part of all those new video game CPUs IBM is making, so I guess that kinda turned out well for IBM...) When I heard Apple really was going to Intel, honestly one of my first responses was to wonder whether this happened because Apple was pushing IBM away, or because IBM was trying to push Apple away and Apple was just complying..
I really wonder what's going to happen to Freescale at this point.
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People like to take shots at the x86, but it is hard to deny that there are brilliant people working on it, really making implementations that fly. Intel's development team has a long proud history (they pretty much single-handedly turned the perception of CISC/RISC around with the Pentium Pro after all), and the AMD K8 team looked suspiciously much like the Alpha team at one point.
That is not to say that the POWER4 and derivatives are not impressive, they are, but the performance of chips like the AMD K8 really proves that if you have a competent team small details like the ISA don't matter all that much. I see no easy way for IBM to sneak into China, and it is actually a good thing; We are all better off with:
By comparison the PPC would be a fairly serious case of lock-in, only two companies manufacture chips (Freescale/Motorola and IBM), and Freescale mostly bothers with embedded applications.In summary, having some PPC around is nice, but having it take over a market would be a bad thing at this point.
As an IBMer, let me tell you - IBM *never* thinks losing business is good. Doesn't matter if the customer was the biggest pain in the ass, used up 90% of your support staff, and even lost money on, you still keep the customer as a reference and for potential new business. And before you point to Apple as not much business, I've seen people bend over backwards for contracts a tenth the size of Apple.
No, IBM may not have particularly liked dealing with Steve Jobs, but they certainly didn't have any desire to lose Apple as a customer.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Whether the "chip" business is in reference to the "PowerPC chip" (which, knowing USA Today, it could be), or IBM's overall CPU business, or IBM's general semiconductor business as a whole, Apple still represents a vanishingly small proportion of IBM's business. Sure, no company wants to lose 2% of its business - on this scale, that can account for millions - or tens of millions - of dollars. However, 2% is still small enough, regardless of the frame of reference, that Apple was most certainly not significantly driving IBM chip development. In fact, since raw clock frequency is about the last thing IBM cares about (at least from a specification one-upsmanship standpoint), Apple was probably a thorn in IBM's side in that respect. (It might pay to remember that at the time of Jobs' Intel announcement, IBM had missed its 3GHz commitment to Apple by over a year, and was/is still only shipping 2.7GHz parts.)
It's also probably worth mentioning to all the people who think that IBM's recent 970MP and low-power 970FX offerings are "perfect" for Apple that, while the 970MP may certainly be attractive for the Xserve and Power Mac lines (and may in fact be used), the low-power 970FX can't just be popped into a PowerBook. The support chipsets (e.g., HyperTransport) required for the G5 all generate substantially more heat than the similar support chipsets with the G4 (74xx) family, making the total heat profile of a hypothetical low-power G5-based PowerBook still much higher than even the highest-end G4-based PowerBooks.
As for the Apple/Intel FAQ, I am the author of that site (and it is completely non-commercial, non-profit, not associated with anything monetarily or financially in any way, and is exclusively for informational purposes), so that's why it's described as such. I'll try to confirm whether it is PowerPC, POWER + PowerPC, all CPU products, or all semiconductor products. Ultimately, though, whatever it actually is, Apple was still a very small part of IBM's business, and, as such, was not "driving" PowerPC development in any significant way, and the truth of my statement remains.