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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. "
From the blurb: Also, Intel's mammoth production capacity erases any supply worries.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
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.
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http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20050830/index
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
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
Mac's already use PC video cards, only difference is a slightly different BIOS just to impose Mac only conditions on them. 90% of a Mac is a PC these days anyways, only the 10% dedicated to CPU bus is different. It made so much sense for Apple to adopt a 100% PC internal core although it will be customized enough (with BIOS and Firmware, etc) to remain "uniquely" Apple.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
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.
which is basically a Pentium 2...
which is basically a Pentium...
which is a DEC-engineering-based design.
No, the Pentium II is basically a Pentium Pro. Excluding the x86 ISA and the fact that they both (as are all modern microprocessors) are superscalar the PPro has nothing in common with the original Pentium.
If you read up on the PPro architecture you will find that it is, though perhaps ancient, quiet clever and innovating. Also, it was designed in-house without ex-DEC engineers.
LaptopLogic.com recently ran a comparison between the Pentium M (Dothan) and AMD's Turion, with a very comprehesive rundown of the technological differences between the two chips, and well, check out the review for the exact results, but the Turion beats the P-M in almost all of the non-synthetic benchmarks. The machines were set up so that they had almost identical specs save the processors, a pair of Acer machines (one of which sits under my hands now, the Ferrari 4005.. I was fairly pleased that the Turion did come out on top, especially for 3D gaming, given that I turned down the other reviewed machine, the TravelMate 8104, shortly before this comparison appeared).
One particularly interesting result is that while the P-M performed better at the 'battery eater' benchmark, i.e., constant battery usage, the Turion gave greater battery life with 'real life' usage, where the processor is not in constant use, when the power saving technologies come into play. So unless you really need to do CPU intensive tasks on the go, the Turion PowerNow gives better battery life.
Oh, and the Turion's also significantly cheaper, which unless you're lucky enough not to be on a budget, is definitely a plus (the article goes through the differences in cost if you want to see the figures).
Well, don't take my word for it, the article can be found here.
Just a couple of minor notes...
:)
P2 was a PPro with MMX, which was *not* basicaly a Pentium. Notably, the PPro used a RISC core and could translate CISC, while the Pentium was straight CISC, and you could run 4 PPros - which you could only run up to two Pentiums (or first-gen PIIs, for that matter). The PPro was also optimized for 32-bit apps, while the Pentium actually outperformed on 16-bit apps at the same clock speed. Otherwise, your lineage is simplistically accurate...
Itanium hasn't been a giant success largely because of software screw-ups - it took a while for compilers to properly optimize for the CPU, and programmers failed to think of it as being a different CPU than their P3 or Xeon. Lots of x86 stuff just didn't (some still doesn't) build well for ia64 (Itanium), while it may still work well on the more similar em64t (Xeon). Ia64 is a really cool architecture, it's just not yet fully exploited. http://www.gelato.org/ and http://www.ia64-linux.org/ are good starting points for Linux-oriented information on that arch...
Considering Steve Jobs is a Vegan, I doubt that would have been of any use :)
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.
- Replace one class wholly with another, at runtime (that is, all methods that are invoked on the original class instead get invoked on your new class).
- Change the class of an existing object to a different class.
- Treat classes as if they were any other object, with class methods becoming instance methods on the class object.
- Control what happens when a method is invoked on nil.
- Message forwarding. You just can't do generic RPCs or message logging in C# without a code generator.
- Add a method to an existing class without recompiling it or even needing its source code. How many silly StringUtilities classes have people written?
- Easily incorporate any C or C++ code (just copy and paste).
- Key-value observing. Get notified when a method is invoked without that method even knowing that anyone might be listening.
- Learn the language in an afternoon.
But of course, there's lots of neat stuff that C# has over Objective-C: