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Apple Switched Chips Too Soon?
Ctrl+Alt+De1337 writes "C|Net is reporting that IBM has announced a method of altering silicon that will allow its next generation of Power chips to run at speeds between 4 and 5 gigahertz, and consume less power as well. From the article: 'Instead of just making transistors smaller, IBM came up with a process to alter how silicon behaves by placing a layer of insulator underneath a layer of silicon less than 500 atoms thick ... The higher speed of the Power6 will be achieved with existing chip manufacturing technology that etches transistors only 65 nanometers wide, several hundred times smaller than a human blood cell.' These won't be out until 2007, but it still raises the question: did Apple jump the gun by switching to Intel?"
Apple switched because Intel offers a better deal right now. When IBM offers a better deal, Apple can pretty well switch to (note: switch to, not switch back) this new chip.
Apple would be silly sticking to an inferior product for 2 more years.
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Who says Apple won't switch chips again? The current relationship isn't all roses, despite all we have heard. Apple won't put those retarded "Intel inside" stickers on their products.
And, it would seem, the Intel core duo is full of serious bugs which Intel doesn't really care about.
Owned. Wait till the Cell comes out
Doesn't mean Apple can't rethink and switch back. From the looks of it, right now they are supporting both platforms. Since they have the ability to go back and forth (with performance loss of course) I can see strategic changes as they see fit.
it still begs the question
No it doesn't!
Presumably any such improvement will be licensable (or just plain doable -- maybe they already have it in the labs) by Intel as well.
with all the bad PR they've been getting related to Apple's switch, this seems more likely something a desperate PR department would do.
I mean one and a half years is a lot when it comes to CPU research & development, why tell everyone what you're doing?
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Because you'd still be running on 1.42 GHz G4's in Powerbooks due to the heat issues around a mobile G5 processor...
It doesn't beg the question at all. That phrase means something else entirely.
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No, it was the best thing to do, instead of having one company as a supplier they now got at least 2 , AMD and Intel. I think we get better and cheaper Apple boxes out of the x86 move.
Its not all about performance either, its the ability to ship large quantities of chips also, if you want to grab a larger market share.
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To paraphrase Monty Python's "I'm not dead yet".
.. they can "switch back".
"They've not switched yet"
Considering they haven't switched, and never even announced a complete switch
I thought the idea of Universal Binaries was that the packages were compiled for multiple architectures, selectable at runtime? The same binaries are now running on Macintels and G5s, so Apple should be able to continue running apps on either architecture...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
If IBM was really worried about keeping Apple, they would have certainly let them know this was coming down the pipe. Besides, Apple can always switch back if they really wanted to.....
IBM was facing a pretty big loss of business, and would have let Apple know before the official announcement. Apple knew, and decided to switch anyway.
SOI is nothing new. It's been around for decades for radiation hardened ICs used in space and military electornics. The only news is that it is now being considered for large scale commercial production. IBM has been hinting at a transition to SOI for years and rest assured that Apple planners were well informed of this when they made the decision to switch.
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Don't count your chickens before they hatch. IBM's chip is theoretical and not in production, Intel's is here now. The better question is, why didn't Apple switch to Intel chips earlier?
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I thought the major impetus for switching to Intel was the supply and timely delivery of the PowerPC (or lack thereof). IBM was not willing to meet Apple's requirements. There is no guarantee they would meet them with this chip, either.
So no, Apple did not move too soon.
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No way did Apple jump the gun. Both Apple and their users wanted more speed, especially in their mobile products, and Intel delivered on that today - not in mid-2007. I see in no way how a chip process that wont be available until 2007 is compared against a decision made in 2005. I think anyone in the right mind can see why Apple made the switch in the first place.
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This is one subtle, yet important distinction. Apple has added the intel processor to their lineup, but they haven't abandoned the PPC architecture. Although Steve et al. have implied a complete switch through the various pr statements made on the subject, Apple could just as easily stick with both chips indefinitely. Or they could retreat back to PPC if intel suddenly died and IBM came out with a blockbuster. That is of course if Intel doesn't lift this technology from IBM for their own chips in the future. Which they will.
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Or can we get a CNet icon so I can filter anything related to their lunatic articles out?
IBM made the exact same claims with the SOI (silicon on insulator) technology they introduced before. Guess what though, their chips stagnated for a couple years and Apple was left looking like an idiot for claiming that 3GHz chips are going to be out "next summer."
Intel managed to be just as fast as IBM, if not faster, for the whole time frame. What would lead you to believe that there would be anything different this time?
Hahahahahaha, what?
I might be wrong, but Silicon On Insulator is a technology that already is being used in some chips. ... it would be great for everybody.
I would love to see IBM stick to this 6ghz claims...
If so
Apple can always "switch-back"..
Or simply never "leave"...I guess from past experiences we can say that Mr. Jobs never burns any bridges...
How is this chip different?
And what would it cost?
With Intel, Apple gets a low-cost chip that they can use NOW, in their laptops and desktops. They get low-power consumption today, and low-heat today. Not in 2009, when the POWER6 chip has been tamed... Or hell, maybe never, AGAIN.
So yes, this seems like a good chip. But it doesn't really affect the reasons that Apple changed. It doesn't say it's a good chip for laptops, and they would still need to change the architecture of their systems. AND they'd have to stick with a company that was creating lower yields.
Plus, this writeup makes it sound like IBM didn't tell Apple that they were about to make POWER6 chips. I'm sure they knew, and I'm sure they realized the advantages and disadvantages.
The Power6 chip will compete against offerings from IBM rivals such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Sun Microsystems...But the process also tends to make chips run hotter
So these are server chips. The area of Apple's lineup that was suffering the worst was their laptop line. These breakthroughs from IBM don't address that at all.
If not, then Apple made the right choice in moving to Intel. Besides, they can still use both processor architectures, so maybe they could put these in new Xserve's.
So, the writer suggests we should rather be using 1.66GHz G4 Powerbooks with 166MHz Buses until end of 2007 or so??? What are you smoking? Apple had to switch, the creative pros were yelling for more power and have been unsatisfied for years!
The switch ensures one thing: in the coming years the standard beige boxes will definitely not have more power than apples hardware. Apple won't have more power too. But that's no drama. Apple will be more creative, better looking and as powerful as the windows-world.
That should be enough to be a fairly profitable company!
Of course it was reported all over that the reason for Apple switching to Intel processors was because of speed and power consumption -- this is what makes consumer happier ("Hey, an extra GHz!".
But another reason was that Apple was VERY unhappy for a while with the rate IBM produced PPC processors and their rather poor chip yields. Introducing more exotic SOI process would not help keeping these yields up, for sure!
We will see if IBM will be able to fulfill demand for PS3 Cell processors -- I wish them best, but...
Paul B.
Why would it matter that IBM is coming out with a cool new chip design? There are other reasons for making the switch than pure processing power. Intel is a strong player in the market, and has been for a very long time. They're a safe bet. Plus, moving to Apple's move to x86 has got to have the makers of various bits of software, drivers, etc. breathing a sigh of relief. It's one less thing to have to worry about. I find a 'switch back' unlikely, and I don't see much chance of IBM stealing market with the new chips. At best, Apple will use the new chips in XServe servers, and even that might not materialize...they would likely be pressured by both IBM and Intel to use exclusively one type of processor, not to mention the OS X developers.
Unpleasantries.
No, Apple did not switch too soon.
Remember, we (the loyal Apple customers) have been waiting for a significant increase in computing power within the portable market.
IBM made promises to Apple but were unable to deliver on those promises. Remember the statements about 3 GHz within a year? Apple couldn't sit by while IBM broke promise after promise on upcoming product lines.
If Apple had waited any longer, they would have lost momentum in the portables market, and in turn the desktop computer market, eventually pulling down the servers and everything else with it.
On the other hand, Apple could always keep their servers on the IBM product line. I doubt they would, but it's always a possibility. Apple might just not be done with the PPC for good.
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I agree Apple didn't switch too soon. They had been promised 3 ghz some time ago. Still at dual 2.7 or quad 2.5. How many processors does Apple have to put in next year while they wait for the fabled Power 6? 8 cores? 2 power supplies to power them? Sweet. I think by the time the fabled Power 6 is shipping, Intel will be competitive with it. As for the constant complaints about not using AMD, AMD does some fabrication at IBM's Fishkill plant. Why switch to X86 to be limited once again by what IBM is willing to grace you with?
Maybe this new development from IBM will be of wide use to lots of folks. Hope so. But there are still a lot of "shoulds" in the mix and we've still to see how it all works in practice.
Intel don't just have a chip, they have lines of different chips and especially chipsets (and especially especially low-power and mobile chips and chipsets). It's also probably easier to deal with the Hollywood DRM greedmonsters if you say you're running an Intel platform. All told it's not just one thing but a while mix of things and only Intel was in a position to offer them, starting right now and not in a year or two. Besides, where else did Apple have to go?
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If they want speed, then the answer is "maybe" - but then again, Apple could have considered AMD (please, fanboys on either side, before there's an Intel v AMD argument - just shut it).
