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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?
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
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 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?
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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..
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.
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.
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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
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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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..."
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.
Apple is using a version of C that fakes object orientation
Whereas C# has real objects inside your computer!
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....
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).
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.
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
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.
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
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 #!
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.
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
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.
- 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: