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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
Steve said low end items were the first to go (mini, iBook, etc). What the hell are they talking about.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Apple is just covering their bases. This is merely a safeguard, not an indication that the move is behind schedule.
Why doesn't apple just continue to use both architectures?
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. */
So presumably we will again have an extended transitional period where Mac binaries have x86 and PPC code rolled together. I wonder how big an OS X Office install will be now.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Will this be a problem for support? They'll now have to support this much more hardware, and will have to have a fork of their OS X code; or will all code be done for Intel procs now, and 'just work (tm)' via the rosetta on powerpc procs? I think they'd have to do this, but still, I think it's going to taint the marketing a bit. Still, this hasn't been done before, and it's in sits like this that Apple usually does well. As long as production can keep up...
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
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?
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
Good, because I just plain don't want an Intel chip. I don't care if it's the future of Apple's support, I want to keep buying PPC as long as I possibly can. I don't care if you think I'm crazy or stupid. Personally I just have a whole bunch of personal Altivec code and I don't want to have to rewrite it.
Posted as AC because every time I express that I do not want to be forced to use Intel chips in order to continue using OS X, I get screamed at for being a "zealot". I find it a bit funny that disagreeing with Apple gets you branded as an Apple Zealot now, but there it is.
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.)
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.
No, the point is "moo." You know, like a cow's opinion: it doesn't matter.
English is easier said than done.
Of course, but you're missing the point.
This is a perfect opportunity to blather on with uninformed speculation, rumors, pipe dreams of dual core Antaries laptops, etc. . .
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.
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
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.
Clarus says Moof!
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.
People may laugh when you say `Intel' and `Roadmap' together, but they don't laugh nearly as hard as when you say `Freescale' and `Roadmap' together. I remember these guys promising 3.6GHz+ G6 chips being ready by 2002 back in the late '90s. Next to them, Intel roadmaps look positively reliable...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This move makes sense from the standpoint of smoothing the transition to Intel chips. It may mean additional challenges for Apple's support personnel, but the bottom line is that Apple's typical customer doesn't care what chips are in the box as long as Macs act like Macs and iPods act like iPods, etc... Apple managed the transition to PPC pretty well, so there is a good chance that they'll be okay going to Intel, afterall, there isn't any big rush to do this that I've heard about.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
lipo -remove i386
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
No thanks, if I want to see fat strippers I'll go here: http://www.bigburlesque.com/home.html
Well, this contract is with Freescale, i.e. Motorola, who make the G4. The G4 is a pretty energy efficient processor, unlike IBMs G5. So the question here is how on earth are the going to make anybody buy a computer, portable or otherwise, powerd by a G4 in 2008?
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Well, this is not so much about Apple hedging its bets, as it is about timing. A lot of folks anticipate an announcment of new hardware at MWSF in January. It ain't gonna happen!
Having now seen last weeks Intel announcement, it makes me believe it is unlikely they will launch Intel based Macs with 32-bit processors. Both iMac, Pro Mac and XServe are already 64-bit and they will stay that way. Anything else would be seen as a complete failure by the market.
For the mini and portables, the picture is a bit more tricky. From what I can gather from the latest announcements from IBM and Freescale, what I think will happen is that Apple will introduce a mini with a dual core processor from IBM perhaps even in September at MacWorld Paris, and follow up with similar announcements for the rest of the product line. Exception is of course the portables where they for thermal reasons have to stay at G4 until the switch to Intel, hence the agreement with Freescale.
I have a little more detail about this in an article I wrote a couple of days ago.The future is in beta
Frankly I think it's very good news, and I do think Apple stands to benefit greatly from using the same CPU as is running Windows and the majority of Linux boxes.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I can see several uses: Future portable products (video player?) and spare parts. There will still be PowerBooks under AppleCare service contracts in 2008.
Apple will support PPC macs in OS X probably about seven years after the last one is sold.
That's based on older models that OS X supports today, every release it seems like back support from OS releases is about five to seven years.
We know that not all mac will switch at once, say high-end Intel macs start coming out the year after next. That's 2007, which means there will be solid PPC support from Apple until at least 2012.
WHat about software vendors? Well you can imagine they would have strong motivation to keep software working well on PPC macs until the percentage of Intel macs is a lot higher than PPC macs. But that will take some time, so I think in the end you'll see universal binaries from just about all Mac software makers until at least 2012 - and it costs them nothing to keep making the universal binaries if they decided to drop testing support for PPC versions, which could extend it out longer.
In short, buy the powerbook.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
You've obviously never used a Pentium-based laptop. There is a reason why Apple is going to use the newer, cooler, mobile chips rather than Pentium chips.
Of course, it's really speculation that Apple is going to use those newer chips, but given that the timeframes for the chips' introduction and Apple's switch, it's not a big stretch...
Apple laptops can get warm, though, especially the newer, higher-clockrate ones. They're clearly pushing those G4s pretty hard. Oddly enough, though, there are no stories of Mac users burning themselves on their laptops...
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.
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.
1. Produce an Intel version of OS-X
2. Make a pretend announcement to change over to Intel
3. Leak the Intel version of OS-X
4. Let Windoze users salivate over OS-X.
5. Change back to PPC.
6. Windoze users buy PPC Macs.
7. PROFIT!!!
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.
>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.
Apple will be transitioning all their G4 product beginning in 2006. They contract Frescale till the end of 2008, which 3 years - the length of a typical applecare extended contract. So, I guess they only intend to sell these systems till the end of this year. Given the recent announcements of Intel processor lineup, I guess Apple will release new Powerbook, iBook, and mac mini's along side Intels release of dual-core and single Yonahs.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one