However, if Apple is going for more than speed, and wants Intel's DRM technology, their vivo (I think that's the acronym) certification for projects that would make Hollywood happy, and other things to allow the company to cozy up with the entertainment market - then Intel was the right choice.
Personally, I'm pleased with the Intel switch. Speed is looking up, once Wine or an Intel virtual PC is up and running that lets me play Half-Life 2 at nearly full speed I'll be set with my games, and besides, IBM had how long to get a G5 into a laptop and couldn't deliver?
So while IBM's technology looks pretty damn cool, I'm not worried about Apple making the "right" or "wrong" choice. As long as my apps and terminal work on my Powerbook (oops - sorry, "Macbook Pro"), then I think I'll be all right.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
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Apple badly needs to stay on the cutting edge of the hardware game, and in my opinion they sure as heck weren't getting that from Freescale or IBM. Sticking with the big dogs (Intel or AMD) should keep them competitive in terms of performance without trying too hard.
don't think for a moment that apple didn't know what was in IBM's pipeline. there had to be lots of reasons for the switch. job's keynote mentioned the performance/wattage factor. intel chips are far more efficient. the market is heavy towards laptops and the G5 series didn't provide the necessary performance vis-a-vis power consumption. it's not just pure power, but the ability to squeeze it into a laptop that can deliver without frying your cajones or dying after an hour.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Yes, Apple switched too quickly. When IBM announced their "GHz Fairy" technology, Intel and AMD shut down their R&D labs and admitted that they have no future plans whatsoever to enhance their own chips. Yes, by switching to a company whose current products are no matching for the CPUs that IBM may or may not release next year or the year after, they have truly doomed themselves.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I work in a world where a variation of the PowerPC drives a business. From iSeries (AS/400 new name) to xSeries and eventually the pSeries. The processor and the technology behind it are simply amazing. We went from 48bit to 64bit computing in the late 90s without recompiling or any such nonsense because iSeries engineers separated the processor from the OS. The tech has always been there. We have PowerPC powered thin clients as well - fanless to boot!
Switching to the Intel platform allowed Apple to get those sitting on the fence waiting for the next greatest thing to have a reason to buy a new Apple computer. It will even garner more buyers from the previously Intel-Only world in the form of linux and windows geeks. Continuing the PowerPC line would not generate the boost in revenue Steve needed. There are only so many variations of the iPod they can crank out before someone either starts to truly compete (overseas the iPod saturation level is only near 40%) or the market moves to further integration perhaps out of Apple's area of expertise.
I know its working, almost everyone of my friends who have Macs are going to buy into the new machines. The laptops are where its going to be the biggest until the mini comes out intel flavored. After that IntelMini comes out I expect another surge once someone shows Linux and Windows running on it easily.
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Next headline:
"IBM CEO passes gas. Did Apple jump too soon?"
We don't know. We will never know what happened in the meeting with Jobs and Intel or Jobs and IBM.
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Why should they have waited for something they didn't even know about?
Besides, AMD can license the same way they did Silicon on insulator, and apple can put AMD chips in their macs with no problems at all.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...that when Apple was telling them that they were going to cease to use their PowerPC chips, IBM promptly outlaid their product roadmap and pointed this little factoid out. Reduced power consumption isn't the only benefit that Apple is gaining from the use of an Intel chip; how about economy of scale? Intel makes so many more chips due to their economy of scale that they can afford to sell them cheaper to their customers (Apple).
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One) It doesn't "beg the question". Begging the question is a logical fallacy in which you assume, implicitly or explicitly, the very thing you are trying to prove.
Two) Apple primarily switched because the laptop-suitable G4 line speeds had been stagnant forever. Freescale's 7448 is over a year late and counting. PA Semi's everything and the kitchen sink promises are still vapour-ware. And IBM couldn't provide a G5 that ran cool enough to put in a laptop.
This technology won't be out in the Power6 until 2007 if everything goes as planned, a never-safe assumption when it comes to IBM's fabs. Add more time to that for them to retool the Power6 into a desktop-suitable G6. So in return for not switching, Apple would have to leave their desktop speeds stagnant for another year, and still have no guarantee of any new chips to offer in their laptop line.
Selling 1.42 Ghz, 133 Mhz front side bus iBooks is tough enough now. They'd have had to be absolutely suicidal to stick to IBM's roadmap and the near certainty that they be trying to sell the exact some mobile processors in late 2007.
And the Cell processor is almost as pie in the sky, until there's some real information about the Cell everything is just conjecture and hope.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
It is counter to their culture to use Intel.
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This sounds an awful lot like Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI). The wikipedia article, however, says that PowerPC chips have had this for a while now, so I'm not sure how it's different. I'm sure if it is some new technology, Intel will be licensing it in no time. They don't really have any other choice.
Now I'm not exactly a chip design engineer, but doesn't "placing a layer of insulator underneath a layer of silicon" sound suspicously similar to Silicon-on-insulator, a technology that has been in production x86 chips for sometime. Also, will the G6 chips released in 2007 run at 4-5Ghz, or is the G6 expected to be improved into a 4Ghz chip - like it was promised the P4 would be? And where will Intel be mid-2007?
Maybe a more appropriate question, is "Why didn't Apple wait until 64-bit before moving to Intel?"
Apple would have had to wait in line behind Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Xbox 360, PS3 and Revolution are all going to use IBM chips. These 3 systems will use the same chips for years. So once things are running, it'll be an easy job of IBM to supply them. Apple, in the meantime, will be constantly asking for faster and better chips from IBM.
If you were IBM, would you like to deal with 3 easy customers or one tough one?
I don't think Apple jumped the gun at all. Let's see - they could stay with the current chip and in a year-and-a-half go with a new chip, or switch to a new chip now. Hmm... hard decision...not!
Seriously, this is pretty much a no-brainer at the moment. They still retain the ability to use the new chip if (or when) it comes to market, and they have more flexibity in their offerings now and in the future.
i would like to see companies like Asus, DFI & Gigabyte start building a PPC arch motherboards along side their PC motherboards...
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If Apple wants to get IBM chip manufacturing technology, they can buy Intel compatible chips from AMD. Since IBM tech often ends up in AMD fabs, Apple can get the best of both worlds without having to recompile. Now why they went with a 32bit Intel part is still a mystery to me. 32bit processors are so last millenium....
IBM developed SOI (silicon on insulator) about 10 years ago, and "strained silicon" (which it looks like this is) around 2002. Where's the "news" here?
It sounds like their chips in 2007 may be just about as fast as intels in 2007, and consume about the same power.
If Apple hadn't started to switch, 2006 would have been the year their notebook line died a horrible, slow death.
Laptops are the most in-demand format and Apple was behind the curve on delivering an update on the Powerbook G4. They made an incredibly smart move to adopt x86 without completely abondoning Gx with Universal binaries. If and when IBM actually ships (in large enough quantities) laptop worthy G6s, Apple can then "adopt" the G6 as a high-end laptop chip with very little effort (relatively speaking). I just wish that they had adopted the AMD 64-bit chips instead. Then I would have been really drooling over the new laptop.
So that's what to watch for. Any extension of the G5 line. Anything so much as a bump in processor speeds will give Intel some well-deserved heartburn.
And remember, the only Apple Intel machines currently available are 32-bit models. And it looks to stay this way until at least mid-year. For the life of me I cannot understand why Apple wants to support both 32-bit and 64-bit Intel machines in addition to 32-bit and 64-bit PPC machines. That's a huge drain on resources -- especially when you are not only not nearly the biggest player in the field, but won't be anytime soon. And all your software partners are also going to be required to support 32/64 as well. I'm surprised SJ hasn't been assassinated by his own operating system engineers by now.
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Apple did the right thing to switch - IBM told Intel and AMD how they did it now. I mean, they practically told the world. It won't be too long before Intel and AMD follow suit with their already low power consuming chips... And, if things do look like IBM is the upper hand, Apple has cross platform capabilites now, becuase of the switch. So they could offer both if they wanted to for a while, and maybe switch back. But, in the end it looks like Apple made the better long term decision. Even if you think about it the only competitor is The Chip which actually allows for mulitple different cores to be on one processor.
As much as the apologists would like to argue about the technical merrits for a switch; it wasn't a technical decision. Sure, its presented as one, but the reality is that Steve was upset at being marginalized...
It was a political decision.
But hey, you could also say that Microsoft made a foresighted decision to use PPC core chips in XBox! Woot better XBox.
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Oi vey, A) server chip not a desktop and certainly not a laptop chip. B) Universal binaries mean that if this tech ever did make it into successors to the PPC 970, then Apple could release a new tower with it without so much as a hickup. Apps are still going to be made for both PPC and x86 for years yet, and at any point for the next while Apple can certainly switch right back.
Market forces will always keep the x86 chips on top of everything else. Any process IBM develops, will be more profitable having been sold to Intel or AMD. Else IBM could make their own x86 chips and make even more money if their process technology beats AMD and Intel.
As long as way more people are buying x86 chips, x86 chips will be better in price/performance deals.
