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Why Apple Picked Intel Over AMD
An Anonymous Reader writes "Macworld has a piece looking at why Apple chose Intel chips over AMD's offerings when it decided to move away from IBM." From the article: "The reason, industry analysts say, is that Jobs has a clear goal in mind: innovative designs. And such designs require the lowest-voltage chips, which IBM and Freescale were not going to make with the PowerPC chip core--and which AMD has not yet perfected 'This is a practical, pragmatic Steve Jobs decision,' says Shane Rau, Program Manager, PC Semiconductors for market research firm IDC. Intel serves up the most complete line of low-power chips for mobile and small form factor computers, and a good-looking future roadmap for it. Also, Intel's mammoth production capacity erases any supply worries. "
In that case, why not use Transmetta!
Maybe massive, cost-saving volume discounts were a factor too?
"practical, pragmatic"...
pragmatic Pronunciation (prg-mtk)
adj.
1. Dealing or concerned with facts or actual occurrences; practical.
redundant Pronunciation (r-dndnt)
adj.
1. Exceeding what is necessary or natural; superfluous.
With all the talk of voltage and mobility, there doesn't seem to be any mention of the impact, if any, on the bottom-line cost and price factor, which is of obvious importance to both Apple and consumers. Interesting that this comes in just a day or two after the story about Intel chips costing $40 to make.
Andrew Lenahan http://www.starblind.com/
I think this is the first time I have seen the words "practical" and "pragmatic" in the same sentence with "Steve Jobs". Remember the reality distortion field?
Because Jobs wants a double function for his new Mactel line... A) The power of a supercomputer B) A space heater since most of the country is transitioning into Fall and eventually winter.
This 'analysis' is no different from the consensus on /. immediately after the announcement. Nothing to see here folks, move along...
and more then half of all sales in '04 were laptop systems.
My co-workers and I pretty much sussed that out the day of the announcement. Others have, quite a while ago as well.
Apple were worried that if AMD were to change the letters in their name around, then they would have some MAD Mac's on their hands! ... sorry i couldn't hold that one back...
-Sj53
The intel range of processors for a long time have held the mainstream mobile processor power/watt and with the Pentium M they have consolidated much of that. however from many sources the new Turion 64 is meant to be very nearly as good in the power area however it does have 64bit memory addressing and all the benefits of the AMD 64 line of processors.
. html
http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20050830/index
Said that it is worth while to mention that IBM is not incompetent. Their embedded cores which are custom designed are even more energy efficient. But again they are expensive (and task specific) and cost drives the market.
Because apple doesn't care about top-end performance.
Have Apple PCs ever been ahead in performance? Of course I'm talking about real performance, and not ridiculously narrow, artificial tests to highlight a largely irrelevant strong point.
I don't mean this to discount Apple, and the truth is that virtually any PC (PC including Apple) these days is overpowered for the uses that the average user tasks them with, but I just don't buy the mythology of the hyper-super-mega PowerPC chips - always barnburners on paper when they're long in the future.
I mean, the decision has been made. They're going with Intel processors. At this point, I don't think it matters much why they chose to make their decision. Regardless of why they made the transition, we're all going to have to live with it. We'll have to port our software, and if we want new systems from them we'll just have to accept that they will have Intel processors inside them.
Perhaps there are better questions to be asking. Namely, what can we do with these new systems that we could not do before?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It's all about the mobile processors. Intel's PentiumM's are FAST, low power usage and did I mention FAST? Seeing as how Laptop purchases are rising faster than desktop purchases, and since Apple's laptops are the most long in tooth, I'm betting that the first new Apple Intel box will be a laptop.
"We're sold out on chip sets," Bryant said during a conference call to discuss Intel's third-quarter financial update. "I think chip sets [will] remain tight into the fourth quarter."
Er, this sure seems like a "supply worry" to me!
\burt
There is no such thing as bad weather - only inappropriate clothing.
I'm really looking forward to OSX on Intel and the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned.
I have a theory as to why Apple aren't coming out with them until sometime next year - I believe they actually want to come out with new machines at the same time as Vista is released. Why?:
1) Microsoft is going to spend (pinkie to mouth) 100 hundred billion dollars on promoting Vista. That's going to make a lot of noise, which Apple can cheaply ride on the back of. Imagine, loads of mainstream publications will cover Vista, and if Apple launches at the same time they'll surely do comparisons.
2) It will be switching time for everyone - current Windows users will be thinking - should I move to Vista? If there is another viable option visible at the same time, then they might consider that too.
3) Steve Jobs may be confident that the next generation of OSX will beat Vista in comparison reviews - hell, the current version (Tiger) has a lot of the features Vista is supposed to have already.
Anyway, that is my theory, which belongs to me and is mine.
Intel still has an aura of superiority about them with much of the world that AMD just doesn't have. Talk to someone that has a decent Pentium 4 and they'll talk to you about hyperthreading like Jesus himself created it. It's the same kind of superiority Apple users likes to tout.
Sure, those AMD sales guys can put together a killer Powerpoint presentation, but the Intel guys know that the real key to making the sale is taking the management out for food, fun, and a night they won't be able to tell their wives about. If AMD doesn't figure this out quickly, their sales will continue to lag behind Intel.
This is Sales 101, folks.
ever heard about the Turion 64 which is only 25W including memory controller (Comparing to Intel 27W for their new 533MHz FSB 32 bit Dothan)? Apple could have 64 bit laptops already with AMD.
The only reason is supply
The same?
If AMD comes out with a better chip in terms of power usage, Apple can switch anytime. As such, going with Intel at the start implies no committment. If Intel starts treating them like dirt, they can go over to AMD, or even perhaps VIA. That's a choice they didn't have before with the PPC architecture.
Oh, I see he wants innovative. Since intel has been so innovative the past few years, it's easy to see why it was such a good choice.
Wait, wasn't it AMD that stepped up with the 1Ghz cpu first?
Oh, weren't they the ones who got the first high performance, low cost 64 bit processors to market?
Geez, haven't they also been dominating the performance side?
Besides, from what I've been reading, the Turion 64 is not far away from the Pentium M. Close enough to call them comparable at least, and the Turion has 64 bit extensions!
Maybe they're sold out cus they delievered all their chips to Apple.
I can imagine: OS X ManSe 10.4.20.01.5.4 dev OS X GentIs 10.6.25.52 daily build OS X UbuntOra 10.1.545.1.2.0 OS X KnoppDros 10.2.0.25.5.6 unstable
I wonder if Apple has a preferential deal to get the new, fast parts first. When a new process is being ramped up, there is an initial period where they can make some processors, but not a lot.
Apple being a relatively small consumer of Intel parts could be quite happy with this small volume of fast parts and put out machines that trump the wintel vendor's clock rates.
It is a lesson that Apple learned back in the dark days of Mac clones. Since Apple only refreshes a Mac design a couple times a year people know when it is coming and will hold off for the newer version. When that version comes out there is a big demand spike. To avoid long backorders Apple has to have enough processors in hand to cover the initial orders and enough capacity to keep up with the flow after that. The clone vendors, being a tiny fraction of the Mac market could introduce models with the faster processors as soon as they became available in limited quantities. The double nasty effect was that the clone vendors got the reputation for faster machines since they could bring theirs to market faster and they delayed Apple's ability to get the new xxMhz 68030 to market because instead of stockpiling chips for Apple, Motorola would be selling them to the cloners.
Exactly.
