2005 Good Year for Power Architecture

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an IBM article looking back on what the piece calls the best year ever for the Power Architecture. From the article: "While IBM is considered by many to be an 800lb. gorilla, in the microelectronics space, it is actually very small -- last year IBM was way down at number 21 on the iSuppli list of the top 25 semiconductor suppliers worldwide. Now, that isn't necessarily a bad thing: for instance, it means that IBM Semiconductor solutions is small and nimble and competitive -- and this agility (coupled with the fact that we do get to share Research and some other resources with the parts of IBM that are 800lb. gorillas) has led some to predict that the IBM chips division will be named the fastest growing semiconductor supplier of 2005. In fact, there is a very good chance that IBM may regain the coveted #18 spot on iSuppli's list this year!"

Comments

Interesting

[hahafaha]

I was sure IBM wasn't doing so well. It just pulled OS/2 a little over a wekk ago...

spot 18

[gcnaddict]

"there is a very good chance that IBM may regain the coveted #18 spot on iSuppli's list this year!"

Whats so special about spot 18?

Re:spot 18

[The Lerneaen Hydra]

"there is a very good chance that IBM may regain the coveted #18 spot on iSuppli's list this year!"

Whats so special about spot 18?

---

1) It's probably better than what they have now

2) It's a press release. Of course they cover everything they say in honey.

Re:spot 18

[kfg]

Whats so special about spot 18?

It's twice nine which is a magic number because it's three threes.

KFG

Re:spot 18

[Anonymous Coward]

It's better than 21?

Re:spot 18

[Anonymous Coward]

"Whats so special about spot 18"

It's barely legal.

Re:spot 18

[Coolcom]

and IBM has 3 letters, therefore it all works out..

Re:spot 18

[bplipschitz]

Whats so special about spot 18?

Eighteen is eight, eight is five, five is four.

Four is cosmic.

Re:spot 18

[mnmn]

But 21 can drink. All the better no?

IBM Article By IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

We're posting press releases now?

Re:IBM Article By IBM

[kfg]

This is the bit that jumped out at me from the "anonymous" submission:

. . .we do get to share Research and some other resources . . .

A story about corporate blogging just two stories ago; and now a practical demonstration of astroturfing a public forum.

Happy New Year, same as the old.

KFG

Re:IBM Article By IBM

[Boogaroo]

This article is FROM IBM about IBM. The article is what is quoted and of course they're talking about themselves, so "WE" is a perfectly acceptable term to use in their own article.

Now, it may not seem newsworthy to some to put a navel gazing press release up on the front page, but some will find it interesting to get a glimpse of part of IBM's internal workings. Take it or leave it, the article is not some kind of Google ranking ploy.

Re:IBM Article By IBM

[kfg]

The article is what is quoted. . .

Of course it is, as there is nothing else for me to quote, the blurb being completely devoid of any personal observation or touch by the "anonymous" submitter.

. . .the article is not some kind of Google ranking ploy.

Of course not. It would be silly to submit a PR piece to Slashdot as a Google ranking ploy. It's a PR ploy.

The medium is the message.

KFG

Re:IBM Article By IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

As clearly stated in the summary, that's a quote from the article ... an IBM publication.

Re:IBM Article By IBM

[kfg]

As clearly stated in the summary, that's a quote from the article ... an IBM publication.

Yes, it's a very good example of how to effectively astroturf.

KFG

Re:IBM Article By IBM

[nacturation]

kfg... now you're just being biased!

From TFA: "Last year we attempted to sum up the whole of the microprocessor news for the year and were accused by some (*cough* Slashdot readers *cough*) of being biased."

Re:IBM Article By IBM

[kfg]

kfg... now you're just being biased!

Damn fucking straight I am.

KFG

Trying to make themselves feel better

[Colonel Panic]

Sounds like the Power PC group tryin gto make themselves feel better about losing their biggest customer, Apple.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[cryfreedomlove]

Is Apple going to completely dump power? Or will it continue to build for both Power and the new Intel architecture?

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Anonymous Coward]

What was really great was the article posted on the IBM intranet when Apple made that announcement; you could tell they were substantially trying to downplay the effect, saying stuff like 'Apple's PowerPC purchases made up point-so-and-so percent of IBM's revenue', and adding that IBM chips would be used in all three next-gen consoles.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[taskforce]

I don't have statistics to back it up, but I can prettymuch guarantee that with the release of the Xbox360 and PS3 both using POWER based chips, Apple aren't IBM's biggest customer.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[NDPTAL85]

Yeah but consoles are a one generation only kind of business. No one can predict what CPUs will be used in the next generation of consoles.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[2nd Post!]

Well, consider that only 400k or so XBoxes have shipped and 0 PS3s have shipped, and Apple shipped 600k iMacs and PowerMacs in Q4 2005 (both of which use Power based G5s), Apple is STILL IBM's biggest customer.

Now Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo may have potentially larger markets, but right now Apple is still shipping more G5s than Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo combined, that and each G5 is higher margin than a Cell based CPU.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually IBM sells Power based processors in several different market segments that in total would probably exceed that of Apple. In some cases they are made under license, however in total CPU's I would think that it should exceed that of the Apple business.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[SlowEmotionReplay]

I don't have statistics OR evidence, but I suspect that it's possible that part of the reason for Apple's switch to Intel is that they were concerned that they may not be able to get the chips they need if they had to compete with the console makers for IBM's attention. They've had supply chain problems before, and I'm sure they've learned from that experience.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Urusai]

IBM has thrown off the shackles of Apple's tyranny! The Power architecture is free! Now IBM has the kind of opportunity afforded Motorola when the 68K architecture was discontinued. I envision a bold future where the Power architecture rises to Itanium-like achievement, marring the shiny chrome bumper of the x86-64 hegemony.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[laffer1]

Apple is duming POWER in favor of intel inside... or leap ahead. Powered by frog processors!

Think of it like the 68k to PPC switch of the 90s for apple. This is a migration.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[laffer1]

i meant dumping... oops.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Covener]

Well, consider that only 400k or so XBoxes have shipped and 0 PS3s have shipped, and Apple shipped 600k iMacs and PowerMacs in Q4 2005 (both of which use Power based G5s), Apple is STILL IBM's biggest customer.

Consider the masive number of systems MS will be shiping in 1Q05 -- surely the CPUs for those systems are long since bought and paid for.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Covener]

Consider the masive number of systems MS will be shiping in 1Q05 -- surely the CPUs for those systems are long since bought and paid for.

1Q06 of course.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[FatherOfONe]

"Well, consider that only 400k or so XBoxes have shipped and 0 PS3s have shipped, and Apple shipped 600k iMacs and PowerMacs in Q4 2005 (both of which use Power based G5s), Apple is STILL IBM's biggest customer.

Now Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo may have potentially larger markets, but right now Apple is still shipping more G5s than Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo combined, that and each G5 is higher margin than a Cell based CPU."

Ok, I don't know where you get 400k. I hope that you are correct, but from what I here there will be around 3 million 360's sold by July of this year if they hold their current pace. Now as far as PS3's go, it would be a fair estimate to say that they will be close to their 90 million PS2's sold in 5 years. So lets just say they average 10 million a year for the next 5 years of PS3's. Now you also didn't mention all the hub manufacturers out there like Cisco. They also use power chips. When you start to add it up, the loss of Apple for the gain of Microsoft and Sony was huge win for IBM.

So in short Apple switching to Intel is a small loss for power, BUT there are some serious advantages now for Power as well. Microsoft and Sony will not require a new fab to be built for ~5 years! Cisco cares about the performance of the Power chip, but they care more about the power consumption. Intel on the other hand needs to focus on mobile chips, desktop chips and server chips. They will need to build their 65nm fabs as fast as possible then spend billions on the next version. Granted Intel spends around 10Billion a year in R&D so they can handle it as long as Wintel desktops keep selling like they do.

Now the real quesiton is why did Apple switch? This is off topic, but it doesn't make sense that they switched to a 32bit chip FROM a 64bit chip. Now if they would have switched to x86-64, that would have made better sense. I do feel for all those poor saps who are going to buy PPC or X86 Mac in the next year or so. I feel for them because I went through the 68k to PPC migraiton and bought all the load of crap that Apple fed back then. It is the same load of crap they are trying to spin today.... fat binaries.... blah blah blah. The truth is that if you go with a new X86 machine a bunch of your old stuff will not work and you will be praying that someone will code a new version that works as well as your old one did. Now after this painfull migration is over in a couple of years and if Apple moves to X86-64, then they will probably be better off. They just better pray (not that many in Apple belive in God), that sales of their Ipod don't faulter.