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I just assumed they switched so that they can sell os X (XI..XII..) to the masses of folks that have Intel based machines. Why wouldn't you want Dell selling your software and compliant machines?
Does CNET really think that in private meetings with IBM, this technology wasn't discussed months if not over a year ago, with Apple? I love how the press thinks that when THEY find out about it, the rest of the world is first hearing about it too...
"Stupid Apple", they chant. Except:
Maybe these Power chips will end up in Xserves or something...seems fairly unlikely though.
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Good news for the xbox360.
I'd wager that Apple knew about this long before they decided to switch.
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One of the reasons AMD caught up with intel was IIRC they liscenced IBMs Silicon-on-insulator technology to get lower heat dissipation. If IBM once again liscences this to AMD then you will have this technology running on 0x86 instruction sets. Or conversely, if it's a world beating technology IBM may be able to persuade Intel to liscence it's 0x86 instruction sets.
No matter how fast the chip is, unless it runs 0x86 it's never going to show up in home or bussiness computers. Windows is the glue that holds that enterpise together and unless windows runs on it, people wont buy it and dell wont sell it unless there's a market.
So Apples will probably by able to access this in the new 0X86 mode. but it's not going to be just a simple processor replacement since you also will need RAM and busses that can handle the suction this processors is going to have. So motherboards are going to have to be entirely redeisnged to cope.
So this is going to be good news for apple since they are an agile hardware manufacturer that is not locked into the PC motherboard paradigm and are free to create their own firmware and software to run on radical hardware variants.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In other news Microsoft has vowed to move all of their next line of operating systems to the PowerPC chip. An unnamed executive from Microsoft was quoted to say, "Stick it Steve! Go play with you mouse ears and let the big boys handle computer stuff."
An Apple spokesman resoponded by announcing the release of there latest iPod brain child. "This latest generation of iPod will be called the iBear. Basically it is a stuffed pinky teddy bear slash iPod which we think will be a hit with the 13 year old girl market."
GAH!!!!!!!!
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I rather doubt Apple would switch again. Intel will eventually develop a similar capability or will license the production of it from IBM. I rather doubt Windows laptops will be switching to PowerPC anytime soon so there's a long road ahead for laptop chips at Apple.
Apple didn't move because of the performance of Intel versus IBM, it was that IBM was very unresponsive when it came to making a laptop variant of the G5. Now that Apple's on the Intel ship, they'll benefit from working with a company that has a vested interest in developing laptop chips. Name me one manufacturer other than Apple that made PowerPC based laptops and you'll see what I mean.
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Apple made the switch at the exact perfect time.
that when Steve announced the switch to Intel he said that Apple would have IBM processors in its computer line for quite a while. What proof is there that Apple didn't know about the POWER6 or its potential? The PowerMac and XServes do not yet have Intel processors, this may be by design.
Also, keep in mind that OS X has been running on PowerPC chips as well as Intel more or less since its inception. For all intents and purposes Apple has a cross-architecture operating system AND development tools; as well as a universal binary format. What disadvantage is there to Apple playing both sides of the field and using whichever chips it likes on a product basis? Especially since this is transparent to a vast majority of the user-base.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't Power and PowerPC two completely different cpu families ? From my Risc6000 days, I would think they are.
PowerPC was a Morotola CPU, while Power was developed by someone else (maybe IBM itself ?).
If this is really the case, these news have nothing to do with Apple's future, present or past.
morcego
Apple switched because IBM couldn't meet the demand. Who cares if IBM has a 50GHz RISC core that uses 5 uW if they can't meet demand?
I think McZealots are still upset that they can no longer bash Intel.
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This looks like a good chip for the new PowerMacs.
For the initial switch to Intel though, you have to imagine that IBM would have said "Hey, hang on just a bit, we have a new processor right around the corner," unless IBM wanted to lose Apple.
Wake me when their chips manage to hit 3 gigahertz.
Who's to say Intel wont have something like this by 2007?!?!
Apple knows the Intel roadmap here.....
And I'm sure Jobs would not have switched if he didn't think it was a better deal.
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...the silicon alters you! sorry...
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Who knows what they were REALLY thinking, but it's pretty obvious that people would be hacking on their MacOSx86 to run on regular PCs. This effort was mostly non-existant when they were running exclusively on a non-intel platform. But now that they do... well you know. If they hate it enough, they'll easily switch back.
What gets me is that people modifying the OS to run on plain PCs was predictable as hell. They knew people would do it and they knew no matter what they do, they cannot stop it. So was the move to intel a stunt? If so, I'd say it was a very expensive stunt. But my guess is this:
If enough pirate copies of OSx86 are out there floating around, then people will get pretty hooked on MacOSX. And when they stop supporting x86 and return to their virtually exclusive PowerPC environment, they'll be taking a lot of intel users with them. Could that actually be part of their long-term plan?
If IBM had this new chip NOW, that would be one thing, but what Apple needs is a good CPU NOW, and Intel's going to have that in 2006.
Besides, just because Apple is transitioning to Intel doesn't mean it has to continue to transition away from PowerPC. Let fat binaries become standard. Always ship a two-way Rosetta. Does it suck that binaries now have to be twice as big? Have you looked at how big executables already are? Doubling the size is nothing.
And the correct answer was: AMD!
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Who said that Apple can't run on two chips. Yeah, might make it a little difficult for developers. But if the science app that needs good old high power PPC type chip, what keeps Apple from making something that fits the bill. OS X is already on both, all they need to do is make sure they produce at PPC computer and let the App makers make their program for the one they prefer or for both.
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And two and a half months after Job's April switch IBM announces a reasonable mobile G5, as well as dual processor chips. Did Job's know what was in IBM's pipeline?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This announcement is FAR more interesting for Linux and Solaris users who will have yet another fantastic CPU to take advantage of for high speed computing and server tasks. I especially like the concentration on overall system throughput in the annoucement, which is something that has been lacking in modern system design for far too long.
I'd love an iMonkey from Rob and Eliot's comic.
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Apple has what the users want. A safe platform that has Powerful Consumer Apps (iLife, iWork - iTunes Music Store) killer HW that can run on both chips as fast as the market can make it. And a stock price\ earnings reation that the Market loves. It has a Unix that I can put on my Mom's Desktop, or even my Grandmother's Desktop.
Love it or Hate it Apple is all about taking over. I am in the Love it crowd and I cannot believe that Apple was not in the know about the chips or the roadmap. Having the Mac OS and Universal binaries able to run on on x86 chips and PPC will allow apple to run anywhere and everywhere it needs to be. It is the best Unix possible. See I am running KDE in Mac X11 side by side with OSX (with fink - Some people use DarwinPorts) and soon the Intel Chip Based Macs will be able to run linux apps concurrently.
Apple the HW company will use both platforms, Bob Cringely told us this last year. I am not trying to hate on Windows it is off of my Radar, because it has no app that I NEED. but it seems to be beat or worthless. Soon everybody's favorite Unix will be able to run everywhere. the only thing missing from a second Apple Golden Age is an Office Suite (is it missing?) and buying Palm (which was the the old Newton Kit.)
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Middle of 2007. That's 16-20 months from now.
If they meet their schedule. If the technology pans out. If they can set up fabrication. If...
Intel have something here and now. If Apple should have waited, then what would they be putting in their laptops? Certainly the G4 is dead in the water for laptops. It was top notch about three years ago, but Intel's Centrino line rapidly caught up and overtook Apple. IBM have nothing to offer in that space that competes.
So yes - Apple jumped too soon, if IBM can do everything on time and if Apple don't mind leaving the laptop business altogether.
Why don't we check back here when IBM releases the chips, and see how it all panned out?
IBM has developed a new SILICON technique for making chips faster and take less power. This applies to the manufacturing of chips. It could easily be applied to both x86 and PowerPC to make them faster and better. Apple switched architecture because x86 is so popular it has been tweaked the best. This article has nothing to do with anything about Apple switching, it is about chip manufactuering technology.
Once upon a time it did. But since then we've had the computer revolution, the industrial revolution, and oh heck, the American revolution...
This article is about Power chips, not PowerPC chips. I suppose
if Apple wants get serious about it (and I think they should) they
could (and should) switch Xserves to Power chips from PowerPC chips
while using 80x86 chips on the other machines.
Let's go back to when IBM said/predicted 3Ghz on the G5, and use that to predict how well this new development will work out. Perhaps we should go back even further to when the G4 came out, and processor speeds had to be scaled back to match manufacturing capability. Methinks the Motorola part of that partnership is what was performing best. IBM now has the market for the consoles; how important could apple production be to them?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Given Apple's reputation for the following:
/one/ processor to /another/ - regardless of vendor - on how well they could do so /seamlessly/ for them and their customers, developers, and ultimately end-users.
/announcing/ (not releasing, pre-releasing, spec-ing, /announcing/) a new processor based upon relatively untested production technology, not having been 'shaken out' - locked in on one supplier. And development & revision & 'shaking out' of this technology is out of Apple's control.
/want/ to hitch itself & its reputation to this?
A: Quality products,
B: High-quality and responsive technical support,
C: High profit margin on systems they sell,
D: Doing massive amounts of R&D and testing on the (Computing) equipment they sell -
AND, given that Apple actually has a grasp of supply-chain necessities and economics,
I'd say the view of them being caught "unawares" or "switching away too soon" are too simplistic.
Apple has the customer loyalty and following they have amongst their rabid geeks due to such things as being able to trace a particular issue to a particular revision of a particular card - and developing a fix for it, literally on receiving less than ten reports of the incident, in a matter of days.
They based their decision to switch from
Here, we have IBM
And you're saying that Apple might actually
To whit: You picked up that 802.11g box too soon, son - dontcha know UWB is right around the corner?
It is amazing to me that the only comments I am seeing are WRT Apple and not the technology. Isn't this still supposed to be a geekful place? Anyway, I am not sure how this is news, the "article" (better described as a press release in my mind) describes strained SOI, or what AMD is using and has been using for quite some time. Why is this news?
Exactly. It is the laptop market where IBM, essentially, "just said no" to Apple. Power6 will be a very impressive chip. For the server market. But (advanced) power management as is used in laptops was not part of the design, and IBM could not justify the investment just for Apple. And Freescale (aka Motorola), the "other" PPC vendor, was not going to be able to deliver either. Now, there are certainly people for which the only thing that matters is the fastest desktop on the planet, but according to recent studies, over 50% of the systems sold are laptops, and I think for the Apple that number may be higher. So, if you want a fast Mac laptop, there were few options for Apple. No matter what the spin.
It's been said before, but... "Won't be out until 2007"?! I don't think other commentators have worked their sums out properly.
Let's say a year before Apple have anything tooled to the desktop market using these chips. That's 2008. Let's say another year before there's anything half-decent to put in a laptop - that's 2009.
Now, everyone else has said "3 years with the same processor in a laptop? Mad!".
But it's not 3 years. Considering Apple announced their move to Intel in the middle of last year, and the chips going into their laptops hadn't changed much for some time before then, it would be closer to 4 or 5 - albeit assuming the PPC G5 is never produced in a cool enough form for laptop use.
Because they didn't wait until 2010 when it would have been down to 32 nanometers or 2016 when it would have been down to 10 nanometers!
That logic is stupid...why then didn't they wait until neural computing was a reality? Imagine OS XXI on that!
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
These won't be out until 2007, but it still raises the question: did Apple jump the gun by switching to Intel?
To begin, RTFA. This technology will go into POWER 6 processor which is part of server chip family that Apple does not use anyway. It may be a year or two before IBM work it into a desktop class chip like the 970 (G5: we are up to 2009). Then, another 2 years after that to work into a notebook class chip (2011). What is Apple suppose to do between now and then. Second, then IBM has to produce in large enough quantities so Apple can compete with X86 pc which they won't do because Apple is not a big enough customer. IBM priorities have never been to produce chips to power the class of devices that Apple sells where Intel/AMD do. Third, eventually this or a similar technology will filter to the other chip makers. They do research this kind of stuff as well (read IEEE publication someday) or they will just license it.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
The software design enables them to switch when and where they need too. If one day IBM says look we have this awesome server/pro-workstation chip that has 10x the power, and intel keeps making better low power solutions, Apple could easily stay dual platform. Even tri platform if something else comes up. The multi platform binaries blur the line between the two platforms, just like sun wanted java too. "Was this the right time to go dual platform," might be a more interesting question.
=1000101
If Apple had gone with the Intel chips instead of staying with IBM's PowerPC as they did, they'd see the benefits of the new virtualization technology that Intel is debutting. Codenamed "Vanderpool", the new VT extentions to the Intel Pentium would have allowed multiple virtual instances of Mac OS X to run on a single Mac! It doesn't appear that IBM has competing technology in it's PowerPC roadmap. And when I talk about virtualization I'm not talking about your silly old VMware or Virtual PC style virtualization on top of a host OS. I'm talking about a truly partitionable CPU with each virtual machine running at native speed. The future is all about virtualization and that's where Apple missed out by staying with PowerPC. ;P
Oh wait...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I thought i read an article that apple had access to intels,IBMs,amd AMDS roadmaps and future cheaps and picked Intel? I thin kapple new about these new IBM chips.
How do we know that Apple hasn't just decided to keep their options open. Apple's engineers are already experts at pulling the most out of the PowerPC architecture. Who is to say that if/when IBM get's there act in gear and releases a product based on these claims Apple won't say "Hey, we went Universal binary for a reason. We wanted to be able to use whichever fab is producing the best tech today!" We all know about how the party line might change over night and we are transitioning back.
The fact of the matter is that Apple is ready to run native on two hardware platforms. Their developers are on their way to having their code run native on two hardware platforms. I do also seem to remember some reference to the Playstation 3 not having a finalized OS at this point and that they could easily choose linux or Mac OS X. All that said maybe Apple is making a play for, gasp, both the home and the enterprise.
I don't believe that this will actually happen, but if any company knows, Apple knows that it is suicide to have all of your eggs in one basket.
They seem a bit sketchy on details. "Squeezing the silicon to get more speed".
Reduce power consumption by a "holistic design". They design the chip "from the molecule up to the software".
Am I the only one who thinks that they taut this incredible technology, which makes further miniaturisation unnecessary, because they are loosing the race towards smaller wavelengths?
They are going to make their next big thing in 2007 on a 65nm technology?! Is intel not beyond that already now?
They sound desperate to me.
It's only for very large-scale servers, so far. PowerPC are in desktops and consumer electronics; POWER are in mainframes and minis. Being focused on desktops and consumer electronis it's no suprise that Apple went Intel.
If IBM and Freescale had ironed out their availability issues and IBM had come out with a G6 with a few CELL cores on it, it might have been better to stick with PowerPC. Going Intel was better than having no chips or outdated chips. Going Opteron might have been better if they were only interested in high-end desktops; with the emphasis on consumer electronics (and iBook, iMac, and Mac Mini), going Opteron doesn't make much sense.
Since I don't see any replies with hard science yet, guess I'll give it a go. This "method of altering silicon" appears to be just a combination of multiple already-extant technologies:
Apple did the right thing by switching to Intel. For all its crunchy 64-bit vector-processing goodness, the G5 was a niche product for IBM. Their bread and butter is now game consoles. They'll lose about a million processor sales per quarter, which they can easily make up for by concentrating on their core market: consoles. The equipment and personnel gets re-tasked to console chip development, and they don't even notice the blip on their balance sheet. They had their opportunity to provide processors at higher MHz and lower power (for laptops) and gave Apple the Heisman. Apple (rightly) walked.
I mean shit, how long could they sit there with their laptops throttled (thanks, Freescale) and the dual-proc dual-core G5s barely keeping up with the latest-and-greatest silicon coming out of Intel's fabs?
So now Apple can stop wasting time & breath fighting "the Megahertz Myth" and stop wasting resources developing their own mobos and interconnect chips and whatnot, and turn all that over to Intel. The EE's that used to work on mobos and interconnect chips can then be re-tasked to develop other cool gadgetry... like a home theater Mac mini, a Newton replacement, a killer cellphone, an iPod with 3D holographic display, teleportation device, etc.
MacTacToe - for every problem, an elegant solution
Just like the switch to PPC. At the time there were FAT Binaires that could go either way. Now that is just not the case.
Sure it's not needed anymore, because computers moved on, they were all PPC and so eventually fat binaries were dropped.
But there's no reason Apple could not, if they chose, simply carry forward indefinatley with two chip lines embedded. Once the work has already been done to take care of endian issues it's not that much work to maintain it and continue to use the libary calls that handle endian problems for you. It's still just one distribution as the binaries are packaged together, it's not like you need two packages.
As long as Apple shipps PPC computers, developers will be forced to continue to support them by the simple fact the market share they would be loosing is too huge to ignore - that's true for some time even if they go all intel for now because of the existing install base.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Don't get me wrong... IBM makes amazing processors that can do amazing things... One day, they'll decode the human genome, discover extra-terrestrial life, combat global warming, and control an entire fleet of advanced robotic assistants. While IBM processors are amazing machines, they seem to always have futuristic applications reaching far beyond desktop computing.
Intel, on the other hand, excels in making chips for today's personal computer purposes. Yeah, it's nice to know your PowerPC CPU can project the path of an asteroid passing near Earth. In a desktop machine, however, most people just want a processor that will run Excel. Really well. And extend your laptop's battery life while doing it.
Throw in the other benefits - lower cost, giving the pundits something else to target, the ability to run WINE without an emulator - and the move to Intel looks good on all fronts. Besides, Mac OS X's roots are Intel-native... OPENSTEP never ran on PowerPC hardware.
IBM has promised big before, and failed to deliver; they made Steve look like a fool, and that's never a good idea. Don't let a late entry from Big Blue make you second-guess Apple.
IBM got their act together too late?
No they didnt jump the gun. It will be at least another year until the new chips are out. Apple is doing what is best for them now. And besides, if they switch now it will be less drastic of a change to integrate the new chips. I think they are on the right track.
Since when do I need 5 gigahertz in my iPod?
The beauty of Universal Binaries is that Apple can support both PowerPC and Intel. There doesn't have to be an either/or.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Im gonna just assume that Intel gave Apple a good deal on their chip b/c they knew this new silicon would be ready soon. That way they get a big peice of the market and still get to have the cutting edge.
Actually, chips for Apple accounted for less than 2% of the capacity of just one IBM fab. IBM's tech division (which does chip fabbing) accounted for less than 3% of IBM's total revenue. That's a really small piece of IBM's global business. It's kind of like an oil company losing one gas station...not really gonna hurt them that much.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Apple has always been going to be toppled from the evolutionary peak by rejecting diversity. This isn't a Troll, but PCs are simply far more capable of dealing with environmental changes by embracing diversity.
PCs are a flawed beast. Capable of changing with the tides but constantly challenged by their lack of uniformity. Very human in that respect.
Apple are sleak perfect pieces of machinery... much like the cockroach (who's developer went broke and left millions of angry wasps with obsolete hardware)
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
Er -
A. Which April switch? The intel switch was announced in July 05 and the first Intel Macs introduced in Jan 06.
B. Where is this 'reasonable mobile G5' you speak of? There is no such thing.
Did Jobs know what was in the pipeline? Oh yes. Oh yes he did - and he saw another G5 - great big fast serverstyle chip that needs big heatsinks and fans and special cases to cool, without the slightest hope of getting it in a portable product, which makes up over 50% of Apple's sales (by computer).
This sig has been deprecated.
SOI just makes the chip run cooler.
They are talking about strained silicon, which makes the electron mobility larger in one direction. Intel, in fact, is working on that too, as are others.
Does anyone actually believe Apple was not aware of this when they made their decision? RISC is dead.
Sigh. This is not a PowerPC chip that would've been sold to Apple. They'd have to take a relatively successful server chip, staple on AltiVec, figure out how to overcommit and lose money, and then get raked over the coals by Steve Jobs. I doubt they're looking to repeat that charade.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Talk's cheap show me the silicon, and show it to me at a price I can afford.
Maybe the new chip will be out in time for Amiga OS 4.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
There's a good piece running over here that talks about all the nitty-gritty that led Apple to switch to Intel.
I think Apple's best chance was to get a version on Intel up, running, and running virtually bug free before Windows Vista shipped. Speed is a secondary concern to stability and user experience. Head to head should favor Apple. Having a temporary advantage on a different chip didn't help much before.
The thing that most people tend to forget is that with Apple switching to Intel chips, this greatly narrows the gap between OS X and Linux/Unix platforms. When you consider that the majority of Linux/Unix boxes run on i586 and x64 chips, it makes a whole lot of sense for Apple to switch to these processors. After all, OS X is more or less based on BSD and with it available for Intel processors this means that applications designed for Linux/Unix can more easily be ported to OS X without the need of recompiling it for a different chip.
Jeff Whitfield jeffwhitfield@gmail.com "I can learn to resist anything but temptation..."
... with the PowerPC architecture would not be a Macintosh cpu chip. It would have had to be a variant of the PowerPC targeted for the iPod, with low prices and huge production volumes. That, and the requisite condition that Apple be an "all-Intel" producer to obtain similar pricing as Dell receives, is what drove the switch.
That, and Intel was prepared to suck up to Steve, while IBM would have treated him as just another customer. It didn't help things that while IBM failed to deliver a 3GHz G5 to Apple, Microsoft was making all kinds of noise about the triple-core 3.2GHz G5 variant they were going to use in the Xbox.
Apple could easily be in the same place they are in today with the new Intel chips by using the Freescale dual-core e600 chips, AND retain the Altivec facility, probably with lower power usage as well. But the iPods would be stuck, with no place to go, and certainly no future like they will have using the Intel processors they will be moving into any day now, at the rock-bottom pricing they will be paying for them. And the iPods are currently more important to Apple than the Macintosh products.
Yup, Apple could switch back to IBM, but IBM would have to be a lot farther ahead of Intel's products, in performance AND pricing AND heat dissipation, before that would ever happen.
Any word on the future of the Darwin PPC Apple support? Will an open source PPC port of Darwin still be provided? The answer to that question will tell you whether or not there is any possibility of switching back or offering PPC versions of OS X at any point in the future.
Intel announced their use of strained silicon back in 2002, and I'm pretty sure all new Pentiums for at least the last couple of years have used this technology. It's essentially certain that every Intel-based Macintosh already uses strained silicon in its CPU.
As an aside, TFA only talks about "squeezing" silicon, but it's actually possible to either tighten or loosen the lattice. CMOS uses complementary pairs of NMOS and PMOS transistors, and for best results you (normally) want to strain the silicon in opposite directions for each -- though NMOS generally has slightly better characteristics to start with, so IBM may have decided to apply the strain only to the PMOS transistors (or the article may simply be incomplete, and they're really doing both, just like Intel and others do).
OTOH, AMD has been using SOI (also since they went to 90 nm). I'm reasonably certain that all their current x86 processors use this technology. Their dual core processors certainly do, though some of their low-end processors may not use it (I'm afraid I've lost track of which cores use what technology anymore).
What IBM has announced is (apparently) successfully using both of these technologies in the same chip. AFAIK, that hasn't been done in an x86 CPU before, but it's not entirely new either. One thing that should be kept in mind is that x86 CPUs are (mostly) built for the mass-market -- that means using fabrication technology that you can dependably produce in large quantities with decent yields. The IBM POWER series chips have a drastically smaller market and substantially higher price tags. A yield level that's perfectly reasonable for that market would virtually put an x86 supplier out of business. As such, both Intel and AMD are somewhat conservative in what they use in production chips, as opposed to what they can manage to do under lab conditions and such (though their volume also lets them put lots of money into R&D to really push the technology as well).
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Apple switched because IBM doesn't care about the desktop/laptop market anymore.
They'd rather concentrate on PPC variants for game consoles, which represent a much, much larger market and more business than Apple was giving them.
I think that article referred to by the parent poster is simply biased.... Claiming it caused Dell to switch to AMD processors for all of their new laptops? Ridiculous. Michael Dell has never shown himself to be the type to make large product line changes simply to "send a message" that he didn't care for something as petty as a single commercial.
Rather, he's repeatedly stated that he has little interest in doing creative, innovative new things. His business is all about mass production of established products and shaving as many costs as possible in the production and shipping process. If I had to guess, I'd think Michael Dell would grin and say "Yep - that's my business model. Boring little boxes. And I sell at least 10 of 'em for every one of those shiny little Apple boxes!"
AMD has been working hard for years to get some of the "big box" vendors on-board with their latest technologies - and frankly, it's sad that it's taken so long for their adoption. I can see absolutely no harm that would have come from offering Athlon 64 based Dell Optiplexes or Dimensions.... other than Intel not being happy about it.
Bottom line, as always. Profit. How profitable will it be for Apple to undergo another switch? Someone else is always going to come along with the next big thing in CPUs, but the trick for a company Apple's size is to partner with someone who won't leave you hanging with very outdated chips and no long-term roadmap that looks promising compared to the competitors. IBM has already illustrated a relative lack of interest in such things as consumer PCs. (Sold off the Thinkpad division to Lenovo, for example - and heavily invested in intangibles like consulting.) And certainly, Motorola wasn't even on the radar of "competitive" in the consumer PC marketplace for the last few years. So yeah, Intel was still the best gamble, IMHO, with AMD being the only reasonably close second choice.
While Apple didn't have .app bundles at the time of the 680x0 to PPC switch, NeXTStep/OpenStep did in the form of 680x0/x86 fat binaries. Pretty good trick for ~15 years ago (I feel old). =)
The present economics of high-end seminconductor manufacture (65nm fab at eur 2,5 billion a piece) and the brutal semi business cycle will lead their consulting-types to abandon manufacturing. Maybe it would turn out to become a fabless company that is a process generation behind, or with no semis at all, just I would not bet on it staying as it is.
Apple won't have to worry about quantities of chips - they're in line along withh Dell, HP, and the rest of them for the chips. Apple won't have to announce something and then have it finally show up in the store 6 months later because Moto or IBM fucked up and dropped the ball on delivering the chips.
Also: the Power6 is a server chip, and IIRC, it wouldn't naturally have an Altivec processor. Given Apple has jumped ship, I don't see IBM spending a lot of time tweaking a Power6 into a "G6" config with Apple compatible Altivec instruction sets, etc.
So, no - Apple did the right thing running to Mommy Intel.
I just wish Adobe/Macromedia would get off their ARSE and cough up the software I need sooner.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
...teams always value player performing well now over a prospect. Someone who might show all the signs of being the next Mickey Mantle could never leave the minor leagues. Apple didn't jump the gun, they traded their prospect for a proven player.
Speaking as a Mac user and a PowerPC enthusiast it pains me to say that it's doutbful that Apple will use any future PPCs in their Macintosh product lines after 2007.
In the '05 WWDC, it was announced that the transition would be complete in 2007. In Macworld Jobs stated "We are going to be transitioning our entire product line this year."
In order for this transition to happen, Apple has to put forward the idea that buying an Intel based Mac is the way to go if you want to run future software. They also have to deal with current architechture based software running on the newer processors. They have pretty much done both rather well; Rosetta runs applications moderatly well and the hype is still going in their favor. They also have to state that the old architecture is on the way out, no matter how advanced it is.
Yes, thanks to fat or universal binaries software should work cross archetcture for quite some time. Commercial apps will slowly appear that are only Intel supported... quicker if vendors decide to use a WINE/Cedega type of translation layer for Mac ports. Someone could theoretically create a reverse-Rosetta that will run Intel binaries on PPC but it's very doubtful that it would be from Apple.
The main reason for not switching away from Intel in the near future at least is that it would seriously lower public confidence in the platform; both with users and developers. The reason for using Intel and only Intel is that there is only one architecture to support thus lowering support costs and reducing the need to stock both lines.
Funny how old things surface again and again as time passes. In 2001, it was estimated that this technology would be out in 2003. IBM Press release from 2001 announced this technology already.
Linux and AIX you mean. IBM doesn't support running Sun Solaris and I am sure Sun has no plans to port to Power architecture from Sparc/x86 any time soon. Although, it would be rather fun to port OpenSolaris to the Power platform just for the hypocracy in it...
root 10956 5164 0 Oct 22 - 0:23 sendmail: rejecting connections: load average: 70 (isn't sendmail just too kind)
It's not just the 'raw' technology but the application of it. Intel has a lot invested in chip sets that are well groomed for notebooks. Power management is key here. ..
Now before the Transmeta crusoe threat, (well scare really) one could reasonably argue that Intel was lacking in motivation to make good notebook chip sets, regardless of how they got there, here we are
There just is not a big enough market for IBM to justify the expense of developing a polished G5 note book chip set. Mind you I am not saying IBM is a crappy company or anything like that. They easily have the technical resources to do it, it just is not in their business interest to spend the kind of bucks it would take.
You said ...no x86...no home or business computers...
Which leaves? Embedded, gaming consoles, etc.
Still -- what about Sparc? Power? These aren't "business computers".
Me? I would like a 4GHz Power system. Sure! Make it a 4 way, and I would be real happy (for a couple of years, anyway).
Would Apple switch? How the frig would I know.
Something I DO suspect though, is that IF Apple switches, the premium for the box will be far more than I care to spend.
And something I DO know. When released, Linux will be running on it. So, if you've got big CPU plans, and are using Linux, you are pretty much "good to go" when the hotties are released.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
The new chips are ot going to be available until 2007... that's 11-23 months away (depending on when in 2007), how fast do you think Intel Chips will be by then? Yes, today you get a P4 3.4 or so, but within 18 months, I am sure the P4 will be running at between 4 and 5 GHz.
IBM announced a lot of things. It was their inability to deliver that prompted Apple to switch.
Further, this announcement is news for IBM's server business. It isn't even relevant to Apple's business, since they don't use IBM's POWER server processors even in their server products. The PowerPC is a cousin that benefits from hand me downs.
CNet brought Apple into the story to give it some interest. Who cares otherwise? The "news" sure wouldn't have been on the Slashdot front page had it not involved Apple in the headline.
Even if IBM/Freescale had found some "hyperconducting cold fusion" technology to bolt onto the PPC to make it competitive with Intel's latest stuff (ie performance of the G5 and efficiency of the G4), it wouldn't serve Apple's needs to keep maintaining a platform that is significantly different from the commodity PC market.
By going with Intel, Apple benefits from PC world's economy of scale in the area of general purpose chipsets (wireless, integrated bus controllers), manufacturing, and key areas of software development. Apple's core competencies do not involve maintaining the only desktop version of PPC software development tools, laying out the yawn-er bit of common logic board designs, and convincing programmers to specialize in Altivec optimizations.
By picking up lower cost, common parts that fulfill the boring bits of PCs, Apple can concentrate on delivering an advanced user interface, higher level software tools, and hardware/software integration & fit and finish, things that Apple really does well, and that are not tied to low level hardware details.
Apple has delegated all that lower level stuff to Intel, which has been plugging along for the last decade providing similar services for boring PC companies like HP and Dell that have been loathe to deploy any of the new stuff Intel has introduced: from USB to EFI.
Apple makes a great darling showoff customer for Intel, while Intel delivers Apple with a high quality set of end to end solutions for desktop hardware that covers a range of consumer/workstation/server needs. The whole point of Apple going with Intel was that neither PPC partner wanted to support Apple in delivering G4/G5 products built for desktops, laptops and workgroup servers.
IBM wants to make gigantor server arrays for big customers, and Freescale wants to make imbedded processors for cars and videogames. No wizzy new technology is going to change that, because no matter what they discover, the PPC fabricators are not going to be focused on delivering it for Apple, since they've chosen business elsewhere in the spectrum.
I think it would be really genius to be able to have an OS that runs on anything
there is and it's called linux.
-- main(s){printf(s="main(s){printf(s=%c%s%c,34,s,34
this is all well and good, but how much press would Power5-6 get if Apple wasnt envolved? probably nil. IBM may have only lost 5% of there chip buying, but how much will this cost them in fan-fare / publicity? I'm betting alot, Apple ALWAYS hypes their products- IBM just lost the only company that sells PC's to "Joe Blow" with their processors, you can make the best processor in the world but if no one cares, it's not worth a dime
think DEC Alpha - look at them now.. and their processors were awesome for the time. I'm betting this time next year, the only press about IBM Power6 will be the fact that they can't supply it , but it will be availble "soon"
These won't be out until 2007, but it still raises the question: did Apple jump the gun by switching to Intel?"
Not unless you think Apple would use the POWER6 (which is designed entirely for servers) in personal computers and portables.
The whole reason for the switch was that the PowerPC had stopped being helpful to Apple's strategy. The G4 had stagnated: originally introduced in 1999, it had been updated fast enough to keep up with competitors. (Top FSB speed is a measly 167 MHz, top internal clock speed is about 1.67 GHz.) I mean, it's mostly seven year old technology. The G5 was stagnating: originally introduced in 2003 at 2 GHz, IBM promised 3 GHz by the end of the year, but here we are, almost three years later, and 2.7 GHz is the fastest available. Meanwhile, IBM managed to corner the game console market (Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Revolution are all using IBM processors), so Apple's ~1 million units a quarter (which is actually split between IBM and Freescale anyway) just doesn't represent a big deal to IBM's bottom line.
Basically, the PowerPC architecture is evolving away from personal/portable computers and into game consoles, embedded devices, and computing clusters, while the POWER architecture (very similar to the PowerPC architecture, but there are differences) remains a high-end server platform. On top of that, Intel started making real progress in improving their performance-per-watt ratios, to the point that they started edging out the ratios on the PowerPC. So, no, Apple didn't jump the gun.
One last thing, why must every article about IBM microprocessor technology get spun as an Apple article on slashdot? This article, especially because it's dealing with POWER, the older brother to the architecture Apple's moving away from rather than the actual used-by-Apple architecture, would have worked as a "Look at the cool thing IBM's working on" without the unnecessary Apple connection.
The U.S. Constitution needs to be ammended with a "separation of business and state" clause.
Apple's claim that Intel won on watts has been thoroughly discredited in the press and in the blogosphere. This just adds more fuel to that fire.
If Apple wanted to stick with PowerPC chips, it would have been able to do so. IBM has a roadmap that would meet Apple's performance and power consumption needs across devices.
My suspicion is that Apple wasn't willing to make the level of committment that IBM or Freescale needed to continue development of the CPUs Apple would use in desktop/server Macs.
Applew Knew about this, they had to. Products that are due for release in 12 months typically have a long period of research behind them. When apple floated the idea about switching to intel, IBM must have approached them and talked to them about this new technology. With this in mind, I'm guessing apple weren't convinced, and thus, this might not be such a big thing as we are elad to believe.
Move sig!
So... Only one day after an article about the top vaporware products, we have an article wondering why Apple didn't bet their whole Mac line on waiting for a chip that isn't even scheduled for at least a year? Perhaps one reason why there are so many vaporware products is that there are so many people who are a little slow to learn the lessons.
So in theory, there is a ceiling on how fast the clock cycle can run. Today we can see us pushing the clock cycle to that ceiling sometime in the future. It is far better to figure out how to use each clock cycle more efficiently, or letting the processor do more in one clock cycle.
Petium 4 is the prime example of pushing up the clock-cycle technology. Today we see Intel trying to copy AMD's approach and make the processor do more at the same speed (dual-core, change architecture, you name it).
IBM may be showing off how to make the processor runs faster, but the reality is that it is more important to develop chips in the new scale of overall performance and efficiency instead of faster clock-cycle is better mentality.
or 're-re-think different'...or just 'redif'...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
The article does nothing to speculate on whether or not this is an indication that Apple made a bad decision switching away from IBM. Apple is not even mentioned once.
The article mentions that the process makes the chips run hotter, and that engineers are trying to figure out how to counter this so that the chips don't fry themselves.
Decent article, bad post. Still sounds like Apple made the right decision.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Absolutely. Apple kept its options open by building OS X for both PPC and Intel. They just hid the Intel code in the closet. There's no reason why they can't continue to do the same. If IBM produces a worldbeater PPC chip in couple of years, I'm sure they'll be glad to sell it to Apple.
That said, the marginal value of an ever-faster CPU is decreasing, since most of our time is spent waiting on the network, not the chip.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Call it unfortunate naming, but these two processor families don't really have much in common (other than possibly some marketing material). A POWER processor is the stuff dreams are made of. See http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/. A PowerPC processor is the stuff printers are made of. And until recently; Macs.
Intel hasn't had problems meeting demand? Really?
I guess I was confused by the fact that Intel has been having lots of problems meeting demand for numerous different chips they manufacture...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Apple knows that x86 means you don't have to worry about switching again. x86 (and now x64), mean you're going to get the same support for your system that every other PC vendor in the world will have. If there comes a day when x86 is no longer supported, Apple will switch again, and so will everyone else.
But for now, we know that the main competition for the desktop will definitely take place underneath an x86/x64 instruction set. And that helps Apple in the long run, they've got a lot more things to worry about than chip suppliers who can't meet their (arguably very tiny) demand. PPC does not offer that.
Intel is shipping 65nm parts NOW. Why is it a big deal that IBM is going to do it next year? Intel already announced that they have produced 45nm parts that will be out in 2007. Also, IBM is not producing a 5+ GHz dual core processor that will fit in a laptop without melting it...Apple made the right choice. Everything with IBM is always at least next year.
Did Apple really switch? Or just add Intel to thier product line? If both IBM and Intel give Apple advantages, why not stick with whatever is the best option for each given product?
ender-iii
If you think, as the question implies, that Apple wasn't told about emergent IBM chip technologies, I'd say you're crazy.
Anyway, Apple won't grow that much with just a faster CPU. By getting Intel's support, and breaking down walls that isolate them from the Windoze world, they can more easily pull over switchers.
with their current momentum, they need to stoke the boiler, make the big bets. Their ability to roll out new technology and navigate the transition seamlessly is a huge competitive advantage.
yup... solving hard technical problems elegantly... sounds like Apple!
The revolution's Chip is being made by IBM. I wonder if they're using this technology in the revo, it woud partly explain why all the specs are not being released.
although I suppose "they won't be available until 2007" kind of puts a damper on that one
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
Who said faster chips ? where ? I don't see them
Power6 is a desktop/server chip. Laptops started outselling desktops last year. Intel is offering relatively fast, low power chips.
Ergo, the answer is no. Apple did not switch too soon.
.... seriously lower public confidence in the platform; both with users and developers.....
/. and possibly software developers, who CARES what is in the box? Certainly not the ordinary Joe User, who just wants the computer to do a job. Maybe a computer with several different kinds of chips, for different jobs could be offered at various price levels. Somone who never plays games or videos can use a much less powerful processor, which can save money, power or both. Since Apple is the only mass market computer maker who does both the hardware and the software, they could offer a bottom line single processor Intel based and a top of the line system with several of both kinds of chips, each doing what it does best. The user never sees any of this. Just a computer that runs rings around anything else on the market in certain kinds of tasks. Why should it be impossible or even very difficult to build a computer that can transparently run *any* software that has ever been written? As chips get cheaper and more powerful, there may be systems with a few dozen or more processing units of various types and the OS decides which combination of them will do the best job. It would be sort of like the boss of a work crew on a building project who decides what part of the overall project to assign to each worker, based on each worker's abilities. The system can even be robust enough, so if any of the worker processors "calls in sick", the impact on the project is minimal. As the hardware performance increases, there comes a point at which the hardware itself becomes a very small part of the whole computer SYSTEM equation. Repeat ten times: " It's the software that makes a computer do what it does!"
Other than those here on
All theory is gray
Clicked the link, typed CTRL-F apple Enter. No hits, except for some unrelated headlines.
I guess that CNet did not mention Apple after all so all people mouth-foaming about the link to Apple base their trolling on an ill-written, idiotic post.
OK so they will have a beta of the new chip in 2007. That means they will be able to produce several hundred a month by 2008. Production quantity in 2009. They won't catch your laptop on fire if you wait to buy until 2011.
Apple is looking toward the future. Right now, IBM is not the right destination for them to walk toward.
By all accounts, Apple has already been left a bit in the dust waiting probably a year longer than they should have to go to AMD.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The move away from PPC to Intel is a 2 year transition period.
Obviously this keeps the door open for either vendor, or hell with Universal Binaries probably both.
n00bs
"unless it runs 0x86 it's never going to show up in home or bussiness computers"
x86 certainly owns the desktop, including inside the enterprise, but Windows (and x86) has made very little progress in the data center.
The data center is owned by Mainframe, Power (Unix/Linux/AS400), Sparc(Solaris) and then Unix on x86.
I wish someone could explain why Apple never switched to the POWER 5. Yes, I can understand why they couldn't do it for the PowerBooks (size, heat, power), but there was no need for the G5 and iMac G5 to be based on the ageing POWER 4. Especially considering the POWER 5 virtualisation and the MacOS Mach kernel. With the continuing success of the POWER5 and IBM still producing POWER4's that out perform anything Intel can offer, Apple really have mud on their face. Now that Intel have announced that they will be ready to actually complete with AMD and IBM's current offerings in mid-2008, the future is looking bleak for both WinTel and MacTel's.
"Think Different" meant "Think our stuff is different than their stuff", "Think we are different from them". It wasn't asking the reader of the add to think differently. The pun, if you want to call it that, is that it plays off the Grammar Nazi's desire to corrrect the alredy correct sentance. That sorta makes one think.
I just can't imagine if IBM had this on the back burner that they wouldn't have informed Apple of it before they jumped ship. "Oh, yes, Mr. Jobs, I understand you taking your $Ms off to Intel. No hard feelings, mate. You just come on back if you ever wanna play with us again, OK? Oh, Steve? Steve? Darn, he hung up. Oh well, I guess he probably wasn't too interested in this new technology that will make our chips 2x faster in three year's time. ."
Maybe they hadn't invented this at that time, but I doubt it. It was probably already working in lab deep underground. Even if that were true, I'm sure at some point Intel gave Steve a call to let him know what was going on. If this morning Mr. Jobs woke up and pooped his pants because of what he read in the business section of the WSJ about IBMs new technology, I'll be very surprised.
Fuck.
Anyone who think's Apple's switch was about performance needs to develop some critical reasoning skills and quit guzzling the Kool-Aid. Power has had the goods all along and will continue to do so without Apple along for the ride; Apple simply wanted to get onboard Intel's hardware-DRM lock-in.
x86 is not some magical panacea, and in fact there are some considerable trade-offs in scalability, floating-point, and vector performance part and parcel with its integer boost.
i expect that just as apple maintained an x86 version of OSX during the powerpc years, they'll maintain a powerpc version of OSX going forward in the x86 years, if only to keep the operating system portable.
if, in the future, the powerpc architecture and it's manufacturers make a successful case for powerpc, apple is fully capable of switching back. in fact, i expect that apple will make sure its ready for any processor architecture that may become competitive with x86.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
...to other vendors who can ship a machine using both a good processor and a good cheap and free-libre OS. "Apple" isn't the only potential vendor for this proposed chip, and most anyone could beat their prices given wholesale cost per thousand units remained the same, because they wouldn't be forced to try and make money on the operating system like Apple would..I also doubt they would do it, given they have already annoyed their devs to no end over chip swappage. A LOT of people stuck with apple over the years precisely because of the chips, this switch to intel is not the universal "oh goody" that it is made out to be. A lot of folks just plain don't like intel, period.
I actually saw one--or a box for one. It had the PowerPC logo and the IBM Logo, with possibly "ThinkPad" written somewhere else. I learned later that it was not a Mac clone, but rather a laptop version of an IBM workstation that ran AIX. It would be cool to get one of those to fiddle with. Given the time frame, it must have been a G2 (603/604).
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Apple didn't move to Intel purely for speed reasons or power consumption reasons. It moved becauase of an unshakable public perception that Intel chips are faster/better. Even when the PowerPC was more competitive speed-wise in the past, the public still perceived Intel as the better processor. So, my switching to Intel, Apple no longer has an uphill fight against public perception *and* gets to benefit from Intel's marketing muscle. Apple definitely made the right move in switching to Intel when it did.
People, this is a manufacturing advancement. This is good for the entire chip industry. Intel will either license or adapt a similar method, and Intel's investment in manufacturing will match this development in short order.
Does anyone remember that article, it may not have been on slashdot, that was about Apple extending their deal with Freescale Semiconductor, the makers of the G4 processor, until 2008?
I always thought that was a rather unusual move, but universal binaries it makes a lot more sense. Not locking themselves down to one architecture is a good move for Apple.
