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What is the Intel Switch Costing Apple?
SenseOfHumor writes "A Business Week article says that it costs Apple $898 for an Intel iMac before loading it with software and packaging. From the article: 'But for Apple, the switch to Intel chips is less about saving money in the short term, and more about hitching its wagon to Intel's longer-term product road maps, particularly in the area of notebooks. IBM's chips are power-hungry and generate a lot of heat, and therefore not suitable to notebook computers.'"
If they don't know, why ask us? Everyone knows slashdot crowd knows nothing. But we'll always comment. So I'll say it's costing them at least a hundred pigs a month in tribute. Maybe some biscuits (you Yanks call them cookies).
In the mid 1990s, Apple showed the famous picture of a Pentium grilling a hot dog and claimed Intel's chips were power hungry and ran hot compared to the nice cool sleek PowerPC. That was one of the supporting reasons that Apple ostensibly switched, according to all the engineering presentations at WWDC. So when did this change?
The main reason of course was that RISC processors were on a much faster performance incline than the fuddy duddy old CISC processors like the x86 line. The graph comparing the two in the period 1995-2005 showed CISC acceleration continuing to slow and RISC acceleration continuing with, I believe, a skyrocket attached to the top of the graph. We all know how that turned out.
ibm relationship, $1,000,000,000
porting operating system $30,000,000
finding yourself on the platform you have been bagging out for the last three decades? Priceless!!
-Sj53
Wasn't this the publicly stated reason for switching when Steve announced the move last summer? They said IBM makes great server chips, but the future of personal computing is laptops, something Intel is putting more R&D into than IBM, and thus provides a better solution.
why is this news?
It should be easier to switch to AMD or other X86 platforms in the future, opening up more negotiation possibilities.
The article didn't mention overhead. You can bet that there is a cost associated with the overall organization, plus the physical plant, R&D, etc. that most likely brings the costs way up from where the article puts them!
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
It is odd to me that Apple leverages so much into specific processors rather than specific processes. It would seem to me that Apple really has a great interface -- and that is the product they want to sell. With their OS kernel being based on some *nix variety (BSD? I can't remember) I would guess that the processor itself is unimportant if their software and APIs are hardware transparent.
Here's the great thing about the market and letting it lead you (instead of the other way around) when you are an OS or software provider -- you can focus on writing good clean code, and follow up that code with the hardware that offers your code the absolute best package given the infinite choices.
Power management, heat creation, MIPS, FLOPS, BOPS, GHZ, THZ, MB, MBps, whatever the hardware does best, there's always a ratio to price. That's the great thing about the free market, though, competititors will always want to beat the other.
What is stopping Apple or another software company from offering the best darn interface for programmers and users to work with, and then find the processor to wrap the interface around? Is this Apple goal with Intel, possibly? Shake up IBM (and show smaller processor companies that they, too, have a chance) and create an operating system that must now work with 2 (or 10?) completely different processor subsystems? Is this Apple showing that they can get away from hardware entirely, and focus just on software?
The pentium-m processors are incredibly power efficient and perform very well. Sure there desktops are absolutely horrible from the Northwood to the Prescott core (and perhaps some new cores since i've stopped paying attention to what intel releases on the desktop now) but that doesn't exclude the fact that they do infact have one of the best, if not THE best solution for notebooks.
Hmmm... Pie...
This wasn't a knee-jerk reaction, Appple was unable to build a fast laptop, and IBM couldn't offer them anything competitive with what was happening on the x86 side of things. I've got the latest Powerbook G4, which is the best, fastest laptop Apple could offer until now, and it's just too far behind the curve. Would you rather they remained there, while IBM worked on other things and didn't care?
I'm a Mac user, and I've been keeping an ear to the ground, but I haven't heard any mention of the new MacBooks having improved battery life over the 'old' PowerBooks, so I am guessing the reverse is true (or much would be made of the better battery life). Of course, there are lots of other reasons for the move than just lower power consumption, and even on that front, there's no way of knowing right now if the new MacBooks will have lower unit-of-power/unit-of-computational-power costs. With the possibility that the new chips provide better-than-G5 performance in a laptop, well, there's certainly something going right with this switch, even if Intel doesn't have the best reputation for efficient, cool chips.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
"IBM's chips are power-hungry and generate a lot of heat..."
In a related news item, IBM chips are now running for elected office worldwide.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
If Apple's going to be commodity CPU on the server front, then there's no incentive on the hardware front to pay for Apple.
Uh, why do you say that? You're saying that the only important hardware consideration for a server is what brand of CPU it uses. All Intel servers are otherwise equally desirable, and all AMD servers are otherwise equally desirable.
That's obviously not the case.
And really, no one in the past five years bought an Apple because of the PowerPC processor. They bought one despite it, because the hardware was great otherwise, and because the OS was great.
This space intentionally left blank.
Apple Computer : Proudly going out of business for 30 years
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is why I'm confused about the push to "All Intel, All the Time!" Apple, with Mac OS X's Unix and NeXT roots, should embrace a multi-platform strategy to get the most bang for its buck wherever it can. The PowerPC-derived Cell will rock for workstation and servers, and the Meron will kick major butt for home user kit. Best tool for the job, and just compile for the famous NeXT "Fat Binary." Back in the day, the same NeXT executable would run on 68040, Sparc, PA-RISC and Pentiums. Why not now? Why tie yourself to x86 alone, when there are better alternatives to fit the niche you're targeting?
Too much politics, and not enough engineering.
~ SoupIsGood Food
The Core Duo is a great laptop chip, have you seen the benchmarks and reviews lately? IBM had no real roadmap for a laptop version of the G5. Shortly after the switch was announced, IBM made some vague statement saying that they had a low power G5 design, and they could have made it if Apple wanted it. I seriously doubt that their chip would have come near the performance of the Core Duo, or that it would be ready today.
The CPU benchmark numbers tell the tale. The Core Duo is 4-5x faster than the 1.67GHz G4 in the PowerBook, but only 2x faster than the single-core 1.8GHz G5 in the old iMac. So you can assume that the Core Duo is at least twice as fast core-for-core as the G4, but about the same core-for-core as the G5.
The G5 was a decent chip, IBM just didn't have a mobile chip to sell Apple and was too distracted by Xbox 2 and PS3 to care.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
"What is stopping Apple or another software company from offering the best darn interface for programmers and users to work with, and then find the processor to wrap the interface around?"
I think the problem is that Apple is a software company that makes its living as a hardware company. And to make money from hardware, they have to be perceived as different from their competition. If you follow what you're saying to it's logical end, you come up with a solution that says "Apple should not sell hardware, they should write software that runs anywhere".
I'm sure Jobs experience with NeXT tells him that selling an operating system, his experience watching Gasse sell BeOS tells him he doesn't want to compete with Microsoft on that basis. So he's chosen a middle ground that appears to be increasingly difficult to maintain differentiation on the hardware side.
The next few years will be interesting for Apple, that's for sure.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I don't know what it costs Apple, but I sure know the change to Intel will cost me about 2000 .
Why would the general populace ever want to buy a Mac?
Almost every person that I've induced to switch or helped to switch were prompted to do so to escape the Windows virus nightmare.
The G5 is a "brainiac" design, a big complex chip with a long highly parallelized pipeline. This is a relatively new approach for RISC chips, which have typically concentrated on a small core, short pipeline, and simple design with a lot of "close" cache.
:)
Intel's Pentium chips have all been "brainiac"s to some extent, but none so much as the P4... which they've backed away from. The new chips in the new Macs are less like the G5 or P4 and, while not exactly as clean and tight as the G4, are closer to it than they are to the real brainiacs.
But there's nothing wrong with the G4 core as a core. Taking the G4 core and giving it a faster bus, the way Intel's taken the PII/PIII core and given it a faster bus in Yonah, would have made a lot more sense. And Freescale's got one like that in the pipeline. They could have called it the "G5 Mobile".
Luxury auto brands like Acura, Infinity, Lexus, Cadillac, and Lincoln should all be folded, because they are super dumb. I mean, who's going to pay the "Cadillac Tax" just to get a glorified Chevrolet? Corporations aren't going to switch; our fleet here doesn't even SEND requests for bids to any of these brands--they go to Chevy/GMC or Ford, because they provide us with machines that get the job done. And sure, all the Cadillac fanbois will tell you that the user interface is so much nicer than a Chevy (even if underneath the gloss they are indistinguishable), but at the end of the day who really cares? Price/performance is all we look at.
In conclusion, Apple will definitely go out of business, just like luxury car brands, because nobody in their right mind will pay extra for something nice.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Well, to be fair, at the time Intel was pushing the heat pump P4 against the PPC. Now intel dropped back to the P3, modified it, called it the pentium-m, now the duo-core. They had to do a 180 and rethink their roadmap.
