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Apple Hedges Its Bet on New Intel Chips
Corrado writes "The Mercury News is reporting that Apple is still planning to use PowerPC chips well into 2008 for its low end and portable systems. Does this increase the "warm fuzzes" for the Intel move?
More information from TheStreet and lots more links from Google News."
I think you mean the point would be "moot". Based upon the stuff that Intel has been announcing lately I'm looking forward to an Intel based Macintosh and I'm not too worried about this.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
The contract into 2008 is likely because Apple needs current and future PPC processors to fulfill support agreements.
You didn't actually think that Apple would cut off PPC users the moment that the last Mac model is moved to Intel, did you?
Google Link and just click on the url that shows up on that page. Worked for me :)
I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
Apple has to support current computers with their Applecare program. Applesinsider has discussed that these go into 2008. So really, this is probably nothing more than the winding down period.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1248
That is more than a rumor. That is exactly what the Xcode that was released on the day of the announcement back in July does.
No, Apple does not plan to keep using G4s in the lower-end stuff. It'd make no sense. Apple is likely securing this contract so they have a supply of G4 chips for product repairs for the next three years, as AppleCare is a 3-year agreement.
Its amazing how most news articles will not give you the full story, or worse, you get their slanted version of events.
Reading multiple articles (not something /.'ers are likely to do since we can't even get them to RTFA) lets you get all the facts so you can draw your own conclusions.
Just my 2 pennies
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Heat? What the hell
The number one reason you havent seen a G5 laptop is heat issues. I don't see any problems running newer and newer x86 CPUs in laptops.
Hell the G5 towers need to be *water* cooled.
Furthermore, while the CISC/RISC business is correct every single report Ive read about the dev OSX86 machines (which are just regular P4s) are that they boot faster, perform faster, and are overall considerably faster than a G5.
Drop the argument, even Apple realizes it's dead.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The Pentium M is lower voltage and has a lower power dissipation than the current line of mobile G4s. I too wish the PowerPC would continue, because it seems like a really elegant architecture, but Intel currently has the PowerPC beat in terms of mobile efficiency.
PPC is one of the best platforms ever for both sound, gfx and of course heat production.
Is this based on more than just personal feelings about the architecture? Honestly, I like the PPC. It's a great implementation of the classic RISC principles: lots of registers, simple and fast instructions, no hardware stack, etc. But, really, this is just geeky fawning over a pretty design. The x86 is certainly ugly in some ways, mostly in terms of the huge legacy instruction set, but it's not so bad overall. Having hardware stack support is very nice. The limited number of registers makes function call overhead very low. If you disassemble code for typical PPC applications, you may see dozens of instructions for entering and leaving a function. And with each of those instructions being 4 bytes, that's a big deal in terms of instruction cache usage. So it's not entirely clear that in the modern world a classic RISC architecture is better.
lipo -remove i386
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
If you went to the trouble of optimizing your scientific/engineering/math/multimedia processing application to use Altivec, not only is it going to be a pain to port it to use vDSP or direct SSE instructions; Rosetta won't even run Altivec code.
I think you might have that reversed. Most Devs don'te even have a Mactel to work on. I'm sure most current stuff will still be compiled for PowerPC, and then run on Intel via Rosetta.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Heh. I googled and landed on a web site that came up earlier today or yesterday in the context of "begging the question". Anyway, here's what their article says: "The mute spelling is a development that has come about because moot is now a fossil word, usually encountered only in this phrase; there is an understandable tendency to convert the unknown into the known, and mute seems to fit the new meaning rather better. But its wrong." But read the whole article for an amusing ethymological note.
Of course as an adherent of descriptive linguistics, far be it from me to agree with the author that any usage is either right or wrong, but a quick Google test seems to indicate that "mute point" is certainly less commonly used than "moot point".
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Hello! it is 2005 Drive prices are now less then a Dollar a Gigabyte. This consern about bloat is a rather mood point now. Besides bloat is more of a problem with the higher level programming code then with the binaries. At this point the cost of making a program that is 10% smaller is more then the cost of getting a drive twice as big.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
XCode can't magically correct any endian assumptions your code makes.
If you use the right libraries endian issues are automatically corrected.
So basically all you need for testing is one PPC mac and one Intel Mac. But when you get to the point where both work, it's pretty easy to maintain the endian compatibilty going forward (as long as you remeber to keep using thr right libraries) which is what makes years of dual proc support not such a big deal.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple considered the Cell and it was just not suitable.
The Cell is a general purpose PPC processor with 8 other vector processors. If your app can't be vectorized then the 8 other processors are about worthless.
However the rest of the world is going dual core general purpose CPU's. To go dual general purpose with the Cell would require 18 processors and a ton of heat.
Plus programming for Cell would be hard because nobody has done it, so there is a lack of talent out there. It would be Apple fighting the tide all over again.
Apple is now about going with the tide and controling where it will go. Going after market share and developers, which are x86 based and trained.
IBM has the big server and cluser market sown up anyway, so Apple can't sell any hardware there.
Actually, since we're talking about CISC vs RISC architectures, you should find that the x86 binaries will be a bit smaller than the PPC ones. So perhaps the code portions will wind up being 175% the original size. But a sizable portion of a typical Cocoa app consist of the NIBs and other non-executable resources, so you might find that a fat executable may take only an additional 50% or maybe even 25% on the disk.
Of course all of this applies only to Cocoa (will they even support Carbon-based Intel binaries? I believe they've already said they won't support Classic on Intel). Java apps won't care at all what CPU is running them.
I wonder how big an OS X Office install will be now.
Based on how it was in NeXTSTEP, approximately 30%.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Thanks to G3's holding down the low-end of Apple's line for so long, nearly every app on the market has a G3 code path (otherwise you'd be dumping an awful lot of relatively recent iBooks, iMacs, eMacs, etc). Rosetta simulates a G3; the application will simply take the G3 instruction path and run fine, just a tad slower. Emulating a vector instruction set like that across platforms would have been hell, and likely slower than the G3 codepath in the first place.
Only applications that are G4-only will have any trouble (damn few outside of Apple, and theirs are already Intel optimized).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Clearly, it does.
Between the 83 occurences of "x86" in Apple's Universal Binary Programming Guidelines and the x86 chip architecture in the Development Transition Kits, how could it not be an x86 chip?
Anyway, I thought the speculation was over now that Intel has revealed its roadmap.
This story is just an artifact from the announcement that Apple contracted Freescale until 2008 to provide processors. This may be simply a CYA manuver in case something goes south with the intel deal (be it delays etc).
So I'm not sure that this means you won't get your portables until 2008, just that Apple has a backup plan in case, with intel portables in 2008 as a longest possible estimate.
-T.
It is for warranty and repair contracts. You can get a 3 year warranty with AppleCare. The are telling there corporate/scientific users that they will honor this going forward so to reduce the risk for those buying machines now. They need to have replacement parts and machines if you buy one on the last day they will use the PowerPC. This is the reason! People over think everything Apple does.
his has been going on since Apple was late with color displays ("The Mac doesn't need color. It has resolution"), through the day Jobs bowed down to Gates on the big screen...
Apple supported large high-resolution color displays before Windows 2.0 even shipped. Look it up. Yes, the original Mac was B&W. But starting with the Mac II the platform held a huge lead in color graphics support for years and years.
And yes, Carbon-based binaries are supported. Did you think Photoshop was magically rewritten in Cocoa for the demo? :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
>For example, many Mac users still run Microsoft Office
>on the Mac. Microsoft isn't obligated to offer that on
>x86 for the Mac, now that the five year deal has expired.
Why did Microsoft come on stage at the Keynote and publicly promise to offer Office/x86 then?
> This is more about keeping options open in
> case the Intel transition doesn't come off.
I don't think you can know that now.
The P4M is pretty much gone. Everything shifted to the Pentium-M a while ago with Apple looking to the the Merom for their Intel generation computers. The Merom is dual core @ 35W max with 1-2W nominal @ 65nm. I'm not a rah-rah Intel kind of guy (I own stock in AMD), but they really got something with this next line if they can deliver on their 65nm process.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
See IDF news for the answer to that... Apple will incorporate Intel's newest processors from 06/07, meaning processors like Yonah, Merom, Conroe, and Woodcrest. They are all based on an entirely different microarchitecture than the Pentium 4.
Ars has a much more thorough and thoughtful take from someone who actually follows Apple and has some common sense.
Except the PPC has instructions to save multiple registers at once to memory. So you can save registers 3-8 to the stack in one 32-bit instruction. I assume the compilers you are using do not do this for parameters because it's faster not to. Much like x86 xor'ing a register with itself instead of setting it to zero.
So I would question what kind of functions these are that you say are takin 20+ instructions. But also, ultimately performance has little to do with the overhead of functions since the vast majority of time is spent in simple loops.
What you say is correct though, that functions are more wasteful on PPC, but another way to look at it is that languages like Java will run insanely fast on PPC since they hot spots are often inlined 5 or more functions deep -- something that is basically impossible with a language like C or C++. That means no function calls, and using up all the registers for something useful. RISC may be a poor choice for C... true dat.