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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."
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent 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 is one possibility. What is annoying is that the slashdot summary says this:
The Mercury News is reporting that Apple is still planning to use PowerPC chips well into 2008 for its low end and portable systems.
when the article actually says this:
Freescale agreed to supply PowerPC microprocessors for orders placed through Dec. 31, 2008 -- a year beyond Apple's planned transition to the Intel chips.
and from apple & freescale itself:
"Freescale (is) to fill any orders Apple places over the next three years. Apple is under no obligation to purchase Freescale microprocessors other than work in progress that was in place at the time the agreement was executed."
So suddenly "freescale is bound to fill any orders apple may or may not need to place over the next 3 years" becomes "Apple will be making G4 laptops until 2008"
Rubbish as spculation gets piled on top of speculation. It stinks something bad when basic reporting gets errors confounded one upon top of another
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.
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.
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.