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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.
Maybe massive, cost-saving volume discounts were a factor too?
In that case, why not use Transmetta!
Because that extra 't' increases power consumption.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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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.
Then why didn't the pick ADM?!?!?!?!
Because they need to process data speedily, not soybeans.
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).
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.