Advice: on VPS providers
"--and which AMD has not yet perfected "
Frankly, that sounds like bullshit and yes I know your name is not Frankly but Surely.
And they sell such huge quanitites that supply is a very important issue. Not.
Intel bunged them in the form of huge discounts, simple as that. No one in their right mind would use Intel processors for desktop machines at the moment and, for that matter, there's no reason Apple couldn't have gone with Intel for the laptops and AMD for the desk.
ALL of which is beside the point that the problem with the PowerPC seems to have been on the compiler side, not the hardware.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
When will people ever learn. Ok now lets think for a minute. Apple can use Intel or AMD. Intel is able to guarantee more volume than AMD at the moment. This will change when AMDs new fab comes online this year. Intel also promised Apple a taste of the ol' MDF pie. MDF (Market Development Funds) as they like to call it helps Apple compete better with the likes of Dell in this space. MDF also guarantees that Apple will use only Intel CPUs. Now unless our heads have been buried under rocks for a while we all know that AMD technology is superior to Intel in sevral ways at this point. But Apple chose the inferior technology because Intel promised it massive $$$ kickbacks. Intel basically "buys" its customers. This is not rocket science folks. My prediction. After the move to x86 is stabilized Apple will then be free to use AMD as a tool to get better deals from Intel as Dell currently does. Due to their volumes they will not be able to get the prices that Dell gets so they will unlike Dell introduce a line of AMD cpus in the future. For two reasons. To have the MAC daddy of all X86 PCs and to stick it to Intel.
Yep right, no supply worries there, just ask any taiwanese OEM who wants to buy Centrino bundles ...
I got as far as this line before laughing.. 'This is a practical, pragmatic Steve Jobs decision,' .. nice one.
I don't believe the article.
I think it came down to money- in some fashion intel offered them a better deal. I have intel and amd computers and amd has a dramatically better cost/performance ratio. I bet that there is no hard technical reason why Mac couldn't have run on both- if they are going to be Intel only it is for political/financial reasons instead of technical ones.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If TFA is correct, Apple is planning to use the low-power Chips promised for next year, rather than the AMD64 which are pretty good right now. Which is fine if Intel can deliver, but I would not like to bet the company on it. If I was in Steve Jobs' shoes, I might do it the other way round:
Use AMD64 now, switch to Intel later if they keep their promises.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Did anybody else notice that Jobs in his keynote addressed why they're switching to Intel, and now however many weeks later the analysts put pen to paper and write down what he said as the reason they think they're switching?
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
This has been dissected before, by an ex-Apple engineer. Apple went with Intel simply because of cost. AMD makes low-power CPUs, too (HE and EE Opterons), and they run circles around Intel's, but they cost more than twice as much to manufacture.
By using x86 CPUs, Apple has effectively lost the possibility to claim that their systems are magically faster than PCs (they never were, but they could claim it, because some people will fall for anything). So why pay more when the best they could aspire to was a claim that they were "on par with the fastest PCs"?
And, of course, there's another element: DRM. Intel cut Apple a good deal because it gives them a chance to start edging their hardware-based DRM into the market (think iTunes). Apple is happy to include DRM as long as they get a discount on the hardware.
A lot of ink has been spilled on why Apple chose Intel over AMD. I think it's all a bit of a waste of time.
Unless Apple uses some proprietary Intel instruction set, it can add AMD offerings to its lineup whenever it feels like.
My guess is that Apple chose Intel for their arch switch because:
1) It was easier to pick a single chip partner to do the switch with.
2) Intel likely offered incentives to go with them alone. There may be contracts involved in this, but they won't last forever.
3) Like it or not, Intel is the x86 brand with mindshare in the public eye.
4) AMD probably can't handle the volume of bringing all of Apple's products over to them at the moment.
The fact is that as soon as OS X is x86 it can benefit from the Intel/AMD competition in the same way that Windows and Linux users do today.
The hurdle is converting from PPC to x86. Going from Intel to AMD later on may not even be noticeable. In fact, if you think of the G4/G5 branding in the current Apple world, most consumers don't even know that their G4 is a Motorola chip and their G5 is IBM. They don't care, so long as there's an Apple on the side of the box.
I've posted on /. the history of DEC->Compaq->(Alpha->Intel)->HP and a bunch of links on how M$ and Intel needed to get rid of DEC and the new one third cost DEC processor Samsung developed for them. It was/is a good read.
1 0625006512.htm
The (DEC) Alpha was (imo) a great 64 bit floating point processor and would fit perfectly into Apple's scheme...now that Intel owns it!
Here's some source:
Intel buys Alpha from Compaq
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2001june/bch200
Besides all that has been said, since AMD will have either simple or enhanced clones of the Intel chips, Apple can either switch to AMD later, or just use the threat of switching to get concessions from Intel.
Such a switch would require a hardware change, but probably not a software change, given AMD's history of trying to provide backward opcode compatibility.
A wise decision by Apple, even tho this is old news.
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
Considering that AMD's chips are generally faster, cooler, and more efficient than Intel's chips, the choice of AMD would seem like a nobrainer without the Pentium M.
Apple seems to be moving hard toward mobile computing now anyway, so going for the Pentium M is a smart move all around, and it doesn't take much imagination to see those in Mac Mini's and the like in the future.
Myself, I'd have split the difference and gone with AMD for the 64 bit server chips. I think that descision is going to do good things for Sun.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
And that is, platform and chipsets.
Yes, Intel has more offerings and better roadmap, and volume discounts, and programmers, and prestige....
But this particular analysis is not mentioning the fact that Intel can give you a system, head to toe. That will allow Apple to move the R&D cost of mobo desing to something else, like SW engineering, or industrial design.... go figure...
Now, if I put on my aluminum-foil-thinking-cap, I can think of the following arrangement:
Intel debuts a new and improved processor/chipset combo, and gives it to Apple with, let's say, six months advantage over everyone else, as beta testers.... If there are no bugs in the combo, all is nice and dandy. If there are bugs in the combo, Intel correts them in the silicon, for all the PC bunch to use, and Apple, having more control over the platform than anyone else in the indutry, corrects the errors via a BIOS/OS patch, intead of a more costly recall.... Match made in heaven! Apple gets a six months edge, Intel gets a HUGE and cheap field trial of new silicon!
Just my two cents anyway....
In the end, there was not just ONE magic reason, but a host little thing that made Apple choose Intel over AMD, Transmeta, VIA/Cenatur and all the others out there...
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
LinosX? Let's see.
/. about Apple forking the kernel. Not to mention questions about GPL compliance and the bi-monthly call for Apple to opensource more of their stuff.
RSM would be running around shouting "It is GNU-LINUX-OS X!"
ESR would write a totally incomprehensible article claiming that "we won!". Again.
Linus would shrug and say 'whatever'.
There would be a flamewar on lkml between FOSS diehards and Apple engineers over their binary only drivers.
There would be frequent articles on
In short, it would be a lot worse. Linux would be pulled in two directions and Steve Jobs and Linus would be in a hornet's nest of unherdable cats trying to calm down tempers and get things done.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Among the market Apple hopes to secure, I suspect the name Intel is better known & respected than AMD.
We geeks know that AMD has some good stuff, but I'm sure we can all remember when AMD provided chips like the K6/2 which while technically sound (100mhz front-side bus before the Pentium-2 became common, right?), tended to be sold cheap and built into PCs which also used cheap chipsets and reliability suffered as a result.
Back in the day, the P2 and early P3 and the K6/2 and K6/3 were only really differentiated by the quality of their chipsets. A lot of the people Apple wants to woo may have suffered the effects of cheap AMD-based PCs. Intel's late-90s/2000-era chipsets were pretty solid and due to better build quality and drivers tended to run Windows somewhat better.
I wouldnt be surprised if that still affects the market today. Technology moves on, consumers are more static.
Anyway they can always get established on x86 then build an Athlon64 xServe......
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Intel have a public roadmap into 2007, so their private roadmap must extend even further.
AMD have a public roadmap into 2006, but nothing long term. Privately, it may be different.
IBM have a roadmap into next week if you're lucky. Privately it may be different, but 3GHz G5s?
AMD has Intel beat at the moment on power consumption on the desktop, we all know that. However Yonah and Merom (and server variants thereof?) are what Apple are interested in. Yonah will come in many variants, with an ULV single core at 5.5W, and dual-core LV at 15W alongside the 35W dual-core standard processor. AMD have Turion however, and it isn't that bad in comparison with the current Pentium M, and 65nm should help them along even more.
It will be interesting to see how next year's processors compare. I think that AMD will remain leading in terms of performance at the high end, but the mobile arena will become very interesting with dual-cores from both company, new 65nm processors, and more to boot.
He's so clever.
there was a time, back when clones were still around and the 604e was fresh, that macs were faster both per instruction _and_ had a higher clock rate.
it was once, and it was fleeting, but it was glorious.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Sure, AMD holds the top-end. Not by an all that huge margin (say 20% on average to be generous) compared to how CPU wars have played out in the past. While AMD has gone from being the absolutely clear bang-for-the-buck manufacturer with the K7 to being the top-end holder with the K8 however Intel has really improved the rest of their product lines. A much overlooked chip today is the (new) Celeron D. 64-bit capable, solid performance, rock-bottom price. I would personally say that Intel offers better budget solutions at the moment.
Other than that however, I have said it before and I'll say it again; Intels desktop Pentium M roadmap can no doubt look great. The Pentium 4 did not work out as they wanted, but Intel has a lot of great engineers (just look how well the Pentium 4 has carried on competing despite the setbacks the design has seen), when they with the next big iteration are freed from the old P4 there will no doubt be a lot of interesting stuff coming from Intel.
Another interesting point is that Intel really is the only CPU maker that actually does more than one product-line at once. AMD kept the K7 around for a budget-line and stripped down the K8 a bit for laptops, but Intel has not just two, but actually three current designs ongoing (the P4, the Itanium and the Pentium M). An Intel roadmap may also contain a lot of goodies directly deriving from the fact that they have the design manpower to actually work on more than one path at once.
Fools they were.
AMD pwnz, in house and in the garden.
In the future. I'd imagine that Apple could fairly easily add AMD to the line where it fits (an Opteron in their server line perhaps). I can't believe that Apple has taken a completely "Intel only" approach on this...but I'm usually wrong on this sort of thing.
Once again, RTFA... it's not about how much power AMD's Athlon64 FX consumes compared to the Pentium XE... The whole article was about low power low voltage chips like the Pentium M. The whole point of the article was that Intel has on the table low power dual core Yonah processors for early next year, while AMD has not disclosed anything about that. Sure AMD has Turion, but that's a single core chip, and it's not fair to compare that to Yonah.
If you payed attention during the Intel Developer Forum, you'll realize that 5x "performance per watt" was compared to Banias, the first Pentium M... which DOES NOT SUCK at performance/watt now.
Intel's Pentium M chips don't suck today... so you're mistaken. The whole article was basically about Pentium M, not Pentium 4 netburst, you buffoon. And moreover, the whole point was future processors, not processors today, so your point about how Intel sucks today is stupid.
Other Advantages would be that it permits Apple to
- ride the tide of CPU speed (no more "megahertz myth").
- pass on processors (try telling IBM that you aren't interested in their minimal speed bump when you are their only client)
- use PC graphics cards without modification
- diversify their product line (if you haven't noticed, the dual G5 is nearly on par with the top of the line Intel... but the middle and lower end systems from Apple aren't even in the ballpark)
As a Mac user, it's a bit hard to swallow that I'm going to have an "Intel Inside" but there are simply too many advantages to overlook. Intel seems very interested in having their processors in everything from handheld devices to super computers... IBM does as well, but do they have the resources?
"PPC good, x86 bad" => "PPC good, x86 better"
everybody knows that current intel chips, presscot & cia, are the CPUs which more power consume. Their performance per watt numbers are the worst of the whole desktop industry.
Yeah, but they're hardly designed to be low power. They're designed to be high clock rate. And Apple aren't using them because they're high power.
Yea, seriously kids. Don't base your perception of reality on what some crusty old computer geek says. Do what I do and trust everything you hear on MTV.
the truth is that virtually any PC (PC including Apple) these days is overpowered for the uses that the average user tasks them with
True if most of your day involves handling cow teets... but other "average users" play 3D games, use Microsoft hogware, edit video, download N things at the same time as they run IM, email, browse... not to mention the tons of stuff that loads up... and don't get me started on how much development platform soaks up resources...
While I agree with the frustration with the Apple drones, the problem is even 13-16W is not low enough. My 14" laptop with 1.6 ghz Pentium M pulls 12-13 watts total for the entire system when doing stuff like typing code, web, mail, listening to music, even light graphics work. It jumps to about 18W when I kick off a render. I routinely get nearly 4 hours off of a 53whr battery doing real work.
The G5 alone will take that much power, then add harddrive, lcd, wireless, chipset, video, etc. IBM's low power doesn't cut it.
Someone please mod the parent down. Using bold, stating "everybody knows" so it must be true, and using WTF, SUCK, hate, and worst != informative. This guy is trolling.
By the way, to the parent poster -- A quick google search will reveal numerous reviews showing that the Pentium-M has the lower power/performance ratio on the market. That's why Intel is dominating in the laptop market.
Intel's Pentium-D(RM) has DRM support baked in. Apple's going to need this to help keep the Mac what it is -- a dongle for OS X.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Redundant?
No, try "true". If you know anything about Jobs and his past with Motorola, this becomes an very highly probable conclusion.
Jobs lost out because IBM doesn't need to put up with his shit now that the consoles are on the way. They weren't making IBM enough to be worth the necessary R&D to keep Jobs happy, so they told him to go fish.
After years of "No really! 68k chips are faster than Intel chips!" followed by years of "No really! PowerPC chips are faster than Intel chips!", maybe Apple just plain didn't want to deal with "No really! AMD chips are faster than Intel chips!"
Going with Intel means they no longer have to waste time arguing that their chips are really faster even though the clock rates are lower. Which, granted, wouldn't have been quite such a big issue now that Intel's finally stopped marketing entirely on cycles-per-second, but there's still a psychological bonus to be had from going with the chip supplier who sets the comparison against which everyone else compares themselves.
Since the chips are compatible for software, if AMD comes out with better chips next year or the year after, its not a big deal for Apple to switch to AMD.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Sorry to be a pedant, but the quote said "voltage" and you went off on "power".
The two are not analogous. Running with a lower voltage (at the same frequency) is based on the properties of the transistors and reflects a more advanced fabrication technique.
I don't know (and am too lazy to check) if the claims in that quote about voltage are true, but if they are then that means Intel has more room for growth in the future (which is probably more important to Apple than what is going on right now).
The article refers to the lowest voltage chips.. This, of course, is one factor that contributes to the real issue: low wattage. The system needs to consume less power and generate less heat.
They also claim that Freescale (former Motorola chip division) cannot achieve these low power levels. I'm not sure where they get this impression from. The PowerPC has always been a low power processor. They are most commonly used in embedded devices, like routers and switches. They keep ratcheting up performance, while trying to keep it under 10Watts.
While the PowerPC's from Freescale won't be at GHz par with the Intel P4's. They aren't far behind the more comparable Pentium M's in clock speed.
IBM, on the other hand, makes CPUs primarily for their workstations. So, their power usage has always been much closer to Intel's..
I'm not drinking the Kool Aid as far as "innovation" goes. From any businessman that's just filler -- the word MicroSoft uses to justify abusing monopoly power. We won't know what it means to Jobs until we see what comes out of Apple's design labs using Pentium Ms.
But to say Apple hasn't had problems with supply is really pretty staggeringly wrong, no offense intended. Anyone who's ever tried to order the latest cool PowerBook knows that's been a serious problem for them.
Apple has had a longstanding "supply chain" problem across multiple generations of chips, going back to well before the original PPC machines. They haven't been able to get manufacturers -- Motorola conspicuously -- to produce enough of the designs they need. The fact that they had a niche market exacerbated that problem, because they had to get the other end of the chain to invest research dollars in new development.
As a result, on the consumer end, they've repeatedly had serious trouble keeping supplies up for whatever turned out to be the hot machines.
(You get additional demerits for using the "not," too. That's irony for the irony impaired, circa 1992.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
You need a hug. And a Xanax.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
3GHz G5s?
How about 3.2GHz, triple core? In the shops November 22nd, Street price of about $350. Of course you have to throw away the xbox they come in...
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The 64 bit extensions that Intel uses are a JOKE. They make the processor take turns when deciding what code to execute, while the AMD keeps chugging away and thus makes their 64 bit solution much better.
The Celeron D is okay, but compared to the Sempron again, a joke. You're talking about a chip that is just cheap (and relatively slow) to a Sempron that is cheap and relatively fast. Not to mention, it runs cooler too.
I think I'll echo what everybody else has said. It's a combination of money and laptop options.
Besides Apple can always switch to AMD at a later date.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
IBM can most certainly do low voltage (and low power) PowerPCs -- just look at the BlueGene compute chip, for example.
Even the Cell is considered relatively low power at low voltages, especially considering it's a 9 core uP.
Apple's decision was about cost, plain and simple.
They were too cheap to prod IBM into being interested in spending money on developing another desktop processor, especially when it must have been difficult in keeping IBM's interest what with scoring the entire game console market.
Transmeta?
I dunno - low voltage and all. . . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You don't think Apple had access to the new 970s? I seriously doubt that Apple would go through such a wholesale change in technology without running a benchmark or two. It's a good bet that the new 970s don't perform as well as the new Pentiums clock-for-clock, or else Apple would have stuck with PowerPC.
RTFA. This isn't just about desktops. In mobile performance, Pentium M mops the floor with AMD's mobile Athlons.
Yes, yes, we get it. Today's Pentium desktop chips are hot, power-hungry underperformers. Good thing Apple isn't using today's Pentium desktop chips. (Developer Preview loaners excepted, of course.)
Show me an example of true revisionist history, and you may have a point. But the people you derisively refer to as "Apple zealots" are anticipating the new, lower-power Pentiums that Intel announced at IDF just as much as Windows and Linux users.
This sig intentionally left blank.
You may want to compare the Sempron64 vs the CeleronD.
"The whole point of the article was that Intel has on the table low power dual core Yonah processors for early next year, while AMD has not disclosed anything about that. Sure AMD has Turion, but that's a single core chip, and it's not fair to compare that to Yonah."
Your right it is not fair to compare a chip that everyone can buy now with one that doesn't even exist yet.
The sad truth is this is beginning of the end of apple as a computer hardware company. They are going to use use Intel motherboards in pretty Apple cases. Pretty much the same thing that Dell does now.
I just hope they keep OS/X.
I find it very sad that Apple is going backwards to the nasty x86.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I liked that part about the trip to One Eyed Jacks (the fictional Canadian one).
This will probably get lost because it's so deep in the comments, but the reason isn't technical, it's personal.
Apple was unhappy about the direct attacks AMD was making against Apple on the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) front. Look at all the inroads AMD is making into the music and video business, and some of the negative comments that were made toward Apple. It's not hard to see why they wouldn't get in bed with AMD.
Pretty much. It would perform a little better, particularly on things like MySQL. But for most people the increased performance would be too minor to notice.
And it would have been considerably later to market, since a lot of underlying infrastructure stuff would have had to be ported. That's one reason they didn't do it.
The other reason, of course, being the licensing.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I am certainly no Apple apologist, but IIRC, when Apple did the switch to PPC, the chips were initially faster than x86 equivalents, and were for a year or so, but when AMD threw the gigahertz gauntlet down and AMD and Intel blew their chips up in speed in a matter of a few years, the PPC got left in the dust. Anyone have more definite info?
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Intel's mammoth production capacity erases any supply worries.
Um, no.
Intel has been a constraint on supply to customers in the past, and will be again, because they're not clairvoyant, and maintaining enough capacity to handle 100% of the distribution of order-rate excursions is wasting money (for those who slept through Technology Policy of the Firm: it's like building an 80,000 seat stadium for a basketball team; sure, once every 30 years you'll fill it, but the rest of the time, you're eating your hat).
It may have mammoth production capacity (ever try to keep a mammoth down to class-1 cleanroom standards?) but that capacity is not monolithic nor is it readily fungible. It takes years to do some kinds of process changes, and most chip designs are tuned to a single process and could not be simply adapted to be fabricated on another process.
What this means, if Jobs is any kind of mogul with any sense of supply management, is that Intel will have to build capacity tailored Apple's needs.
Which is good++ for Intel, because their real business is building and filling fab lines; designing and marketing chips is a cost to them.
That's misleading, because Vista doesn't really have any features, itself, except pretty pictures and a nice new browser. If you're talking about the forthcoming WinFS and Indigo, which ARE significant things, you're also wrong. Spotlight isn't really a database file system, but is more of a quick solution thrown together that looks pretty, but really isn't anything we haven't already seen on Windows in various forms for quite some time now. It's just got a nice menu icon. Apple tends to be good at getting things out quicker because they are content to wrap a pretty interface on a quick and dirty fix. (Which actually sums up Mac OS X itself, pretty much, which is a total kludge of OpenStep on BSD on HFS, and none of the three are completely integrated yet.) However, if it looks good enough to please the art school crowd, it works for Apple and everybody forgets that the "new" operating system is really a 15 year old class library.
So, the REAL question is: when Microsoft finally gets their shit together (they will eventually) will Apple have something to really compete against WinFS, Indigo and C# (which is lightyears ahead of OpenSTEP's frameworks and 'objective' C)? My hope is they do (I'm typing this on a PB G4) but my point is that it's not fair to say Tiger already has any of this. Microsoft, for all their faults, tends to try to do things the right way, at least in terms of computer science, if not morality, whereas Apple just tries to get it done. In the end Microsoft will have an almost new operating system with some very modern ideas on file systems and distributed computing. For all the delays, it could be quite good, actually. Apple, on the other hand, really hasn't added anything of huge significance to the old OpenSTEP except pretty pictures and a really nice graphics system. Yet...
(a happy AMD CPU user for many years... with money still left in my wallet...)
They're analysts. They're smarter than us. Examples:
"I believe this is a purely negotiating move by Apple to grab some attention and headlines and to point out that they're feeling underappreciated by IBM" - Evin Krewell, editor in chief of the Microprocessor Report, quoted in the Mercury News, May 24, 2005, a few days before Apple announced a switch from IBM to Intel processors.
"You just wouldn't do that. You wouldn't do something that disruptive.'' - analyst Tim Bajarin, quoted in the Mercury News, May 24, 2005, a few days before Apple announced a switch from IBM to Intel processors.
"Stick a fork in 'em - this Apple is cooked." Robert Thomson, Financial Post, 2/20/2003
"For those who love Apple's products, this is all just so typical. This company has made an art of innovation -- from the personal computer itself to the point-and-click operating system -- only to invariably surrender the high sales ground to the boring knock-off artists who copy Apple's best ideas into a new and slightly cheaper model. So it's not surprising Wall Street is already bracing for another disappointment." - Steve Maich, Macleans.ca, 2005/05/09
Count David Goldstein, president of the Dallas-based growth-strategy consulting firm Channel Marketing Corp., among the critics of Apple's retail plans. "It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for them to open retail stores," he says. - May 01, 2001 Macworld Magazine
I collect quotes like these, to remind myself why trusting analysts about anything is generally unwise.
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But I think one big headache for Apple if they stay with Intel-only is that many of the people who demand OSX on AMD will just use a hacked version of OSX. These people will be Apple software converts and not give one penny to Apple, because Apple isn't giving them the hardware options they want. This will be an especially visible group if AMD stays as far ahead of Intel as they are now (unlikely, but their engineers are quite good).
I'd love to see the contract Intel and Apple hammered out. I wonder if Intel made certain delivery promises and what would be the remedy if those promises are broken. Super-cheap EE Pentiums for Apple? That might keep people from grumbling too much about the lack of AMD options, but still, it will be a little demoralizing when Apple pirates will gloat on Slashdot about how they can blow away every OSX benchmark on their overclocked AthlonFX and still spend less than they would for an Apple machine.
I remember a few years ago at an Apple user group meeting here in Cupertino, CA. I asked someone if he every tried Photoshop on Windows. "EEEEW! Intel" he screeched. "It's thegmented! Everything is tho thlow." (The lisp was a result of a tongue piercing.)
So here was a computer user who should only care about ultimate usability of a system (something Apple may have been better at!) who was "brainwashed" by the Apple crowd into reciting silly half-truths about Intel whenever the subject came up. Face it, a CPU that only has an XOR and JNZ instruction and dealt in 64K memory blocks would work just fine if it ran fast enough. How the CPU works is of no concern to someone who just runs Photoshop all day long....
Best Buy can have you arrested
However, note that Intel actually produces 2 major processor lines: ARM and x86. ARM has scaled (in terms of power and clock frequency) almost as well as x86 -- due to Intel's incredible arsenal of slaves in the materials-science department. Apple should have picked ARM for its next-generation Macintosh.
There are 2 reasons for doing so. First, ARM allows the marketing department to continue to say, "x86 sucks because RISC is better". Two, ARM is definitely more capable of low power than x86.
The future trend of Apple is to create cool (looks-wise) and cool (power-wise) products. Consider iPod Nano.
Ha, that's funny! Like Apple is ever going to sell enough computers for supply to be a concern! I'd bet that AMD is already outselling Apple.
The sad truth is this is beginning of the end of apple as a computer hardware company. They are going to use use Intel motherboards in pretty Apple cases. Pretty much the same thing that Dell does now.
And yet, Dell is doing pretty well. As are HP, Gateway, and a good number of other companies. You make it sound like the market for computer hardware is shrinking, or that the hardware is really what makes the machines different. If these companies, dependent on Microsoft for their operating systems and software, using mostly the same hardware, and without the reputation that Apple has, are still doing well, why would you think that Apple would do any worse?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
... if they get a chance to take their foot out of the PC motherboard backward-compatibility bucket. Apple gives them a chance to do that.
Yes, yes, the Apple X86 developer preview box is a vanilla PC motherboard, boots Windows fine, etc. Doesn't mean the actual shipping Apple hardware has to be that way, does it?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
They are more expensive to end users, not to OEMs.
Intel has lower production costs than AMD, and they don't even mind to lose money on some deals if it helps them take business away from their competitors (which is why they're currently under investigation in several countries).
The only brand Apple is interested in promoting is Apple. You never saw them make a big fuss about having Motorola or IBM CPUs, and I doubt they'll make a big fuss about using Intel (unless Intel gives them another big fat discount for that). They would have gone with AMD if it was cheaper for them.
I doubt they will have both AMD- and Intel-based models; Intel would probably cancel their discounts, as they do with some PC manufacturers (then again, Apple will represent less than 3% of Intel's CPU sales, so maybe they won't really care).
I wouldn't buy them on PPC, I won't buy them on Intel.
The PPC was the main reason I wanted to get an Apple.
There's nothing they can do to OSX to make it appealing to me when they are ignoring ogg vorbis and partnering with the RIAA/MPAA.
No amount of rhetoric or fanatics will convince me they're on my side. Just like Microsoft, Sun, and Tivo, they are not.
I don't care how many times I have to post this.
switching to Intel processor means you can run Windows software under OS X using Wine
this lowers the cost barrier for Windows users to switch.
Apple isn't just going to Intel for CPUs. Intel has all kinds of other chips and technologies, and at last they have a PC-making partner that will actually use cutting-edge stuff.
... CPUs.
And don't forget EFI. I doubt Apple's going to want a crufty old BIOS designed for 8086 machines. Intel has been working on superior alternatives to BIOS (although perhaps not as good as OpenFirmware, but still...).
AMD makes
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Intel's 3 lines (according to you): P4, Pentium M, and Itanium
AMD's 3 lines: Athlon64, Turion64, Opteron
Huh, go figure - both manufacture desktop, mobile, and enterprise/server chips
And come on now, the Celeron D? Mediocre performance aside, 64-bit Celeron D's start at about $80 street price (going off of newegg right now), but AMD's Sempron64s start at 50-60 bucks - I fail to see how Intel has the better budget solutions.
To echo what everybody else already knows - the Pentium M is a damn good chip, and it'll be the basis for the first Intel Macs, with Yonah down the line. That aside, Intel used no small amount of monetary influence in getting this deal.
Have Apple PCs ever been ahead in performance?
Yes, for several years the PPC604 and G3 were faster than x86 by quite a bit. That came to a screeching halt with the G4's stagnation
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
They are buying CPU in future. There are things we don't know but Steve Jobs know.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Look, 10 years ago in '95, Jobs was behind the campaign that promised the new PPC machines were 100x faster than Intel. Remember? He compared SpecINT running a 486 to the latest PPC (or was it a 486 compiled binary, I forget.) Point is: Jobs knows the marketing game, and for him to work with a company he tried to beat in the numbers game means he can TRULY see through the bullshit that other makers ... *dell* **cough cough** cannot.
I know y'all hate Intel, but maybe, just maybe, they got something right and Jobs can smell it.
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APPLE: All your chips are belong to us
INTEL: It's a trap!
It's about Dell - Intel's stalwart (yet irritating) partner. Dell has been playing 'footsie' with AMD for the last few years and in the process, getting more consessions from Intel (who is probably responsible for half of their advertising budget). Intel knows that Dell fears Apple (and make no mistake - they do).