I think the greatest thing will be virtualized intel cpu's running multiple copies of OSX for servers. Or even Windows and OSX. Apple xserves will look very attractive now when can do anything, have apple quality hardware, and have true migration to any OS or software that you need. Brilliant move.
On thing that is not called out in this article (at least not well) is that Apple is saving R&D costs and R&D time by not having to develop its own chipset like is has done in the past. Instead Apple is utilizing Intel developed and manufactured chipsets. Intel has the economy of large volumes for their chipsets, Apple did not.
When Apple was making its own chipsets they could only afford to revamp them every couple of years because of the low volumes in relation the development cost and manufacturing tooling and ramp. Now Apple can refresh their chipset and product offering as often as Intel does without excess cost.
The component costs per unit may be higher but saving in both time and money other places will help make up for that.
Very true. Volume-wise, the game console market beats Apple's meager volume hands down. No wonder then that IBM chose to devote its Microelectronics division's resources to making the PowerPC derivatives for the Nintendo Revolution, XBox 360 and PS/3. Not to mention embedded versions you find in consumer items and under the hood of cars. The Cell processor alone will find its way in many consumer electronics appliances, not just the PS3.
So the choice was between making a laptop chipset for Apple (volume: hundreds of thousands a year) and making a high-volume chipset for several consumer markets (volume: millions a year). Guess where IBM prefered to invest. Can't blame them for telling Apple to go fly a kite.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Just within the last 12 months has Intel started releasing chips that focus on lower heat and power.
False. Your statement isn't giving Intel enough credit and is not supported by the numbers. Since the original Banias Pentium M's were released back in March of 2003, we've seen Intel's mobile products have very good performance per watt ratios and overall power usage numbers. In fact, the overall power usage was the lowest in the original Pentium M's out of the entire line. You statement would be correct if you it said this: "...within the last 34 months (i.e. ~3 years) has Intel started releasing chips that focus on lower heat and power."
Data pulled from Intel Product Specifications at http://www.intel.com/
Banias (the normal voltage models-i.e. 1.7 GHz, 1.6 GHz, 1.4 GHz, etc):
Thermal Design Power: 24.5 W (Full speed) / 6 W (Speedstep)
Sleep Power: 1.7 W
Deep Sleep Power: 1.1 W
Deeper Sleep Power: 0.55 W
Dothan (any model #):
Thermal Design Power: 21 W (Full speed) / 7.5 W (Speedstep)
Sleep Power: 3.2 W
Deep Sleep Power: 2.5 W
Deeper Sleep Power: 0.8 W
Core Duo (any standard power model #):
Thermal Design Power: 31 W (Full speed) / 13.1 W (Speedstep)
Sleep Power: 4.7 W
Deep Sleep Power: 3.4 W
Deeper Sleep Power: 2.2 W
The Pentium M chips were a step towards lower power, but the Intel Core Duo that ships in the imac is the first chip that is really ahead of AMD for mobile systems.
Again, False. The first part of that sentence has already been proven false with the numbers I've posted. The second part of your AMD fanboy'ism is also incorrect. AMD offers two TDP ranges in their "Lancaster" single core Turion64 mobile processors: 25 watts and 35watts. As you can see with the data presented above, both of these TDP's are larger than Intel's single core Pentium M offerings which have been available since March 2003. AMD's Turion didn't even arrive on the scene until 2005 which gives Intel a solid two year headstart. What's even more interesting is that more than half of AMD's entire single core Turion line consumes more power than Intel's dual core Core Duo mobile processors. AMD has yet to release their dual core Turion processors. So your statement that the Intel Core Duo is the "first chip that is really ahead of AMD for mobile systems" is complete wrong. Intel has had AMD beat since March of 2003 in the mobile market and still continues to beat it. Please check your facts before posting lies or put an AMD fanboy disclaimer on your posts.
Note: I didn't both including Intel's various Low Voltage and Ultra Low Voltage Pentium M, Core Solo and Core Duo processors that have an even lower TDP than the standard voltage processor numbers I posted above. Adding this information would only serve to futher prove that your statements are wrong.
Freescale's e600 dualcore G4 has been "in the pipeline" for the past 2 years with no sign of pouring out. On paper it should compare quite favorably to Yonah ... if it ever ships. Yonah has a slight advantage in that department.