Apple has some other issues that they need to address. One is their view of open source. They use it a TON in their OS yet their sales guys go around and bash it whenever they get a chance. The next is their view on technologies such as Java. Again their sales guys go around and bash it, yet all their Java apps will not need to be ported to this new architecture. One sales guy just recently said to me that he would NEVER load any JVM on his system because he hates slow Java applications. I then informed him that it was loaded by default. He smiled and told me he knew that and he was "just kidding", but I have to wonder how many poor saps he talks to that don't know that and then repeat the same crap he just said. Lastly, and perhaps the biggest issue is why on earth would our development shop write software for X86 Macintosh? Lets look at the marketshare as it is and as it will be for the next few years. What percentage of all new desktops do you believe will be running X86 OSX? .05%? Heck some vendors just NOW started to fully support OSX! RedHat Linux Desktop and SuSE Linux on the destkop will have more clients that OSX on X86. Perhaps Ubuntu will even have more desktops! I wish Apple well, but it will be far far easier on them to reign in their sales guys and send out a message to ANYONE to help support OSX on X86, be that open source apps and or Java applications.

I

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[mrchaotica]

Yeah but consoles are a one generation only kind of business.

So are PowerPC chips in Macs! ; )

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[ClamIAm]

Also, the Nintendo Revolution apparently uses some kind of IBM chip. Oh, and every Gamecube has a PPC chip inside of it.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[linuxfanatic1024]

Will they have to use/write a PowerPC emulator for this like the one they wrote for 68040-based apps with the PowerPC migration? I know it can be done, but it isn't very fast.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[renoX]

> Intel on the other hand needs to focus on mobile chips, desktop chips and server chips.

And? I fail to see your point, there is not much difference with IBM which sells servers chips too and embedded chips which cover a wide range of usage.

For the off-topic part about Apple:
1) I don't understand why Apple made the switch too.
2) you say it like not beleiving in God is a problem for me it is an intelligence sign.
3) Free software such as Linux is a competitor so why wouldn't they bash it if they get a chance? It's not like their principal target is geeks.
4) having Apple on x86 CPUs can only help vendors deciding to port their software on MacOS X, it lowers the bar not increase it.
5) About Linux comparison: when I see reviews about MacOS X, I'm always surprised how stringent the reviewers are: they expect high quality from Apple and they're quite disappointed when they don't have it, unfortunately reviewers about Linux are far more tolerant because they don't expect (and don't get) such quality: the cracks between the many layers of a Linux's desktop are always showing.
Somehow I doubt that this can be fixed in one or two years, especially since HW makers don't help by hiding their spec (Nvidia, ATI, other..).

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[batzn]

Why did they make the switch? Easy one. Laptops. Powerbooks/iBooks make for more than half of the Mac revenue of Apple and there's currently no PPC chip available that can stand up to the Pentium M. Nor does anyone have one on his PPC roadmap.

Or do you think the Apple folks *like* to be hopelessly behind when it comes to portable computing power?

(And, yes, I too hate the fact that they switch. Now I'll be in the same boat with the Gigahertz bean counters ...)

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Halfbaked Plan]

Naw, Apple put Power Architecture chips in their systems for year after year. But they sell to a different market than anybody else using Power chips, and don't have the resources to do their own silicon.

Me, I'm resentful of what the whole 'PowerPC consortium' did to Motorola. They were one great silicon producer, but dealing closely with Apple did them significant damage.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[adrianmonk]

Now the real quesiton is why did Apple switch? This is off topic, but it doesn't make sense that they switched to a 32bit chip FROM a 64bit chip.

There's a reason that doesn't make sense: it probably isn't happening. Yes, Intel does make 32-bit chips, but most (all?) of its recent chips have 64-bit extensions. It's entirely possible, and I would say also quite likely, that Apple will restrict itself to the subset of Intel chips that have 64-bit capabilities. It's the only sane thing to do, and as far as I can tell, there's no penalty for doing it. Heck, for what it's worth, I'll speculate that the reason Apple didn't switch sooner was that they wanted to wait until the x86 world settled on a 64-bit instruction set architecture.

I do feel for all those poor saps who are going to buy PPC or X86 Mac in the next year or so. I feel for them because I went through the 68k to PPC migraiton and bought all the load of crap that Apple fed back then. It is the same load of crap they are trying to spin today.... fat binaries.... blah blah blah. The truth is that if you go with a new X86 machine a bunch of your old stuff will not work

It remains to be seen how well the PowerPC-emulating technology will work. I personally thought that the 68k-emulating technology in the 68k to PowerPC transition worked pretty OK. I don't think it had perfect compatibility, but it did run lots of apps, and I never personally had a problem other than speed of emulation. (And although I did not personally own a Macintosh at the time, I was a system administrator at a site that had lots and lots of Macintosh systems.)

Also, regardless of how Apple spun the thing, doesn't it seem that some sort of transition was necessary? As I recall, several other manufacturers transitioned away from 68k before Apple did (such as when Sun chose SPARC for Sun 4 machines instead of the 68k processors they'd used in Sun 3 machines), and it was fairly clear that the 68k line was dying. Even if it wasn't clear then, it is definitely dead now (even Palm OS has transitioned to ARM!), so it was the right decision to do. The only question is whether Apple did it at the right time and did a good job with it, and I can't fault them for either one.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[ravyne]

Apple was never IBMs biggest customer, PPC is everywhere, cars, routers, smart devices of all types, granted that Freescale has the majority of these markets, but IBM has more than enough share to outweight Apple. I'll grant that Apple was IBMs highest-profile customer, but I've seen numbers that place revenue generated by Apple at fewer than 1% of IBMs business. Not only that, but they're going to be manufacturing CPUs for all of the next generation game consoles. The Xbox 360 has already sold more units than Apple would have over the ~4 years or more (keep in mind that the only IBM processor in the Macs is the G5, The G4s are still provided by freescale.) How many PS2s, Xboxes, and Gamecubes have been sold worldwide? 150+ million combined, and that number is growing with each new generation (plus we're not even at the end of this generation's sales!) So IBM is looking at basically guaranteed sales of ~200 million PPC-based parts over the next 5-6 years. Apple doesn't even drive PPC development, its driven on both ends by the embedded and big-iron/server markets.

IBM won't be hurting by loosing Apple, neither will PPC. I am a bit sad to loose the only "mainstream" consumer-level PPC hardware, but there are some smaller PPC manufacturers such as Genesi to provide for the hardcore PPC fan market.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[FatherOfONe]

"Intel on the other hand needs to focus on mobile chips, desktop chips and server chips."

What I mean by this is that Intel has to additionally focus on desktop performance against AMD. IBM does not need to worry about this market. This market has razor thin margins that only can be maintained by enormous sales. Quite a few people believe that this market is going away, or at best has leveled off and will not grow significantly.

"you say it like not beleiving in God is a problem for me it is an intelligence sign."

I say that from my dealings with Apple people. If they are so "proud" of their "Deversity" then why don't they show some of those people in their marketing? You say it is an intelligence sign.... You better hope you are correct :-) If not then you better start getting use to the temp of those uber hot Intel CPU's :-)

"Free software such as Linux is a competitor so why wouldn't they bash it if they get a chance? It's not like their principal target is geeks."

Good point! However please remember that those same "geeks" will help develop software for their machine that will have less than .05% marketshare the year it is out. Those same "geeks" will help convince other people that by buying a Macintosh they will actually be able to function in a "Microsoft" world. I just find it very ironic that a company that built their OS on the backs of open source developers would then stick a knife in it.

"having Apple on x86 CPUs can only help vendors deciding to port their software on MacOS X, it lowers the bar not increase it."

I wish that was the case. If you code in something other than Java and you company produces client code then here is your current environment.
1. OS9 - Still have a market using it.

2. OSX PPC - Large but now there are 4 versions and trying to validate your software on each one is a pain. This is why a lot of software vendors still only support 10.2 or 10.3. This currently has around 80% of the Apple market.

3. OSX X86 - Not out yet but at best these system will only hold a 5% share of the APPLE market the first year.

4. Linux - Lots of versions but RedHat and SuSE appear to be the leading candidates.

Now the last ones
5. Windows XP/2k
6. Windows 9X and Mel.

Those last two DOMINATE sales of most software vendors. Even the core Apple ones. Take the Adobe products... What percentage of sales do you believe Adobe gets from their Apple line vs their Windows line of products? From what I have been told is that it is way less than 10% of their sales, and I am being very generous here... So why should Adobe port yet again? I guess the question should be "why would Adobe port any apps in the next 3 years?" They might as well wait and see how the market pans out.... This adds to my point above, in that Apple should be begging any and all developers to port software to their platform.

"About Linux comparison: when I see reviews about MacOS X, I'm always surprised how stringent the reviewers are: they expect high quality from Apple and they're quite disappointed when they don't have it, unfortunately reviewers about Linux are far more tolerant because they don't expect (and don't get) such quality: the cracks between the many layers of a Linux's desktop are always showing.
Somehow I doubt that this can be fixed in one or two years, especially since HW makers don't help by hiding their spec (Nvidia, ATI, other..)."

We agree! However, I will say that the desktop Linux has come a LONG way over the last 3 years. It is a race for my $$$$ and I am curious who will win. I wish them all well.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[petermgreen]

macs have been using the powerpc for a long time (over 10 years now and still going for the moment although due to switch soon). Console makers afaict rarely use the same architecture for more than two consoles running (if that).

