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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."
Has anyone ever heard of support? Apple may need the occasional extra lot of processors for years to come to support their existing support contracts.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Apple is just covering their bases. This is merely a safeguard, not an indication that the move is behind schedule.
This has nothing to do with the change over to Intel. Apple needs to support the warranty its existing base of G4 Macs for at least three years.
Entirely outside the ADC NDA...
If you take a look at Apple's developer tools - specifically, XCode 2.1 and above, you'll find that building binaries for both platforms is fairly easy. I think that Apple not only wanted to allow developers to build binaries for Intel and PPC, but to allow itself some time for the transition. Apple hasn't locked itself into a position where it must switch to Intel on a certain date. This is a good thing.
Really, if we can consider Mac OS X as simply OpenStep 4 (or whatever), then the CPU - to a very large extant - becomes just another part of the machine. With the exception of low level hardware driver experts, do you really care what bridge / Firewire / USB chip is used? Think the same way about the CPU, and you have Apple's apparent perspective on using Intel chips - the OS is fairly independant from the CPU, the developer tools can target multiple platforms, and consumers really won't have too much to worry about.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
Apple have stated that the low end will switch to Intel first, so I don't really know what the basis for this `story' is. It seems much more likely that, if they are extending their purchasing options for G4s to 2008, they will stop selling G4s at the end of this year. This would then give them a supply of G4s to use in replacements until the end of the 3-year AppleCare period for the last G4 units sold.
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Apple did say the transition would take a couple of years.
It's obvious that after the Intel bomb shell they dropped that they now need to secure supplies of current processors until the entire line has moved onto Intel.
This is common sense. (But you don't have to expect this from news sites that report, even, that Apple might be back-tracking on the Intel switch.)
Intel has made their whole company strategy around low power high performance chips. That was the stated reason for moving to Intel. Therefore, I would think that Portables would be the first thing to move. For example, there is no G5 portable and we've been waiting a long time for a portable with a better chip than the G4. My powerBook is getting long in the tooth, but I won't replace it with another G4 powerBook - what would be the point? - unless it quit working.
The G5 desktops are still very fast and I could see staying with PPC there for a while, but not on portables.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
When an auto manufacturer ships a new engine, they don't immediately halt production of the old ones that it is destined to supplant. A phased transition is simply a reality of the manufacturing business.
Apple doesn't have to rush out an entire new line of units in one big bang. Good engineering and facility planning take time.
Hard disk space is cheap. RAM is less cheap, but having twice as much code and then only loading half of it into RAM doesn't increase bloat at all.
English is easier said than done.
I can see several uses: Future portable products (video player?) and spare parts. There will still be PowerBooks under AppleCare service contracts in 2008.
You hit the nail on the head. In fact, Apple's plans are to phase out the PPC by 2007, that means they will have PPC chips under AppleCare at least until 2010, and I'm sure they'll have many out of warranty repairs for many years to come after that.
Anybody who tries to twist this into "Apple isn't so sure about Intel" is just fooling themselves.
What we know is Apple has secured a line of PowerPC chips into 2008. However, Apple has no commitment to buy. It being for Powerbook, etc is pure speculation on the part of the contributor and contradictory to the keynote.
If you went to the pain of adding Altivec enhancements by hand, then you're probably going to have no problem recoding them for Intel's SSE and such. Most major products are cross-platform and have this code written already, and most minor products just used compiler optimizations. Either the hard work is already done, or Intel will do it for them, gratis.
And as I said elsewhere, nearly every program has a G3 codepath, so Rosetta will run them just fine. Those that really got a significant boost from the G4 will be hurt the hardest, so those will be the ones you upgrade first to Intel native versions. Since such apps clearly have made an investment in the platform and have a need for speed, they're also the most likely to be ready first.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Dude, I gotta call bullshit on your numbers. The 970FX most definitely does not dissipate 28watt at peak. Maybe at 50% idle, with the clock throttled back to 66%. The PM also has half the main-memory latency of the G5, and roughly double the integer performance.
Furthermore, Apple isn't interested in sticking Intel's current lineup in their products, they're interested in the next-gen hardware, the ones that provide roughly triple the computing performance at lower power. Did you see some of the pics from last week's IDF? 9 watts for the lower-power laptop parts, with performance to match almost anything the 970 ever did save very well-scheduled and hand-tuned FP and AltiVec algorithms, something that devs don't even have to screw with (mostly) on the x86 side, as Intel's compilers smoke the hell out of anything on the PPC side.