Intel PowerBook Rumor Mill

catdriver writes "AppleInsider has an article guessing about Apple's new Intel portable offerings in early 2006. 'With the initiation of the Intel Power Mac project last month, all five of Apple's Intel Macintosh projects are now said to be underway and moving at an exhaustive, yet fruitful pace. It should come as no surprise that Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is reportedly leading the charge, with his heart set on making 2006 the next 1984.' With Mac OS X for x86 now catching up to its PPC sibling, is Apple ready to take the plunge?"

Comments

Apple wants to use the dual-core "Yonah", not...

[Harry Balls]

...the current "Pentium M Dothan".
Yonah is scheduled to arrive in January 2006, and will be followed in Q3/2006 by "Merom".
Most "Yonah" models are dual core, but a low-end model with only one core will be available. Apple will most likely opt to use the dual core "Yonah".

Merom will add 64 bits - yes, Yonah is 32 bits only.

Altivec

[0xC0FFEE]

"Altivec programs" really aren't coded against Altivec instructions directly. For example, for doing a vector add, you'd use vec_madd() which, if you have Altivec, maps to the vmaddfp altivec instruction. If you move to SSE, you'd probably code against the same vec_madd() but the compiler would generate the correct instruction for SSE. So, if you've followed Apple's instructions, conversion should be relatively easy. Furthermore, most people simply use Apple's higher level libraries (ie, vecLib, etc) that embeds most of what numerical people would need (like blas or lapack).

Most importantly, Altivec, while really fast, only support single precision computations. This is sufficient for improving multimedia playback, applying image filters on photos or compressing music, but lacking for high-precision computations. SSE supports double precision, a big improvement for the scientific market.