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[FatherOfONe]

I believe that only the Xeon chips support X86-64 and the test systems from Apple ran on normal 32 bit only chips.

This doesn't maean that you are incorrect, it just means that they have been working on a 32bit X86 version for YEARS.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Toraz Chryx]

Morelike they already have done...

Rosetta developers docs

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[NutscrapeSucks]

This is off topic, but it doesn't make sense that they switched to a 32bit chip FROM a 64bit chip

64-bit is currently a non-factor for the Mac market, and will be until OSX 10.5 comes out. Right now the OS is still primarily 32-bit only (Only Unix Deamons can run 64-bit), and every commercial application except one is 32-bit.

The thing that didn't make sense was hyping "64-bit" support on the G5 chips without the software to back it up. They probably regret that now, because even though the userbase is running on 32 bits they think they are running on 64.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Hal_Porter]

D'oh.

I was just thinking "Now THAT's a reality distortion field".

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[PayPaI]

Intel Pentium 4 511 Prescott 533MHz FSB LGA 775 EM64T Processor Model BX80547PE2800EN - Retail
There you go.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Hal_Porter]

Actually, I got the impression that the deal with IBM wasn't for n processors, $X per chip, it was more like a one off payment to license the core.

Not sure how it compares to the cost of the Intel CPU in the original X Box, but since they switched from that, it must have been cheaper. But I think the more important reason for the switch is that they can make a custom chip with the CPU + other stuff and reduce the build cost to below the sales price :

http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm ?story_id=5213722&tranMode=none

Another huge change, says Mr Bach, is that the original Xbox was built from off-the-shelf parts. This reduced time-to-marketthe Xbox took 18 months to design and launchbut prevented Microsoft from reducing the cost of the console during its lifetime. With no loss of performance Sony, for example, has gradually reduced the number of chips inside the PlayStation 2, cutting costs and enabling it to sell the consoles at a profit. Microsoft's use of multiple chips from different suppliers (such as Intel and Nvidia) made such integration impossible. But the Xbox 360 is based on a new, custom design that should give Microsoft the flexibility to integrate components in future. As a result, says Mr Bach, the company will break even on the hardware over the console cycle. Since software sales will be profitable, the Xbox 360 should actually make Microsoft money.

I'm not sure if they have the rights to build the ATI graphics chip too, I can't find any reference to it.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[toddestan]

4) having Apple on x86 CPUs can only help vendors deciding to port their software on MacOS X, it lowers the bar not increase it.

I disagree. If Windows will boot on a Mac like so many think it will, and if Wine for OSX really takes off amonst Mac users, a lot of companies aren't going to bother with an OSX-86 version of their software. Especially with OSX-86 having a tiny marketshare for its first couple of years. They'll just tell the Mac users to boot into Windows or run it under emulation. It could very well kill MacOS just like it killed OS/2.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Anonymous Coward]

I envision a bold future where the Power architecture rises to Itanium-like achievement, marring the shiny chrome bumper of the x86-64 hegemony.

The Power4/Power4+/Power5/Power5+ is the only processor lineage to give Itanium a run for its money, consistently for the last 5 years.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[2nd Post!]

I get my numbers from Apple here: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/oct/11results .html
Over 1 million Macs in the last quarter, 600k of them IBM supplied. Which means in a healthy year (it it looks to be shaping into one), Apple will ship over 2 million G5 based Macs in the next year, making them nearly as large a customer as Microsoft, and when you factor in that the G5 is probably a higher margin part for IBM than the Xenon (though no guarantees), it would seem to place Apple in the same ballpark as Microsoft, as a customer.

If Apple is particularly lucky, Apple could move even more G5 units!

Of course Apple is dwarfed by the combination of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, but on it's own it's as large a customer as any of them individually (especially when factoring in the estimated ship dates and price points of the respective consoles). So losing Apple for Microsoft is a wash, while a gain with Sony, with Nintendo already a customer.

Apple, right now, is a marquee brand, a flagship to crow about. They've got a lot of consumer awareness with the iPod, more so than the XBox , when you consider that there are more iPods sold every quarter than Microsoft can sell XBoxes in a year. I guess we'll see how IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Sony, and Nintendo do in a year.

*OT: I do expect Apple to do well partnered with Intel. There's no reason not to; Intel is a strong partner, even if they aren't as innovative as IBM or AMD, they still have a highly reputable product and dependable supply, something you don't get with AMD (history of cheap parts still haunts them) or IBM (history of shortages haunts them).

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Hal_Porter]

I still don't understand why they didn't bite the 64 bit bullet when they moved to Intel. It would have been easy to move the UI stuff to 64 bit mode. As far as I can tell, the kernel already is. Then you'd give people the option to run in long mode for applications. 32 bit applications could run in long mode too, actually - they would still have 32 bit pointers in memory and sign extend them into 64 bits when they load them into registers[1]. That way, all user applications could use the improved ABI, more registers, modern instructions and so on.

I don't see the reason to use 32 bit x86 code at all really, since they don't have any third party legacy Intel stuff to support. You could even run the 32 bit UI stuff in long mode, if you use the sign extended pointer trick.

[1] GCC for x86-64 already supports a small model where the code and data of an application must fit in 2GB. You'd need to have a "32 bit process" flag somewhere to tell malloc and so on to only return buffers in the first 4GB of virtual address space. That way, the application could safely store pointers in 32 bit memory locations. It could use MOVZX to load them into registers, and pass them to system calls. The idea is that you can still run ILP32 code on x86-64 code, in long mode.

  http://www.network-theory.co.uk/docs/gccintro/gcci ntro_65.html

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[NutscrapeSucks]

Sure, it's technically possible. It would just involve buying inferior laptop chips for a feature that virtually none of their users care about.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[timeOday]

Apple is supposedly planning Yonah-based laptops. Yonah is only 32 bit.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Hes Nikke]

i love how the above post, and this thread totally contradict each other :)

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it be possible to run an old app in a 68K emulator in the PowerPC emulator of x86 based OSX?

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[bufalo_1973]

How many Macs were sold in 2005? How many XBox 360? PS2? Gamecube? Apple isn't the biggest customer, just the more "publicited" one. Power CPUs aren't only on Macs.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Ilgaz]

Apple makes only 3% share of PowerPC sales for IBM. (http://www.woolsock.ca/geeklove/2005/06/apple_and _ibm_w.html ) Yes, that small customer. Will be further joke when PS3 ships.

Xbox 360 and PS3 customers will see some amazing games running on native HDTV output. Everyone looks a bit deeper will see it runs on PowerPC architecture.

Most important of all, I am writing this as an Apple customer here, there are no PCs here. Steve Jobs made me so mad saying lies about Power architecture so I write like a Dell guy. The "boss" of Apple became a Mhz comparing clueless Dell troll.

As a guy could happily run Slackware on my PC, my "reason" to switch was the modern PowerPC arch. Mr. Jobs can't send me a 30% higher priced Intel. If I use Intel, it will be running Windows or Linux.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Anonymous Coward]

It's entirely possible, and I would say also quite likely, that Apple will restrict itself to the subset of Intel chips that have 64-bit capabilities. It's the only sane thing to do, and as far as I can tell, there's no penalty for doing it.

It would be sane, except that the developer docs that Apple has for coding on x86 address 32bit code exclusively. To the point that you'll have to recode some of the stuff to run 64bit code. Also, it loosk like OSX *still* isn't 64-bit clean, so a stable 64bit port is not exactly immediate.

All in all, it should not matter for laptops that Apple will be going 32bit; however, workstations and servers are a completely different issue - if Apple gets x86-64 Xeons and installs an x86-32 OS on them they'll be the laughingstock of the server market. Only someone drinking deeply the Jobs cool-aid would choose such an XServe over, say, OpenSolaris. Bah, perhaps Apple is actually dropping the server segment and going all-out with the 'media platform' concept.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[MysteriousPreacher]

Apple has some other issues that they need to address. One is their view of open source. They use it a TON in their OS yet their sales guys go around and bash it whenever they get a chance. The next is their view on technologies such as Java. Again their sales guys go around and bash it, yet all their Java apps will not need to be ported to this new architecture. One sales guy just recently said to me that he would NEVER load any JVM on his system because he hates slow Java applications. I then informed him that it was loaded by default. He smiled and told me he knew that and he was "just kidding", but I have to wonder how many poor saps he talks to that don't know that and then repeat the same crap he just said. Lastly, and perhaps the biggest issue is why on earth would our development shop write software for X86 Macintosh? Lets look at the marketshare as it is and as it will be for the next few years. What percentage of all new desktops do you believe will be running X86 OSX? .05%? Heck some vendors just NOW started to fully support OSX! RedHat Linux Desktop and SuSE Linux on the destkop will have more clients that OSX on X86. Perhaps Ubuntu will even have more desktops! I wish Apple well, but it will be far far easier on them to reign in their sales guys and send out a message to ANYONE to help support OSX on X86, be that open source apps and or Java applications.

Who are these 'sales guys' who hate open source and Java?