The argument that "performance has reached adequate levels" rears its head every few years or so in the industry. The fact is though, everything goes in cycles. Sometimes the software development outpaces the currently available/reasonably priced hardware, and then things shift back the other direction for a little while. But the one thing that's certain is; development isn't going to come to a halt on the software side. If you develop faster, cheaper systems - eventually, software developers will figure out ways to make use of everything that's available to them. They have to, because in most cases, that's the only thing that keeps food on their tables. New versions are expected practically yearly for most popular applications, and once you've offered all the basics - what else is there to do for the next upgrade? You have to add "cool new things" that catch people's interest. Whether that means toolbars that automatically fade into the background when they're not used for a little while or voice recognition integrated into the app, built-in video tutorials or adding all new capabilities to perform tasks the app never tried to tackle at all before - you're going to need ever faster CPUs to become "commdity items" to go along with your work.
Apple has a deep hole to keep trying to dig themselves back out of largely because the perceived "value for the dollar" of buying a Mac became VERY poor in the mid to late 90's. Sleek new systems running OS X have started turning things back around - but Apple's move to Intel means they've got to be MORE concerned with performance increases than ever before! They can't lean on an excuse (however accurate or inaccurate is really was) of "You can't compare Mhz to Mhz between Intel or AMD chips and our PPC chips!" Now, the CPUs powering their hardware are the SAME ones powering everyone else's hardware. So if your new Mac offers a 2.1Ghz CPU and a new Dell has a 3.0Ghz of the same product type - it's clear. The Dell is a lot more powerful. And the general public understands that.
And when it comes to software, Apple has no peer. Apple consistently creates great applications that normal people want to use. Apple's competition, on the other hand, has demonstrated -- repeatedly -- that they cannot do the same.
So that's the reason for the switch to Intel. Apple has moved what used to be a two-front war onto a single battlefield where it has the ability to outmaneuver all opponents.
Smart move. Expect Apple to capture some market share.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
Apple has been trying to kill the classic Mac OS and replace it with NextStep, I mean OpenStep, errr, Rhapsody... since 1997. The original plan was for all new development to be in what's now Cocoa and was at the time called Yellow Box, and legacy apps would run in a simpler version of Classic that basically ran a whole OS 7 or 8 session in a single window, called Blue Box.
The ISVs, paricularly Adobe, plotzed. There was a major row with threats of abandoning the platform, and Apple backed off, improved Classic, came up with Carbon as a transition API, and brought out OS 9 and eventually OS X.
Steve Jobs reportedly had wanted to go with Intel as soon as possible. He thought Apple had made a mistake switching to the Power PC while he was away at NeXT. OpenStep ran on Intel, of course, and Apple had versions of Rhapsody that ran on Intel boxes, even on generic clones. They had a fat binary mechanism in OpenStep that supported by the end as many as five different processor architectures.
And that's why intel. Not because IBM screwed up, but because it was in their long term roadmap and had been for years.
But obviously... that wouldn't fly if they couldn't even cram classic Mac OS off in Blue Box.
But they kept their Intel code base alive, and every other year, about, they tested the waters by trying to stop offering a Mac that could boot up into OS 9.
Every time there was a user revolt.
Until late 2004. The last G4 that could boot to OS 9 disappeared from the Apple store, without any fanfare. And, apparently, there just weren't that many people dependent on OS 9 to make enough noise to notice.
A little over 6 months later, they announced the Intel switch.
Rosetta will run all legacy Power PC applications... well, all legacy Carbon and Cocoa applications that run on OS X. They're not running Classic under Rosetta. Classic is dead.
And nobody's bitching about that, either. Which means they guessed right, and Apple can finally drive a stake into the heart of Classic Mac OS and leave it behind for good.
And that's why they did it now. Because they could.
So if your new Mac offers a 2.1Ghz CPU and a new Dell has a 3.0Ghz of the same product type - it's clear. The Dell is a lot more powerful. And the general public understands that.
Even that's not quite true. The power of a cpu is what you can do with it, not its clock-speed. A faster chip of the exact same line is not more powerful if the software is less powerful.
For example, for day-to-day tasks, a slower Mac is more powerful than a faster PC. For games, a slower PC is much more powerful than a faster Mac.
When it comes to iLife style apps, a 1.25GHz G4 Mac is far more powerful than a PC (Windows or Linux) of any speed.
Or, put another way, what's more powerful: running Windows Movie Maker on a 3 GHz cpu, or iMovie on a 2 GHz cpu?