This is really Intel's way of getting some of their leverage back. If Dell tries to pull one of those, "Well... You know... AMD is offering...", then Intel will be in the position to tell them to do what they like.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Yes, for several years the PPC604 and G3 were faster than x86 by quite a bit.
I don't dispute that they were competitive at times, but I remember at the time it was much more of an even race (at least when compared by less biased sources than Mac fanzines), or with x86 in the lead. e.g. As has been the history of the PPC, they would come out of the gates with grand claims of remarkable performance, and then the real-world benchmarkers would get ahold of it and render the claims ludicrous.
e.g.
http://www.heise.de/ct/english/96/11/270/
Era of the Pentium Pro and the PPC 604e. They found them to be evenly matched overall.
WHAT?!? IBM is not going to make low-power chips?!? What about the 970 low-power line (13-16W) that EVERYBODY KNOWS?
Apple will be using PowerPC chips in at least some of it's machines through 2008. There is little reason to think that they won't use the 970FX (low power) or 970MP (dual-core) in a machine between now and then. I think the point you're missing then is that Apple saw what was comming from IBM and still decided to move to Intel. In other words, 13-16 watts is still too much.
According to Intel's presentations on the Conroe/Merom architecture, due 2H06, they're anticipating typical draw down to about 5 watts for the mobile version, and (IIRC) 25 watts for the desktop.
[Intel's] performance per watt numbers are the worst of the whole desktop industry.
And yet, their performace per watt numbers for mobile chips are the best. You seem to be implying that Intel for some reason can't design a low-power chip, when it's quite clear that they can.
And then intel promises apple CPUs which give 5x more "performance per watt". Yeah - that's nice when you consider that they get that "5x" number when they compare it with the current intel chips - which, as everybody knows, they're the worst at performance/watt.
What is your point here? Just because their current chips are the worst doesn't mean their chips next year can't be the best. Five times better than Intel's current might only translate to two or three times better than AMD's current, but that doesn't change the fact that the chip only draws 25 watts. Again, you seem to be implying that Intel can't possibly make a lower power chip just because their current chips draw a lot.
But heck, I absolutely hate how most of apple zealots just don't think - they repeat everything which Jobs tell them
What you should hate is people who assume that they can't possibly be wrong, and that anyone who disagrees with them must be incapable of drawing their own conclusions. In short, yourself.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Regardless, Apple is not going to be using *any* processor that's currently available on the market today in their new Macs. That's the whole point... they are picking and choosing *tomorrow's* best technology, not today's.
Why would anyone want a 64-bit laptop?
64 bit, as far as the average consumer is concerned, is a bigger gimmick than ramping gigahertz was.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
That depends on your perspective if we get shafted. Look at an ibook g4 and compare the specs to a dell, sony, or toshiba laptop on price/specs. The ibook is a better deal especially the acedemic price of 950 dollars for a radeon video card, wireless, bluetooth, 512mb ram and a 40gb hdd along with a combo drive.
:)
Powermacs are costly but if you compare them to a dell precision they are not too much more. Now i'll agree that apple monitors are a screw in price. I don't buy those
Example: My wife bought a dual 867mhz powermac g4 with 256mb ram, 60 gb hdd about 2 years ago.. maybe 3. It was 1700 dollars not including a monitor. It included a 32mb nvidia geforce 4mx and combo drive.
I bought a dell precision 650 refurbished last year for 1300 dollars with 1gb ecc ram, 2 x 2.0ghz intel xeon processors, ati firegl 64mb dell oem video card. My included a cd burner and 80gb hdd.
My system is faster than hers at integer operations but throw something like world of warcraft at it and hers is faster. I should mention though that we both upgraded video cards and she now has 1.25gb ram. (radeon 9800 128mb agp 4x vs my 9600 aiw xt 128mb agp 8x)
Its a draw when i run windows, and i blow her out when i boot FreeBSD5 or Redhat EL 3.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Maybe they should've used Keynote....
It's simple...
Intel has vast software and development resources specifically to help assist in migration to it's processors from rivals. (Although this may be the biggest such case.)
Their resources in the software, compiler, etc. arenas is unparalled. AMD might be pumping out some great chip designs but I seriously doubt they could offer the transition resources of Intel.
However, once Apple is transitioned to x86 and their exclusive contract (5-10 yrs I would guess) with Intel expires. They will then be in place to take opportunity with whichever manufacturer has the better offer at the time.
So essentially, it was a wise long term strategy. Choose the one who can offer the easiest transition as in 2-4 yrs (after they fully transition) who knows who's chips will be faster/cooler/cheaper? After that time. If there is a better alternative chip it would be minimal work to allow for using an AMD x86 as opposed to an Intel x86.
Plain, simple, intelligent....
I-ntel: i-pod i-movie i-dvd.... A-MD: a-pod? a-movie? a-dvd? Clearly intel is the better choice based on it's first i-nitial alone.
They want someone who actually puts out product, not just pins their hopes on residual goodwill effect of an alternative OS's creator.
And Intel has better laptop processors. That's why SJ chose Intel as a primary supplier. When AMD gets its act together wrt laptop processors and kicks Intel's butt there, I won't be surprised to see AMD chips in Apple products side by side with Intel (unless Intel cut them a really hefty discount in return for exclusive contract).
Motorol...uh.. Freescale knows how to throw a steak dinners and BareNakedLadies Concert. They through a hell of a party at the Hard Rock CityWalk in Orlando for their 1 yr anniversary (on the last day) as a thank you to its customers.
Freescale Technology Forum 3 days. I highly recommend attending next year's.
Guess they didn't invite Steve.
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What I keep asking myself is how much influence an x86 based Mac OS will have regarding WINE.
:)
As soon as Macs will be based on x86 I'd assume that it will not be very problematic to sooner or later run all kinds of Windows applications "native" using the WINE API. Sounds very very promising if you ask me...
Come to think about what Corel has done for WINE development one can not even imagine what Apple as sponsor could do...
Until a software developer sees it fit to mmap that entire DVD 8GB DVD on their hard drive. Or anything like that.
With 4 billion dollars, 5 years and 575 project managers matrixed over a 700,000 step process. I'm sure that the day they succeeded they would all be downsized anyway.
See for all its tough talk about innovation, IBM and I suspect any other large command and control organization that's tried to outmanage and outprocess itself out of every dilemna by becoming even more bureaucratic really can't move quickly to do the right thing. And even when it succeeds at moving at all, it's typically the wrong solution poorly executed and overloaded with everyone's personal agenda items.
Moving to a company like Intel which for the most part makes chips and nothing but chips is usually the wise choice for a company looking to use chips. At best IBM's chip division, while capable and smart is only a division and one that gets the shaft more often than not because it's a supplier to all of the other IBM hardware units which are themselves victims of their own bureaucracies.
And if truth were told, if IBM thought there was money to be made in low power chips they would have done it already. Clearly IBM made a decision that Apple's goals did not fit with their own business model.
"PPC good, x86 bad" => "PPC good, x86 better"
Sounds like something out of Orwell's "Animal Farm" - "Four legs good, two legs bad" to "Four legs good, two legs better."Pretty funny.
AMD's 3 line: K8, K8, K8
True that the Sempron64 has taken a great dive in price as of late. I based my statement of way too old information I guess (when the "original" Sempron was still the basic solution). I take back my statement about Intel on the budget end.
Signing Apple up is HUGE for Intel. Apple, despite small market share, has a very large mind share. Apple also has a history of pushing the early adoption of new technologies.
Intel is one of the makers of new technologies. Apple was the first computer maker to adopt USB as the only low data rate serial bus. The fact that PS/2 ports still came on my new Dell, shows you how slow even a leader in the PC industry is at changing over.
What does this all mean? Intel might have cut Apple a much better deal then to normal OEMs, to get Apple on board the x86 wagon and to get Apple to push it's technology.
In general though, I think most people would admit that historically Apple mac hardware has been priced pretty high compared to equivalent PC hardware. Probably mostly because Apple has had a stranglehold on compatible hardware and hadn't generally let OEMs compete with them. (ie: a monopoly = set your own prices & margins)
and just to forestall any flames, no, I have no interest in joining an extended conversation on historical apple vs pc priceing, but thanks anyway ;-)
Right, I messed up. The situation was different a little bit back and I hadn't noticed that things had changed. Sorry.
When I bought my 1.8 dual G5, they clocked our code at twice as fast as a standard PIV running at 2.6 ghz . A large chuck of this had to do w/ the fact that intel had a horrible bus architecture, especially for dual processors, while the G5's had two memory buses running at 1/2 clock speed. In practicality it mean 8 GBit/s bandwidth per CPU. I believe the opterons have a similar design and are probably as fast if not faster now (the spec ratings are crazy w/ the opterons), but the IBM G5 chip/architecture is really quite decent. The G4 chips on the other hand are basically like running on PIII, 800's.
It states that Apple picked Intel because AMD chips use too much power. But if you compare the AMD and Intel dual-core chips, the AMD chips use at least 30% less power than the equivalent Intel chips.
IBM foucused on all three console makers
AMD Solid high end chips but lacking in low power mobile area-small company
INTEL Focus on the computer market - dominating the portable market - big company ie greater resources - fallen behind at high end but starting to catch up
Add to this that previously Apple has always had to make there own chipsets, being able to use Intel off the shelf chipsets will make a huge difference in Apples margins.
plus you gain better access to Wi-Max, USB, Xscale
For the neandrathals, wait, that's too nice, as neadrathals had larger brains than humans, well for the archaic homonids with the itchy troll trigger fingers, my point ... is whatever reason the folks at Apple or most analyst will "pitch" about Apple going Intel is in short B.S.
Hence the blah, blah, blah ... I thought that was self evident, but I'm wrong. I guess all the rumors I've been hearing about ./ are true. Exit stage left.
This wasn't meant as flamebait or anything... Apple has never shown any desire to be the fastest performers on the block. They're more about the all-around experience.
If you take out the desire for top-end performance, AMD has nothing over Intel.
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Nope hardware no longer makes the computers any different because it isn't different.
We are going to be stuck with x86 and it's 64bit mutants until the end of time.
Maybe it is because I remember when their was some difference in computers. Lets see which PIV with an Intel mother board and an ATI video card I should buy!
Or which AMD system with an NVidia video board runs Doom3 the fastest.
Boring.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It would be nice if someone who knew more than me would comment on how the xscale processors may have figured into Apple's decision.
I think Cringely may have brought it up a few weeks back.
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"The sad truth is this is beginning of the end of apple as a computer hardware company. They are going to use use Intel motherboards in pretty Apple cases. Pretty much the same thing that Dell does now."
..... kris
pointless despair. intel inside != generic hardware. one of the reasons intel wooed apple for so long is that apple has a history of designing extraordinary hardware around a chip architecture.
if history is any guide (existing macs, next machines, etc.) there will be plenty of design tweaks apple's superior hardware design team will use to differentiate macs from pcs, despite using intel chips.
"I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me."
Because Intel cut them a better deal?
Considering Steve Jobs is a Vegan, I doubt that would have been of any use :)
In this case, AMD would have been the "don't be evil" warm and fuzzy choice (see AMD-v-Intel suit). Transmeta would have been the cool-tech choice. Picking Intel was pure cold business rationality.
Jobs doesn't bend other people's reality so much as exercises his power to mould new realities. This is evident in his string of lucrative industry firsts.
(Malone's Infinite Loop is a fairly balanced account of Jobs, rich in background detail, neither hagiography nor a total hatchet-job.)
you had me at #!
that movies and iptv will play because of drm and tcpa and all the patented crappy codecs.
can't wait to put linux on their new intel hardware.
To make some of you whiners happy, the BYTEmark fiasco happened in 1998, under Jobs' command, so he can be blamed:
c _Benchmarks.html ...and not in 1995.
http://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/3631/iMa
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Dell is larger than Apple...
HP is larger than Apple...
Then who?
In the US, Apple is the #4 manufacturer of PCs, they were #8 in global sales, but I believe that they have moved up to #6 or so...
What is my point? They are one of the LARGEST manufacturers of PCs... period. The fact that there are BIGGER companies doesn't make them a small player. Their aren't many bigger sellers of machines on the planet (there are about 5 of them)... Meaning while they aren't the biggest account, there are only 4 accounts that matter more...
Remember, Apple is the #2 seller of operating systems and the #6 seller of PCs, that's not a small account. They ARE a Fortune 500 company (top 300 I believe), meaning that there aren't 300 companies in the US that are bigger than them.
All AMD has to do is hire Intel's managers and outsource the manufacturing and they'll produce the lowest power chips with the highest capacity. There's nothing about the word Intel which means anything about their product or their capacity.
this article title sounded a lot more interesting when i read AMD as WMD and I briefly entertained the thought of the Apple Nuke.
AMD has often had trouble shipping chips in the needed quantity. In addition, Apple would probably be AMD's biggest account if they were 100% AMD, none of the handful of larger manufacturers are 100% AMD. Apple's chip needs would account for approximately 15% of AMD's current production. I don't believe that AMD can ramp up production 15% without problems, otherwise they would and lower prices slightly and grab more market... They don't have excess capacity.
A chip manufacturing plan is HIGHLY automated. Those lines DO NOT shut down when running.
AMD doesn't have excess capacity.
There is a REASON that AMD doesn't advertise. They are a manufacturing company, NOT a technology company. They use R&D to develop products, but they don't care about marketing. AMD can sell every chip that they product. Their market share limitation is a function of production limits.
The reason AMD does these marketing games? They are trying (and HAVE succeeded) in moving up their selling price by increasing their perceived value. They do market, but to manufacturers and large technology opinion shakers, NOT end users.
Intel is a full technology company that uses R&D, manufacturing, and branding to sell their products at a premium. Intel has excess capacity. However, as the "monopolist" in a monopoly w/ fringe market, they cede the fringe to collect monopoly rents... That means that Intel gets 100% of the market that isn't taken by the fringe players.
With Yonah and Dothan, Intel is already ahead on power in the category of "non top speed chipset". So I don't see how Apple is making a mistake here.
Apple is taking a risk that Intel will not be able to reform their top of the line chips to match AMDs superb offerings. But honestly, tower configurations don't account for much of Apple's sales anyway, so it's not a huge risk.
Anyway, I as I've said before, I think there are other reasons Apple chose Intel over AMD. To get Northbridges with integrated graphics and chipsets with integrated wireless, etc. is the main reason. Apple mostly makes all-in-one type machines. In order to be cost-effective, these machines will have to be much more integrated than they currently are. And AMD doesn't offer much besides a processor. They don't make chipsets right now.
So I don't think AMD really made much sense to Apple at this time.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
IDC is a respected market research firm.