Regards the transition, I don't want to pray since that's baloney of the highest calibre but do you reckon I could get the same results by doing a voodoo dance? I even have a sacred stick with a little plastic skull on the end.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[ravyne]

I'll actually concede my remark about ~4 years, as I had forgotten that the iMacs are now G5 based as well. However I'd like to still consider my posting more on the mark than the other post in question. For one, the 400k number he states is much lower than reality because the sales at the 10 day mark was nearly that and there have been at least two stock refreshes since, as well as the launches in other territories. Secondly he has compared an entire year of Apple sales to one month of 360 sales. Yes, its launch and a lot of consoles get sold, but with supply much lower than demand at this time, sales should be strong for the next 3-6 months. I also doubt that margins on the G5 are all that much higher, its a far more complex chip than the xenon CPU or what will likely be in the Revolution. Cell is a different matter perhaps, but toshiba and sony have thrown huge amounts of money at it as well, minimizing the risk for IBM there. Console sales are all but guaranteed because people love games, and regardless of which console manufacturer wins IBM is supplying the CPU. Even the Gamecube and Xbox, this gen's "loosing" consoles have better than 30 million units each worldwide. PS2 will probably approach or even surpass 100 million units before it ceases to be sold in ~2008. Also, the comparably long life of the consoles allows for manufacturing technology to make the chips cheaper to produce over time as opposed to desktop chips which are always evolving needing both new designs and processes. I think thats a key point to remember here, the console CPUs will be essentially static for the 7 or so years they will be in production. They'll only need minimal rework as the die shrinks in the years to come, an investment that will pay for itself with haste. When the last of the consoles are being produced in 2011 or so they'll likely be on a 65nm or even 45nm process, more than halving die size, which can allow for both cheaper unit price and higher margins at the same time.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[FatherOfONe]

Cool thanks! I hope that this is correct, and that means they should run fine on AMD Opterons as well. Well this means they should run better on an Opteron :-)

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Kijori]

Now Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo may have potentially larger markets, but right now Apple is still shipping more G5s than Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo combined, that and each G5 is higher margin than a Cell based CPU.

I suspect that Apple will be shipping more G5s than anyone else for quite a while yet...

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice, but Apple is not using, and will never use Prescott.
It's possible they'll be using Yonah, or its successor...

Yonah is 32bit, but I believe the successor may be an AMD64/EMT64 chip...

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Scudsucker]

Apple makes only 3% share of PowerPC sales for IBM. (http://www.woolsock.ca/geeklove/2005/06/apple_and _ibm_w.html ) Yes, that small customer. Will be further joke when PS3 ships.

But the joke is only funny until you realize that embeded and console chips are a high volume low margin business, whereas Macs are a low volume high margin business. Apple might "only" sell 3% of new computers, but how many other PC companies have made money since the bubble popped that aren't Apple or Dell?

Steve Jobs made me so mad saying lies about Power architecture

What lies would those be, exactly? Sure he played up the strengths of his product while glossing over the weaknesses, but that is what every. single. business. on the planet does.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Hal_Porter]

What do you mean by "buying inferior laptop chips"? The Apple laptops will use the Yonah and it's successors, right? All of which support x86-64.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Scudsucker]

When you start to add it up, the loss of Apple for the gain of Microsoft and Sony was huge win for IBM.

But there's one thing everyone here seems to be hugely missing: margin. Yes, IBM will sell a buttload more embedded processors and console chips than 970's. But those chips have to be cheap, something Apple has never been. They are losing out on a low volume but high margin business; IBM could charge a premium for fast G5's with lots of cash, and Apple's professional market would snap them up. Sort of like what Nvidia does with it's Ultra products or Intel with their Pentium Extreme Editions.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Scudsucker]

64-bit is currently a non-factor for the Mac market, and will be until OSX 10.5 comes out. Right now the OS is still primarily 32-bit only

And that's all it needs to be. Finder doesn't need 64 bit memory addressing, only applications do.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Ilgaz]

3% of entire PowerPC sales. Not 3% of PC market.

PowerPC is huge on server,embedded and various platforms. http://www.power.org/

It is a "architecture committee" in fact. It is not only IBM. IBM makes better publicity.

I just didn't like Steve Jobs making funny face when he said "I promised 3 ghz". Yes he promised but a RISC CPU obviously have problems with high speeds. A computer legend like Steve Jobs knows Mhz is NOTHING in this time.

It is all what performance you get from professionally coded, optimised applications.

I am in video industry, nobody sees a valid reason to buy Mac arch. after Mactel announcement.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[NutscrapeSucks]

No, Yonah is IA32 only, which is sorta the point of this discussion.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[NutscrapeSucks]

Your comment makes no sense. Anyway, the next version of Photoshop will be shipping for 64-bit Windows, but Mac will be 32-bit only.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Hal_Porter]

Hmm, I see what you mean.

Odd that, I thought the next gen core was EMT64 capable. I found some reference to it not being enabled to reduce power consumption in Yonah, not sure how true that is.

http://news.com.com/Intel+spills+beans+on+Yonah,+t he+next+notebook+chip/2100-1006_3-5729925.html

But I'd bet that if Apple wanted a 64 bit chip, they could have had it.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[metamatic]

So why should Adobe port yet again? I guess the question should be "why would Adobe port any apps in the next 3 years?"

I have 3 PowerPC Macs. I know the x86 transition is coming, so I've put a total freeze on buying any software that isn't available as an x86 fat binary.

If Adobe want me to buy a Photoshop upgrade, they'll get Photoshop running on x86. Because if they don't, I won't buy the upgrade, even if I don't have an x86 Mac yet. Because I know that sooner or later, I will have, and I want all my software to be running on it when I do.

Similarly, no Cubase upgrade for me until there's an x86 version. Ableton Live looks nice, but until it's x86 ready, no deal.

So the market for x86 OS X applications is bigger than the number of x86 OS X machines sold this year.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[NutscrapeSucks]

Intel has something called "Next Generation Microarchitecture", but that's not coming out until later in 2006 (Mermon, etc). Yonah is just a rev on the existing Pentium-M chips, the single-core versions aren't really signifcantly better than stuff currently on the market -- it's just a convenient jumping point for Apple.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[metamatic]

It'll also be interesting to see whether Sony, Microsoft and IBM step up and continue to support PowerPC improvements to GCC. Apple funded many code generation improvements.

(Anyone know if the Xbox360 dev kit uses GCC?)

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Hal_Porter]

I kind of thought Yonah was a preview of the NGMA. But the pipeline is different, so it could be closer to a Pentium M.

It's interesting that it has VT though, it makes you wonder whether they want to run OS-X together with Windows. You could imagine this being something Microsoft might even collaborate with. They could drop their Mac version of office for a start. Maybe you could run XP and Mac OS in different VT virtual machines and find some way to make it seamless, so that both could create windows on the same desktop and the clipboard and so on could be shared. Mac OS could share files over SMB for instance.

Still, I'm not sure that VT is the way to do this.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Scudsucker]

Your comment makes no sense.

Maybe to someone lacking in it. So here it is again, with more words: the GUI does not need to be able to access more than 4 gigabytes of memory. UNIX tools like top and bash do not need more than 4 gigabytes of memory. Services like ssh, smb and afp do not need access more than 4 gigabytes of memory. So what can make use of it? Applications, like Photoshop. So it doesn't matter if 99% of the OS and userland tools are not 64 bit aware, because they don't need to be. In fact, 64 bit code can be slower than 32 bit code. The only thing that matters is letting Photoshop use all 8 gigs of memory that you can stuff in a G5 tower.

Anyway, the next version of Photoshop will be shipping for 64-bit Windows, but Mac will be 32-bit only.

Probably because they figured making a version for the G5 would be a waste since Apple is moving to Intel. So just substitute Photoshop in my examples for some other application like Apeture or Final Cut Pro.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[NutscrapeSucks]

Well, that's nice, but currently it is not possible to write a Mac GUI applicaiton that addresses 64-bits. Mac Photoshop supports a max of 4GB. And your original comment made no sense because there's no fundemental difference between Finder and Photoshop .. they are both "applications".

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[laffer1]

No and what i've read about rosetta so far it doesn't do g4 or g5 instructions so we can't run modern games either. Classic support (os9 and lower) is dead as well.

Re:Trying to make themselves feel better

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony and IBM clearly have continued to contribute to GCC for Power. Cell is based on Power and the GCC compiler (and a whole tool chain) for Cell is available from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell
(also note that URL -- /power/cell -- gives away IBM's view on the matter)

Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[MattWhitworth]

I hope they're being sarcastic :) Last year they lost their biggest customer Apple, so it takes a fair bit of marketing spin to make it the best ever year! Whenever the G6 comes out, with low power consumption (if it does of course), that'll be a great year for the Power architecture.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[damiam]

Apple was/is a relatively minor customer. The business from next-gen consoles (all of which use POWER chips) is/will be at least an order of magnitude larger than Apple.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[1000StonedMonkeys]

Well, in terms of volume the XBox 360, PS3, and Revolution are going to get the Power architecture in a heck of a lot more homes than Apple ever could have.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[bhima]

There is a reason Motorola and IBM both are not so interested in Apple's business and it is that the embedded business DWARFS the "Personal Computing" business. My company uses more Motorola microcontrollers than Apple... so does every car company and just is to name a few.

A pity really... I'd love to see a dual MPC8641D (dual core G4) in the retail marketplace and more of the PPC970MP as well. They are both great processors that few have used to their full potential.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[2nd Post!]

Yes, but volume and margin aren't the same. That's like being excited at being the CPU supplier for iPods; 6m a quarter!

Of course it's nothing to laugh at, but it's a totally different market than the desktop CPU.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[2nd Post!]

Eventually, yes. Now, no.

Apple shipped over 600k G5 desktops last quarter; Microsoft shipped only 400k XBox 360s this Christmas. Apple probably also shipped another 600k G5 desktops in the same period Microsoft shipped their consoles.

So right now Apple ships more high margin units than Microsoft does. Maybe by next march that will shift when Sony unleashes the PS3, but if it's only Microsoft vs Apple, Apple is still the bigger customer!

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I would expect that Apple probably pays more per chip than the console makers.

Still, of the three consoles you mentioned, only one is out in 2005, at a trickle rate, not much of a win for Power or PPC this year.

Apple isn't that far behind. Apple sold something like 5 million Macs in 2005.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[sco08y]

Apple shipped over 600k G5 desktops last quarter; Microsoft shipped only 400k XBox 360s this Christmas. Apple probably also shipped another 600k G5 desktops in the same period Microsoft shipped their consoles.

There's another issue. Desktop systems use a whole range of chips, including last year's model and the latest and greatest. Next year MS will be using the same chip they did this year.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[Anonymous Coward]

The CPU supplier for iPods does over 400m a quarter. http://www.arm.com/ir/financialnews/10757.html

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[Arker]

Last year they lost their biggest customer Apple

Umm, no, Apple was never anywhere near their biggest customer. Apple was only notable for building PCs with power chips, but the vast majority of power chips never went into PCs. Apple was a rather small customer, and one that was constantly demanding special treatment.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[kesuki]

nintendo is using ppc chips now though. gamecube is the cheapest console, and has a large library of games, nintendo shipped 10 million+ gamecubes since they were launched, that's not more g4's and g5-s than apple has ordered over the same time frame, but it's not far off from what apple did either. from one console maker. Who is at number 3. launch sales suck because the price is so high who wants to pay $450 for a console with 3 buggy games? people who absolutely have to have the newest latest or just have a wad of cash to blow.

Sony has shipped 100 million ps2's since they 'launched' 4-5 years ago, and i dunno how many xbox have shipped, but they're expecting to have shipped 3.6 million 360's by christmas 2006. yeah, with ALL three console makers using ppc based chips in their next gen consoles (and one using one in it's previous gen console) there are going to be a lot more volume than apple ever did for them.

apple was making the kind of (hardware QA) decisions that put them on a a par with other 'retail' branded vendors like dell.. so going to intel parts, while still using the main draw 'Mac OSX' made sense.

If apple has better quality solutions with intel i wouldn't be surprized to see competitors like dell considering if they can afford to buy OSes from 'microsoft' apple has a lot lower volume than dell and can still afford to write their own OS ;) what's to stop dell from buying say, red hat, and putting red hat linux on certain product lines? microsoft? not with the courts still watching all their deal making...

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[NutscrapeSucks]

What do you or I know about margin? Apple's desktop CPUs require the latest tech and foundry improvements as well as continual R&D. The margin on 'old tech' embedded chips may well be much higher margin than 970.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[renoX]

Sure but without spending on the latest tech, you'll get behind Intel and that's something IBM cannot afford..
The R&D for fabs must still be done for IBM's own POWER and joint venture with AMD but there is a client less to recoup the cost.
I always find it funny that IBM's say that they don't care about Apple because it was a low volume client, I bet that they don't sell that many high-end POWER CPU too, compared to the number of PPC micro-controllers sold, yet investements for the high-end tech is important: that's the next generation low end..
Plus as the grand-parend said, volume != margin.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[Anonymous Coward]

so is it safe to call the power line of processors "toy cpus"

*ducks*

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[Halfbaked Plan]

Sure but without spending on the latest tech, you'll get behind Intel and that's something IBM cannot afford..

It's something IBM could afford, but are not interested in. It's just a pissing match between Intel and AMD over irrelevant specsmanship. IBM is in the business of producing Buisiness Machines.

Motorola dropped out of the PowerPC consortium awhile back specificially because they wanted out of the pissing match.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[Methuseus]

Do you honestly think that IBM charges MS, Sony, or Nintendo that much less per CPU than they do Apple? If they do I can only see it because of volume sales.

Just because a console is (arguably) sold at a loss doesn't mean the individual component manufacturers are selling the parts for a loss. Usually quite the opposite.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple was/is a relatively minor customer.

That's quite true, especially if one considers that IBM supplies only the G5 CPU to Apple. Freescale supplies the CPUs for all Apple laptops, the eMac, and the Mac Mini. IBM has never delivered a low-power laptop CPU to Apple. Ever.

Apple delivers about 4 million computers per year. I'd guess that less than half of them contain IBM supplied CPUs.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[2nd Post!]

Yes I do, actually.

If Microsoft sells a $600 console for $400, and that $600 console is compared to a $1300 computer, it would make sense that the components chosen for that console are cheaper than that for the computer, right? Especially if Apple's historic 20%-ish margin applies, so that the $1300 computer really costs Apple $1000, then taking out the $200 or so for the LCD to make the systems comparable, Apple's parts must cost Apple more than Microsoft's parts cost Microsoft.

This is even bigger when you compare to a PowerMac, which costs something like $2k!

So if Apple can be expected to move 2 million G5s next year, and Microsoft is expecting to move 3 million XBoxes, I really do think Apple is still the more profitable business to IBM.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[mnmn]

Hmm I dont know about that. Both the xbox and PS3 have CPUs more powerful than the average desktops. Both are multicore 64-bit. Both are over 3GHz. Now thats alot quite frankly.

Sure Power is used elsewhere, but we're not talking about those since theyre like change. Recently consoles have exceeded the average desktop in cpu power, and since the CPUs for both consoles are 'specialized' or highly customized, I imagine the margins are higher than if they were run of the mill G5. For Apple machines the chips weren't designed just for Apple, they were found elsewhere. For consoles the chips are custom-fit and probably the most expensive component of the console.

At least the Cell must cost some real money. Consoles are sold for little margin or sometimes at a loss to create the market for the games. AT $400, theyre close to lower end desktops (Dell), which take all their profit from the hardware being sold. So theyre not all that different anymore.

Cant wait to get the Cell on an ATX board.

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[Scudsucker]

Umm, no, Apple was never anywhere near their biggest customer.

They were for that type of PowerPC processor.

Apple was only notable for building PCs with power chips, but the vast majority of power chips never went into PCs.

Yep, mostly embeded chips, and now for consoles. But those chips have to be cheap, something Apple has never been. Selling your product in high quantities is a good way to make money, but so is charging higher margins.

Apple was a rather small customer

Whatever your business is, I'd like to work there, if you can casually give up 4 million units a year.

one that was constantly demanding special treatment.

IBM promised Apple they would deliver 3 ghz G5 chips within a year, two years ago. If expecting people keep their promises means you expect "special treatment", then every person on this planet "expects special treatment".

Re:Subtle sense of sarcasm?

[Arker]

They were for that type of PowerPC processor.

Well, yeah, because the PPC processors they used were custom models made just for them.

Whatever your business is, I'd like to work there, if you can casually give up 4 million units a year.

IBM is huge, of course. But regardless of size, a customer that costs more than they pay is something any business will happily give up. I'm NOT privy to the details, but the rumours were that IBM was barely making money on Apple, and actually makes higher margins (after R&D costs, at least) on their embedded market.

800lb. gorillas building processors

[jaxu]

800lb. gorillas building processors? I thought, the chimpanses were the researchers?

Re:800lb. gorillas building processors

[game kid]

I thought, the chimpanses were the researchers?

Nah, they're busy writing Shakespeare, remember? ;)

Re:800lb. gorillas building processors

[The Lerneaen Hydra]

But since there are infinetly many of them, then infinetly many of them will only appear to be writing shakespear, while they are in fact researching.

Re:800lb. gorillas building processors

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nah, they're busy writing Shakespeare, remember? ;)"

No; that's monkeys.
<flamebait>
The chimp is running the US of A.
</flamebait>

Am I alone in thinking that...

[ubiquitin]

the only interesting thing about the Power architecture is that it runs PowerLinux?

Re:Am I alone in thinking that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:Am I alone in thinking that...

[bhima]

yes

Re:Am I alone in thinking that...

[iggymanz]

nah, some of us think it's interesting because it runs a few flavors of BSD, AIX, OS/400, Mac OSX, QNX, and BOS/X

Re:Am I alone in thinking that...

[LWATCDR]

Yes I suggest you look past the PowerPC line. The Power5 is a very cool CPU.

Losing customers

[Ramble]

While IBM did lose Apple, they're also making PowerPC chips for the Xbox360, Cell for the PS3, and another chip for Revolution. That is one hell of a good position to be in.

Re:Losing customers

[2nd Post!]

It's a strategic position, but it's trading known present income/market for future unknown income/market.

It's quite possible that the XBox 360 and the Revolution totally tank, which isn't good for IBM. It's not unlikely, given past performance, that only one of the three consoles really takes off; then couple that with the low margin, high volume characteristics that describe the console market, vs the low volume but high margin characteristics that describe the Apple market.

Re:Losing customers

[Anonymous Coward]

PLEASE. Think of the price of a game console, and the price of the Apple Powermac.

You can sell many PS3, that's not going to make as many $$$ as Apple did. The PS3 will even be cheaper than the actual price of the xbox 360.

Apple isn't a Cheapy company, selling cheap hardware. They sell it at the biggest price they can do.

Re:Losing customers

[KarmaMB84]

just because Apple is selling their stuff at inflated prices, it doesn't mean that they're passing it on to IBM...

Re:Losing customers

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM Microelectronics has been losing money for many years. The console deals does not give them the money they really need in the long run. There are no margins whatsoever on the console CPUs.

Re:Losing customers

[petermgreen]

It's quite possible that the XBox 360 and the Revolution totally tank
indeed but it seems to me power owns the next generation console market whoever wins.

Re:Losing customers

[2nd Post!]

Of course, but at current price points it seems that IBM should get 2 to 3 times more revenue from Apple, comparing the cost of a PowerMac or iMac to an XBox or Revolution, so that even if Microsoft and Nintendo combined move twice as many units as Apple, they still aren't as profitable; of course Sony is going to skew the market heavily, as the current reigning champion, but if I am not mistaken they are taking to fabbing the Cell processor themselves, as well, robbing IBM of the revenue they will be getting from Microsoft, Apple, and Nintendo.

Re:Losing customers

[Pollardito]

of those, only the XBOX360 was 2005. it seems like what you're saying is that 2006 is a good year for Power, whereas the article is saying that 2005 was.

Re:Losing customers

[topham]

IBM knows they can produce the same chip for the XBox360 today, as they will next year.

There is no immediate push for the chip to be faster, smaller, lower power consumption, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there will be incremental improvements in the processors used over the lifetime of the XBox 360 production schedule. But it won't be an absolute necessity.

It should be far easier for IBM to plan the production of the chips to coincide with demand for the XBox360.

Re:Losing customers

[Scudsucker]

As if IBM doesn't have any control over the prices Apple pays. Yes, IBM is going to sell a lot of console chips, but those chips have to be cheap. And if there is one thing Apple has never been, it's cheap. The profit margins on big, expensive dual core chips with lots of cache would be much higher than on the Cell. See Intel and their "Extreme Edition" processors.

Last time I checked...

[Anonymous Coward]

"small and nimble" was management speak for "underachieving".

Printers

[Flying pig]

A lot of printers use Power architecture (there's one near me, with a 600MHz processor, right now, and the speed with which it renders a full color A4 PDF is quite impressive.) Power is very good wherever there isn't a load of dead weight to keep supporting, which is why it seems to do so well in the embedded or non-"PC" market. As for Apple's decision - well, I fortunately don't have any shares in Apple. I'm not convinced that they will be able to make the world's best X86 portables, and that is the task they seem to have set themselves. I have an attic full of old Macs, and I now have no reason at all to acquire another one.

Re:Printers

[Anonymous Coward]

well, I fortunately don't have any shares in Apple.

You do realize that Apple's stock has been outperforming nearly every other big tech company this year sans Google, including IBM.

Also, four words for you: MacOS + Windows + Linux = Tri-Boot

If that isn't potential incentive, I don't know what is.

Re:Printers

[Anonymous Coward]

> If that isn't potential incentive, I don't know what is.

Incentive for do-nothing hobbiest/dabblers, maybe. The market as a whole is too busy getting stuff done to give a shit about dualbooting. Mac customers run Windows virtualized ontop of OSX.

Re:Printers

[toddestan]

If that isn't potential incentive, I don't know what is.

It could also be a disaster if Mac users find themselves spending a lot of time in Windows. If a lot of Apple customers start dual booting, what incentive is there for companies to port their Windows software over to OSX-86? And if a lot of Mac users find themselves in Windows more, then why pay the Apple tax?

Re:Printers

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a printer with a Power processor, too. Or...the Power processor is actually part of the RS/6000 workstation inside the printer...
B/W only, but at 162 pages per minute...12", that is...

iSuppli

[Anonymous Coward]

last year IBM was way down at number 21 on the iSuppli list

I'd expect them to be embarrased to appear on something with such a ridiculous name at all. What the hell went wrong with this industry?

Yes, 2005 was the best year - when Power went ...

[xdesk]

...on the same path as Alpha, PA-Risc and a few other architectures nobody still remembers :)

My, my, my...

[Anonymous Coward]

"IBM may regain the coveted #18 spot on iSuppli's list this year!"

My, my, my, but aren't we smarmy. And the year just a day old too.

See, good move apple!

[nurb432]

Mr Jobs.. you are an idiot.

Re:See, good move apple!

[2nd Post!]

Right now Apple has the choice of supporting any of three different architectures:
Motorola/Freescale G4
IBM G5
Intel x86

They can choose the best CPU for their needs.

What's so idiotic about that?

Re:See, good move apple!

[SpinJaunt]

This is about POWER not PowerPC. There is a difference.

Re:See, good move apple!

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have a choice. They're forced to support all three.

Re:See, good move apple!

[nurb432]

They are close cousins. In the big picture, no, there is no difference.

Re:See, good move apple!

[2nd Post!]

They aren't forced to support Intel; they chose Intel for the x86 and will choose to drop Motorola and IBM eventually (possibly).

Nor were they forced to support IBM; they chose IBM for the G5 and dropped IBM for the G3.

The only CPU they are 'forced' to support is Motorola, because they don't have a replacement for the G4, until Intel.

Apple has a choice; they decided, two years ago, to go with IBM instead of Intel or AMD, though that choice existed too.

Today Apple decided to support x86, instead of AMD or IBM, and that's just another choice.

Re:See, good move apple!

[Halfbaked Plan]

Be fair. The fact that Jobs isn't a programmer or techie, just someone who exploits programmers and techies to do his bidding, doesn't make him an idiot. It makes him a user of people, but not an idiot. He's more of a 'design guy' type. You know, the guy who sits in a meeting room adding features and bullshit that somebody else has to implement.

Us tech folks generally revile that sort of person.

The world is too complex for this rating system

[Anonymous Coward]

The reality of chip design and manufacturing is far too complex for this rating system to mean anything useful. IBM has cross licensing pacts with just about everybody these days, viz. AMD, VIA, Intel, Sony, et al..

Xbox 360 and PS3 are a step down

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether or not XB360 and PS3 are Power is irrelevant... Apple was a HUGE loss to these guys whether they know it or not. Power had a chance in the desktop and server space with Apple on board, and now it doesn't have a remote chance of general use except in academia. What company would seriously buy Power for servers now?

Sure, their volume will be higher, but the volume is still high for the 68000. The XB360 processor and Cell are not competitive in the general processing market, they're stripped down in-order processors designed for gaming. Problem with chips like those is they can't crank up margins. IBM can't charge an extra $500 for an extra meg of L2 cache or hyperthreading, like Intel still can with their "Extreme Editions". Any of those gaming chips fabbed by IBM are going to be selling for rock bottom prices. Plus, IBM doesn't have the sole ownership of either chip. Microsoft co-owns the XB360 design, and Toshiba and Sony have rights to the Cell. Either one can turn around and fab those chips somewhere else.

Power is a nice chip, but while going from a general desktop processor space to a specialized game console space may be a step up in the rankings, it isn't in general acceptance. What they make up for in volume, they'll lose in competitiveness and innovation. The Cell and XB360 chips won't and can't need a rev for another 5 years. IBM dropped the ball on Power. Freescale might be its only remaining chance.

Re:Xbox 360 and PS3 are a step down

[Anonymous Coward]

What company would seriously buy Apple for servers in the first place?

Re:Xbox 360 and PS3 are a step down

[Anonymous Coward]

> What company would seriously buy Apple for servers in the first place?

I see your point, but many advertising companies or design firms have more Macs than PCs. Seems like a no brainer for them to buy XServes.

Re:Xbox 360 and PS3 are a step down

[natd]

Plenty.

OS X Server has alot going for it, but you're hardly going to want to run a production server on a PowerBook.

How about we turn it aronud - why wouldn't you use an Apple server?

Re:Xbox 360 and PS3 are a step down

[Anonymous Coward]

"Power had a chance in the desktop and server space with Apple on board, and now it doesn't have a remote chance of general use except in academia. What company would seriously buy Power for servers now?"

Ehm.. do you have any idea what you are talking about? The amount of power servers sold has been steadily growing ever since power4 came out and the unix operating system that runs in it (AIX) just keeps getting better (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/15/unix_gcg_ study/). Since itanic was such a failure, pa-risc is pretty much gone and the sparc chip is underpowered - Power is by far the best option for a 64 bit system - especially in the server world where software licenses are bought on a per-core basis.

Per-core software licensing means you want your core to be as powerful as possible - which is why sun's strategy of selling servers with a ridiculous amount of underpowered cores is so idiotic. The power chips are both powerful and can handle loads which would fry most intel and amd chips - and that is why the ibm power server market share is steadily growing

Re:Xbox 360 and PS3 are a step down

[Anonymous Coward]

How about we turn it aronud - why wouldn't you use an Apple server?

Umm ... because it sucks compared with most of the other options?

1. Apple support sucks compared to the rest of the field. Heck, even MS manages to beat them at patching speed every now and then. (note that 'OSX (Server or not) is secure' disqualifies one automatically due to never having administrated something resembling even remotely a production server)
2. Which is the *other* company that thinks a mandatory GUI on a server is a good idea?
3. Virtualisation? Partitioning? meh, who needs that, we've got lickable buttons here!
4. MAC? what MAC? (that would be Mandatory Access Control for you Apple guys)
5. Apple's history in the server space is kind of ... how to put it, 'thin.' 'Because we trust Steve Jobs' is not a valid purchase reason where real servers and real 24x7x365.24... is concerned.

And so on.

Let's put it this way - the only reason you'd want an XServe is if you're an Apple-only shop (or very close to it). Pretty much like the *other* vendor in the cases when one uses the Server version to hopefully (hah!) integrate painlessly with the dominant desktop.

Re:Xbox 360 and PS3 are a step down

[Scudsucker]

1. Apple support sucks compared to the rest of the field.

They have enterprise support. I haven't used it, so I can't say how good it is. Can you?

Heck, even MS manages to beat them at patching speed every now and then.

When. Apple has a long track record of fixing vunerabilities in a matter of days, whereas Microsoft has a habit of sitting on flaws for months or even years.

2. Which is the *other* company that thinks a mandatory GUI on a server is a good idea?

So turn it off.

3. Virtualisation? Partitioning? meh, who needs that, we've got lickable buttons here!

Never tried virtualizing with OS X. But, given that Macs have used partitioning for what, two decades now, maybe you're not trying. At all.

5. Apple's history in the server space is kind of ... how to put it, 'thin.'

No, it's not. AIX.

Because we trust Steve Jobs' is not a valid purchase reason

Neither are baseless complaints from a feckless fanboy.

Let's put it this way - the only reason you'd want an XServe is if you're an Apple-only shop

Or if you want Apple's track record on stability. Or if you wanted reasonably powerful, low power chips. Or if you wanted their compeditve RAID options.

And so on.

Re:Xbox 360 and PS3 are a step down

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has a long track record of fixing vunerabilities in a matter of days

Really ... you must be looking at other patches than I am then. What I see is Apple sitting on patches for OSS components that have been out for at least weeks if not months from other vendors.

But, given that Macs have used partitioning for what, two decades now

Behold the fanboy clue no 1. Perhaps you might want to ask yourself if 'partitioning' could possibly have had a different meaning when applied to servers? I would refer you to Solaris' 'zones' as an example of an OS way of doing resource partitioning (as opposed to hdd partitioning) but I suspect you're not the technical type that would be interested in such details. Still, next time try to engage your brain before stuffing feet in your mouth.

5. Apple's history in the server space is kind of ... how to put it, 'thin.'

No, it's not. AIX.

tadadadadada-BOOOOOOM!!!! (I guess the previous warning was a little to late. Talk about putting *both* your feet in your mouth ...)

I'd have called this 'fanboy evidence no 2', but it's actually closer to 'jaw-hits-the-floor-with-a-thud' type of proof. Apple. AIX. Quick, somebody call Darl, they sued IBM for the wrong reasons!

Kid, shocking as this may come to you, playing with your Apple toys in the mud does not make you an expert in real-world servers. Go sit with the 'I installed Linux a couple of times so I'm a badass sysadmin' crowd and wipe your nose.

Quotes

[fm6]

Marketrons are never sarcastic or ironic. They were simply ignoring the Apple debacle. Which is why this headline should have "Good Year" in quotes.

IBM 2-0 for 2005

[Nom du Keyboard]

IBM loses whiny Apple who is well known for beating up their chip suppliers every way from Sunday, while gaining XBox 360 and PS3, which will not only ship far more units than Apple over the next five years, but have already paid for the next generation of Power architecture.

Apple, in the meantime gets Intel, where they're not even close to being the big I's largest customer, and have only their prestige to trade for favors (compared to Dell, whose Intel loyalty is beyond understanding these days).

Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005

[femtoguy]

I think you underestimate the value of Apple for Intel. Intel spent billions of dollars developing the Itanium family of processors, which have been a complete failure in the market. They have also spent more millions developing MMX/SSE/SSE2/SSE3 and so on, and these have been barely used. Intel keeps developing new chip technologies in order to distance themselves from AMD and VIA, but Microsoft refuses to put them into use in their operating systems. Why not? Microsoft may be a software company, but they hate doing the work of developing software. They remind me of a piano student who says he loves playing piano, but hates practicing. Microsoft never bothered to do a decent job of porting Windows or Office to the Itanium, of to fully integrate MMX/SSE into their operating system because it would have been too much work. Compare that to Apple which went from 680x0 to PowerPC, and from PowerPC32 to PowerPC64 as soon as they had working silicon.

I believe that Intel has made big concessions to Apple because it knows that Apple will use every technology that they can to make MacOSX work well on Intel chips, and that that will shame Microsoft into finally getting off of its %@#^ and get developing. Well, and it makes good revenge for Microsoft's ignoring Itanium but releasing for AMD64.

Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005

[Ilgaz]

Now the Mac zealots converted to Intel fanatics in 1 day (after announcement) will bite you very bad. :)

Well, I am a G5 1600 user converting to dual G5 2700 soon myself.

BTW, to check PowerPC stuff , check http://www.power.org/ , better news there. Better than this PR thing. From Power committee. (official)

(posting with karma bonus for obvious reasons)

Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent is an idiot... SSE instructions are used in a lot of software like DVD players, video games, math crunchers etc. Just cuz u don't use it doesn't mean no one else does.

Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005

[Scudsucker]

IBM loses whiny Apple

So when you make a promise to someone and then break it, and they complain, are they whining? IBM promised Apple they'd have 3 ghz chips within a year...two years ago. Apple still hasn't gotten them, nor have they gotten a mobile G5. Or when Motorola promised Apple 500 mhz chips and couldn't deliver, so Apple had to knock the whole PowerMac line down by 50 mhz.

while gaining XBox 360 and PS3, which will not only ship far more units than Apple over the next five years

Lots of people harp on this but they miss the point. All the parts for a console have to be cheap, and something Apple has never been is "cheap". The profit margin on an expensive dual core G5 would be higher than on multiple console PPC's. And while yes IBM is going to be making a good pile of cash from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, making chips for a static platform isn't going to further longterm development. The Cells produced two years from now will be the same as the ones used today, but what are desktop chips going to look like?

18 for perfect balance of power.

[FeriteCore]

Or more likly, because it is three times 6.

Six is a perfect numer (equal to the sum of its factors).
Three is the first odd prime, since two is even -- making it a truly odd prime being the only even prime.

But more importantly a three way balance of power has proved relativly stable in history. The Roman Triumvarates. The three branches of US government. The trinity seems stable. Probably lots of other examples I'm too lazy to find.

Good engineering is mainly (for the purposes of this discussion) finding the good balances when tradeoffs are required.

IBM values good engineering (I'll bet they'll back me up on that one).

IBM is part of the IBM-Motorola-Apple triumvarate that brought us the power PC (based on POWER) archetecture.

So 18 combigns a stable balance of power with perfection.

I would assume 18 would be a good number.

Re:18 for perfect balance of power.

[kfg]

Yes, but 6 isn't magic.

On the other hand 3 and 7 are, so I'm at a loss as to why they're unhappy about being 21st.

KFG

Re:18 for perfect balance of power.

[Xaositecte]

Baatezu, Tanar'Ri, Yugoloths..

Oh, wait, wrong rule of threes

Nope, Cars

[NutscrapeSucks]

I believe the largest market for PowerPC is automotive -- there's quite a few cars that ship with three or four PPC CPUs in them.

Re:Nope, Cars

[Anonymous Coward]

3 or 4? Try 52. BMW 5 and 7 series currently contain 52 freescale chips. See http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1404

Re:Nope, Cars

[Kiryat Malachi]

Nowhere near all of those 52 are Power-based processors, though. Most of those are specialized chips handling things like transmission controller algorithms, power supply, and data stream coprocessors.

3 or 4 Power chips is about right; I forget if the 5/7 series use an integrated PCM or not - expect one doing telematics, one doing chassis control, and one doing ECM. If its seperate TCM/ECU, stick 2 Power chips in there.