I've heard that IDC is respected. I'm just not sure why. About 10 years ago I stopped reading PCWorld and stopped recommending it to others. This is because I had a manager that read this magazine. About once a month I'd have to go in and reinstall Windows because he had made some tweek, recommended by PCWorld, that would completely hose his system. I'd also have to explain why some future sounding technology that PCWorld was raving about wouldn't work as a solution to our current problems. Now granted, this manager was an idiot. However, it's a real headache when you have to deal with idiots feeding idiots information. Has the journalistic quality of PCWorld improved any over the last 10 years? Are their other publications of higher quality? I've never read MacWorld.
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Well they'll actually be trying to proclaim "No really, Intel chips are faster than AMD chips". At the high end, I see AMD being in the lead for at least two more years.
But, really, Apple's decision is based on the availability of processors for the notebook market. Here's where Intel still leads. The Pentium M is the chip to beat at the current time. When 65nm processing is introduced, Intel still will be leading.
pescatarian actually, he eats fish. oh god, why do I know that?!
I'm so goddam sick of smallminded mods with an agenda downing everything as a "Troll" that doesn't agree with their little world view. I gave reasons for everything I said, and said so in a respectful manner. So, on the off chance the fool who modded me down is actually reading these threads: remember the part of the modding FAQ about "concentrate more on promotion than demotion"? That means YOU. Just because you don't like an opinion isn't grounds for modding down, you twit. If you think my post was a troll, you must've just gotten your AOL disk in the mail last week...
Where have you read/heard these negative comments?
In Soviet Russia AMD picks Apple!
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I always wondered why Mac decided to change from PPC to x86 and not x86_64? You would think if there going to change they would go with a 64bit arch. I know Intel has 64bit desktop CPUs and the mobile 64bit CPUs should be out soon.
Problem in the reasoning: I know the article is about why Intel over AMD, but they repeat that quote that Intel have a roadmap with processors of diminutive power ratings that "Freescale and IBM weren't going to have".
ABSOLUTELY TOTALLY WRONG AND BULLSHIT.
Freescale and IBM already have processors which scale the sub-watt handheld line running PowerPC code, and processors from 400MHz to 1.7GHz taking from 3 to 20W for higher performance code, dual core PCI-Express, Gigabit LAN integrated chip is around the corner. This is undercutting Intel's power margins right now for more functionality.
There is arguably a performance difference: if Intel are running 2GHz dual core chips and Freescale are only pushing out 1.5GHz at the same time, but there are plenty of benchmarks using SSE and AltiVec which show plenty of performance improvements by going via PowerPC than Intel code (see MacSTL at www.pixelglow.com) including Freescale versions of algorithms which Intel also provide in their proprietary math libs and compilers.
So. We know they chose Intel over AMD because of financial might and R&D budgets. I'm afraid saying "IBM and Freescale weren't going the same places" is saying that IBM and Freescale would be throwing away their entire established market. Remember Freescale alone has a revenue mere millions lower than Intel's, and IBM's R&D budget outclasses Intel's. Combined they are a larger force. POWER is on the rise.
The real reason: let's recap. Jobs is a control freak and a nutjob, who's sole purpose in life is to be in the public's eye with "impossible" products and "chic" solutions. Processor architectures aren't chic anymore, Macs sell because of case design and user interface improvements. Performance, certainly not power consumption, doesn't come into it for consumers.
My system is faster than hers at integer operations but throw something like world of warcraft at it and hers is faster
she now has 1.25gb ram. (radeon 9800 128mb agp 4x vs my 9600 aiw xt 128mb agp 8x)
Yeah, you get back to me when the 9600 suddenly performs anywhere near as well as a 9800.
If you were trying to make a point, perhaps you'd better start over from the beginning.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
All your syntax are not right.
You can't really compare an academic price (which is basically a discount) with a system that isn't discounted.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
The real reason Intel was picked was because Jobs and Paul Otellini decided to do the deal over a golf game and then came up with reasons to support the deal after the fact. So far the people running OS X on Intel hardware haven't had such impressive benchmark results and a very high end Intel gaming system is only about 25% faster than the 1st gen minimac and Apple isn't using any current generation G4 processor in any of its lineup.
They probably decided they had to bite the bullet and get the costs out, and the important costs are not always just the ones in the box.
But is it the death of a main stream cpu that isn't an X86. As too apples hardware design... I said it would have a pretty case.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Dell does just fine using only Intel chips, despite flirting with AMD whenever they want to negotiate a sweet deal with Intel.
Anyone who thinks Apple will be unable ot sell every Mac they make (before and after the Intel switch).
Also, consider this -- do you think the ramifications of switching to AMD instead of Intel would have made all the investors who keep inching up Apple's stock happy?
I realize Apple is really doing well on the Wall Street because of the iPod... but computers (and the retail stores) account for about 50% of their business.
Simple... Which soumds better: Mactel or Macamd?
Seriously, it's likely brand recognition, quantity discounts, and supply ability.
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They're not G5s however, they're PowerPC Processing Units.
But yes, IBM can do >3GHz if they want to.
Chipsets ! = CPU's. Intel is a CPU company. Intel is not a chipset company. VIA and nVidia have been the dominant chipset makers for Intel and AMD for some time now. Since chipsets are closely tied to CPU's CPU companies develop chipsets for their new technologies but it's generally not their focus. AMD used to be a chipset player alongside VIA, but now doesn't release any chipsets for consumer use. I'd imagine Intel is going down the same route. Let the chipset makers do what they do best.
The power-optimized PPC 970FX has a rated 24.5W peak at 2.0 GHz. I found that buried in a PDF spec sheet on IBM's website.
There's nothing really holding Apple back from making Powerbook G5's right now. This whole shenanigan is just Steve Jobs being a dickhead because IBM didn't deliver 3 GHz chips after he promised they would.
Yep, good ol' Steve "Dickhead" Jobs... Steve "Numbnuts" Jobs... Steve "Motherfucking Crack-Whore" Jobs...
(I miss the PowerPC already.)
Hi,
l owdog-announce/2005-June/000094.html
:))
As a G5 owner and also thinking about a dual g5 2700 or dual core systems if I am sure about Apple's stance I am checking PowerPC community except Apple which removes pages about how PPC outperforms Intel from their site lately.
Here is the leading PPC Linux for Apple and IBM HPC cluster producers stance on Intel decision:
http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/pipermail/yel
As we (home users) figured after Mactel decision, Apple is one of smallest PowerPC customers on planet. Here is the PowerPC platform official page (without removed benchmarks
http://www.power.org/home
And I hope I don't see another story like that which will make me delete OS X and run PPC Linux...
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436
Its a server centric benchmark and OS X produces very sad results. I just hope Apple workstation does not have similar disadvantages which will make Apple a waster of the architecture they bitch about lately.
Its not AMD versus Intel. Apple certainly lies about the real reason behind the switch to Intel.
What about performance per watt on latest announced FreeScale DUAL CORE CPUs?
I didn't read anything in that piece that hasn't already been made painfully clear in punditry linked to via Slashdot and Ars....
Let's not forget here that intel also makes the high performance ARM based Xscale(terrible name I know) which slot's neatly into the iPod, which is currently using ARM based chips from a different source. So by hooking up with intel it not only gets the main desktop chips it also gets the iPod chips from the same supplier. Can you say bulk discount? no other chip maker could offer this to Apple, which should pave the way for either cheaper high performance iPod/iPod-esque devices or, more likely, bigger profit margins per iPod for Apple. Makes sense, no?
You're just jealous because you don't have splashy window effects yet.
The image is a dream, the beauty is real. Can you see the difference?