Obligitory IBM SLam # 3

[foolish_to_be_here]

Please spare me having to mod through an article where IBM toots it's own horn. IBM Miroelectronics post these "internal articles" at least once a week. One major reason was to pump up it's work force into thinking that management was really looking out for it's business and it's employees intrest. They are the "Walmart" of the semonconductor world! The loss of Apple as a customer was admittedly more of a symbolic loss than a financial loss. You really want to drop some big customer names in the chip market try Kodak, Alcatel and Qualcomm. IBM has a habbit of side-lining customer projects, but usually becuase it it imersed in it annual reorganization shuffel (a real full time project).

Small?

[6Yankee]

in the microelectronics space, it is actually very small

I thought everything in the microelectronics space was very small...

Re:Small?

[Halfbaked Plan]

Have you seen the die size on some of those big silicon monsters??

Re:Small?

[jibjibjib]

No, that would be nanoelectronics. Microelectronics is just moderately small.

Mod "Ignorant" - 4.5 million macs in 2005 alone

[SuperKendall]

The consoles will have some catchup to do - in 2005 Apple sold about 4.5 million macintosh computers.

That's just 2005, in 2004 it was something like 3-4 million - and they've been selling PPC computers for a lot longer than two years.

Between the PS3 and the 360 there probably will be ten million chips going out next year, I'm just saying Apples contribution is not as insignificant as you make it sound. And even though Macs are moving to Intel next year they'll still be selling Quad G5's for some time.

Good link.

[NutscrapeSucks]

"Next year, 50 percent of car (models) in the world will have PowerPCs," Mayer said.

So much the silly idea of Apple being the largest PPC customer.

frankly, with all of the growth opportunities that we have in front of us, it was not a good use of our resources to try to defend half a percent market share, which is how much desktop we have against Intel."

It was a pretty good year for Sparc too...

[hutchike]

How come IBM gets free Slashdot publicity? And where exactly is the news in this article? Surely the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell chip more newsworthy than the Power architecture?

Personally I thought it was a particularly good year for Sun's Sparc processors - see this Forrester research article for example. Here are some recent Sun SPECjbb performance benchmarks against IBM's Power P5.

But since Sun isn't a leading Linux advocate, I don't expect them to get Slashdot front page coverage like IBM seems to...

800 lb Gorilla?

[bergeron76]

Man, I remember back when it was just a 500lb Gorilla!

Times certainly have changed.

Re:800 lb Gorilla?

[corngrower]

It's been eating too much fast food.

Biggie Size me.

Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005 - Microsoft ain't stupid

[Nom du Keyboard]

Microsoft...to fully integrate MMX/SSE into their operating system because it would have been too much work.

Let's see. It would have been work. And it would have broken compatibility with every older computer in user's hands each time Microsoft did this. End of operating systems upgrades for all those users. I'll bet Microsoft considers this a problem, even if you don't. And keeping track of all the different Windows versions for each new Intel update wouldn't be easy either.

Besides, just how useful is SSE2/SSE3 in an operating system? Even in MSOffice, at best you might make the case for Excel, but it would be a weak one. When Intel wants their new instructions used they release compilers to developers that incorporate them. Why is that Microsoft's fault?

Next time I suggest you look at things from Microsoft's perspective before condemning this business decisions. Might make more sense.

You left out the Revolution. Wich is also a powerp

[SmallFurryCreature]

The revolution from Nintendo will also have an IBM powerpc inside according to fairly solid rumors. So for the next console war IBM is pretty much the sure winner.

Why do you answer your own question?

[SmallFurryCreature]

IBM is the cool company nowadays. They are hip and happening. Yes pigs are flying when International Business Machines has more fun articles then a home consumer company like MS.

Sun? Geez, the only thing they get in the news for is for licking MS ass. Hardly /. material perhaps you should find a MS fanboy website.

This is linux land greenhorn and IBM is our current pet of the week. I think it is very telling that it is IBM who is involved in all the next gen game consoles and not the likes of Intel or AMD. Both of whom should be really worried IF the cell lives up to Sony's dream and does turn the PS3 into the living room PC.

What I would like to know is how powerfull those IBM chips really are. How can a 360 have such power at such a low price (a fraction of what a similar Intel/AMD chip would cost).

Oh my gosh!

[Arterion]

Let me add my name to the list of "omg no apple is not teh biggest cust. lawl ps3 n xbx60 are haha" posters, so I can be cool, too.

I don't know if this was such a good year

[richman555]

Don't get me wrong, IBM seems to have found a better market for themeselves in video game consoles, but it hasn't been too sucessful in the pc realm with the 'power pc' processors. I think the console market is just a better fit for them as they don't seem to have the same production capabilities and release schedules as Intel or AMD. I guess Id call it semi successful, get out of one market, and into a new one, and time will tell if this was truely a success.

Wringing the last drop out of old tech

[ndg123]

Seems to me that Sun have done a good job of re-using some sparc technology to force lots of threads through a system, but this won't see them much further into the future.
Or to put it another way: why isn't the world and his wife buying into SPARC like they are with POWER and other architectures ? Ah, perhaps they are all wrong or blind.

easier numbers.

[ndg123]

We're metric - its so much easier. That's a 363.2kg monkey you've got there.

Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005 - Microsoft ain't stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

And it would have broken compatibility with every older computer in user's hands each time Microsoft did this. End of operating systems upgrades for all those users.

You are an idiot. Just adding support for a technology does not mean it is required. USB, multiple processors, graphics acceleration...all things that are SUPPORTED by operating systems but not REQUIRED.

Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005 - Microsoft ain't stupid

[femtoguy]

You're missing my point. Apple did it. Twice. They managed to move their entire user base from 680x0 to PowerPC with a combination of emulation and fat binaries. Then they added AltaVec with the G4 computers, while still maintaining compatability with earlier G3 computers. Finally, they have moved to the 64 bit G5. Wait that's three times. (Four if you include the introduction of CoreImage that depends on advances in Video cards).

My exact point is that Apple has done what Intel wants done, without breaking compatability. Say what you want about Apple, but they will be tremendously useful for Intel.

IBM doesn't produce a lot of what they design

[csoto]

Rather, they license it. I'm certain that if you factor in revenue from semiconductor licensing, IBM is up near the top. This began in earnest about when they designed and licensed many of the 1mbit DRAM a jillion years ago (ok late-80s). They figured there was no money in the dog-eat-dog world of manufacturing, so they just design stuff, license the hell out of it, then collect royalties. Not a bad idea.

Re:IBM 2-0 for 2005 - Microsoft ain't stupid

[Nom du Keyboard]

Apple did it. Twice. They managed to move their entire user base from 680x0 to PowerPC with a combination of emulation and fat binaries. Then they added AltaVec with the G4 computers, while still maintaining compatibility with earlier G3 computers. Finally, they have moved to the 64 bit G5. Wait that's three times. (Four if you include the introduction of CoreImage that depends on advances in Video cards).

You missed one. They also moved from 68008 24-bit addressing to 68020/30/40 clean 32-bit addressing, which required a lot of cleanup since the top byte of the 32-bit address word had been used for other functions by some developers.

But you give too much credit to Apple. It's the Apple developers who keep migrating their code to ever newer Apple platforms. Apple may create a future development environment, compiler, and migration tools that will work with most programs with some effort, but much of the burden falls on the developers who now have to support a completely new program version. At what point to they throw up their hands and say "Enough of this!" for a platform with only 15% market-share? Their only advantage is the ability to sell the same software for the new platform when a user purchases new hardware or OS. Then the end-user gets screwed by not being able to run his perfectly good purchased software on the new platform with any increased performance after you subtract the cost of emulation. I guess that's the reward to the developers -- rather like the RIAA having you repurchase your music with every new format change.

Come to think of it, Apple users have been screwed a lot along the way. Amazing that Apple keeps doing it and yet retains so much loyalty. Now the promise of cheap Intel hardware is completely negated by Apple insisting that their OS will only be allowed to run on their hardware still. Jobs could sell ice to Eskimos.

Blink....Blink.... Get your Heads out of the Sand

[riscguru]

Little boys with their little Intel/AMD toys..... Do any of you have any idea about Power architecture is and where its going. IBM is generations ahead of the competition in performance. Sun's pathetic showing this week with their latest offering was laughable. It's expensive and yes it runs AIX but Power5 systems ROCK.

Their are two classes of Unix platforms: Enterprise Class and Desktop class. If it ain't Power or SPARC, it ain't on my list for customers (and those I have in the Fortune 10, won't even seriously consider Linux for big apps, their relegated to utility functions.) PC geeks for too long shout til their lungs are bloody and yet, they'll never get the "play they want" in the big leagues.

If you haven't seriously checked into Power5 and AIX (and yes something deeper than running SMIT.) If you can't run a system without menu's and GUI's, then limp your lame butt back to Windows.

There is a whole other world out there.

Re: Rule of threes.

[XnR'rn]

Planscape rawks, this made my day. :D