Come on, anyone who's up on the CPU business knew the G5 was damned efficient in terms of size and power, not to mention outright speedy anyways. The switch had not much to do with technology.
Look at the recent benchmarks of the iMac's with Duo Core and G5. The old G5 single core, with old technology and old process generally keeps pace on a per/core basis with Intel's latest and greatest.
A process shrink dual-core G5 would've been a pretty good match, if not better.
...but nothing in the article said IBM could sell those miraculous CPUs at a price affordable enough for consumer computers.
Ok, so I've been quiet about this. But I've been a Mac user since day 1, and I'm seriously unhappy.
So we go Intel, and what happens? Typical Intel long list of hardware bugs. Maybe it's my memory, but I don't recall any such lists of PowerPC errors. Ever.
And what exactly is the upside? The new box doesn't do anything I'm interested in any faster than the G4 I'm working on, much less the G5 at work. And we've lost all back-compatibility. My extremely valuable old ClarisDraw, WriteNow and HomePage projects can't be opened at all on Intel because they've abandoned OS 9 compatibility. We can't run Virtual PC at all, losing all my Windows testbeds.
I don't get it. It was a stupid idea to begin with, and it looks stupider every minute. Sorry, Steve, but just because Big Blue didn't think you were the most interesing playmate on the block for a couple of months doesn't justify giving up the biggest advantage you have. What ever happened to "think different?"
Foo
Apple just needs to stay ahead of their PC competition. Now that they've pulled ahead in the OS department, they just need to find a chip that keeps them on par with the PCs in order to keep their lead. As in any match race, they only need to watch what their opponent, the PC does. If the windows world made a switch to this new technology, Apple would have to follow suit -- but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
If you want to see just how little having the fastest processor buys you, just take a look at the Alpha. Apple not being able to meaningfully update its laptop for a couple of years was, on the other hand, a real threat.
Notice that there is now only one model of the iMac G5 left on the website? Where'd the others go? The switch is a done deal, don't watch for any remaining G4/G5 production. Foo
Last year when Steve Jobs announced on stage that Apple was switching to Intel, he cited the future roadmap as the reason.
Steve new darn well what IBM had coming, and he knew what Intel had coming... and I'm sure he knew what AMD had coming.
One of the big reasons for the switch is Intel's superior low-power/high-performance chips. Apple's new slogan "Performance Per Watt" is the proof of that.
At MWSF 2006 Steve said they were disappointed with IBM because they've been trying to shoehorn a G5 into the Powerbook for well over a year (or was it two?)... What makes you think that the new IBM chips would offer Apple anything?
Sure they might have a centi-processor 5Ghz high-end desktop system, but that doesn't help their bottom line.
Apple's planning is much much more strategic than that.... I mean come on, they've had OS X in production for Intel for over 5 years. Steve's been planning a mass-exodus for a while now.
two days after my new Intel iMac arrived at my condo.
I remember reading that Steve Jobs saw the roadmaps of both Intel and IBM, Apple must have known about this development. Apple knows more than us about this.
---
If Apple's market share is - depending on when the question is asked and of whom - somewhere between 2.4 and 2.8% - then in response to the question of "These won't be out until 2007, but it still raises the question: did Apple jump the gun by switching to Intel?" isn't the real answer/question do more than 97% of computer users actually care?
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
So could some one explain the difference between this kind of modification and Silicon On Insulator (SOI)?
BTW, they mentioned 65nm, but one of my friends in this business told me they were making 9nm feature in their research facility about one month ago. And some Japanese company have been "touting" 20+nm scale transistor since last spring. So what's new here?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Sometimes you just need something new and fresh. I for one support the move from Doritos to Ruffles. Had they stayed, we could have seen Salsa flavor come back, but I bet Jobs knows about a new flavor that Ruffles is working on that will give us an explosion of taste sensations!
PowerPC, X86, Spac, alpha, Ipod, Toaster, you get the idea
These "Power" line of chips are only used in large Unix based servers such as the P Series. These are not desktop chips or laptop chips at all so I think we should all ignore this article.
http://osx.portraitofakite.com/index.htm Just run OSX on your CPU and forget about the PPC vs. Intel stuff. =)
Fighting over religion is like seeing whose imaginary friend is best.
I can't believe it's going to be running even hotter... Reminds me of the days of the Cyrix.
HD Trailers
There's no reason this technology wouldn't make it into the x86 sphere eventually. That's not a year or two out, but probably more like three to five.
But Apple has some experience with integrating their software with new chips, and if we assume their new x86 boxes aren't completely bug-ridden, they could probably have OSX running on this new platform within a year or two. That's what, a year or two in development? So as early as three years out, Apple could be introducing a new platform featuring this chip.
Oh c***, I've turned into Cringely.
You heard it here first....
The Dell XPS 600 Renegade has a dual-core intel 955 @ 4.26 Ghz:m
http://www.dell.com/html/us/products/ces/index.ht
....
I'm also looking at this from another, more personal angle. The sad truth is, I need WinXP for much of my work. I don't want to be busting anyone's balls here, but a lot of embedded systems development software is Windows-only. And a lot of people need to ship a Windows version before anything else. So, not that I like Windows development much, but, more often than not, I get hired to do some Windows drivers, and an MFC application or two to go along. I get quite a few of these jobs - where the overall coolness of the project (and the money:-) more than offsets the need to use Windows.
Now, I like Apple hardware a lot, and the only thing that stopped me from buying an Apple laptop so far was that it wouldn't run goddamn Windows, so I'd need to own another, PC-compatible, machine as well. And I just don't have time for that many computers:-)
But, it'd be extremely cool if I could, so to speak, have an Apple, and eat it too. In other words, triple-boot an Apple machine. Then I could use it for any work that I do, and the coding I do for fun too - which would even cooler. Anyone know what it'd take to run WinXP on one of these new ont-yet-existent things?
I am not able to access cnet and zdnet since yesterday. I live in India, am I the only one facing this problem?
Creativity uninhibited www.kreeti.com
The rest of the discussion, it seems, completely ingores this small detail :)
Not for this reason. They jumped the gun by locking themselves into intel only for x86. AMD is a viable contender (hint: TurionX2 is coming out within the year) and shouldn't be discounted specially for the sake of the customers who might be more willing to switch to Apple had they more choice.
There is little reason from a software point of view why other x86 processors are not in the mix. Sure it requires a different motherboard and bios (or whatever you want to call the startup sequence) but if that means you capture even more market share by getting people who don't like Intel offerings I think it would be worth it.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Yes, from a technical perspective, I am inclined to say that Apple's switch from the PowerPC was not necessarily a brilliant move. However, the real reason for the switch was in my opinion this:
Apple could no longer live with a processor manufacturer that reserved its best performing processors for their own use
IBM has a huge business of their own to protect, making servers and workstations using the same technology that Apple does. IBM's issue is that these systems are priced at 2 to 4 times higher than the same performance from Apple. This became very evident when Apple shipped the G5 Xserve and completely undercut IBM in large cluster configurations (which is clearly IBM core markets.) Why has the Xserve not yet shipped with the dual-core IBM 970MP? Why has Apple never shipped anyhthing but dual processor machines even if it was possible all they way back to the PPC 604 days to build 8 way systems. IBM had them. No coincidence if you ask me.
Intel does not have any such hangups og dependencies. Intel is all about delivering its best performing processors to those who can build systems from them.
Intel will even throw marketing efforts into the equation -- something IBM never, ever did to help Apple promote the PowerPC plattform. I think IBM's - and IBM Software's complete lack of support for Mac OS X is a telltale sign why Apple had no choice but to switch even if the PowerPC/POWER processors at the technical level perhaps would be better.
The future is in beta
apple is getting dev's to swich to universal binary that can run on x86 & Ppc
whats to say they won't put 5gh ppc in there high end stuff and keep with x86 for laptops and other consumer products.
the thing is in the long run x86 has higher production numbers and more money into the development of chips
This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.
What on earth has this got to do with apple?
Recent POWER chips *are* PowerPCs. I think the POWER2 was the last non-PowerPC chip. A stripped-down POWER4 formed the basis of the G5. How do you suppose that was possible if they were two entirely different processor families?
This may have been raised already, but once the Mac platform's transition to Intel is complete, Apple will have the option of licensing out Mac OS X at any time in the future. It may then become a viable competitor to Windows.
As a long-time Unix guy, I have to say I don't see that much of a difference between them. Maybe if you're writing device drivers or need to output PDF, yeah, but they're all pretty much POSIX Unix systems. They're similar the way Solaris and AIX are similar, or BSD and Linux.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
In fact, if the open source community love OS X so much, they ought to throw away GNOME, put KDE in maintenance mode, and pour their resources into OpenStep.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
...they didn't switch for performance, or heat, or anything like that. The cost/performance ratio of silicon is switching back and forth between architectures all the time, and right now the Power PC is doing relatively well. Apple's had it a LOT worse in the past. In fact, between the time the G5 Powermac came out and when Jobs made the announcement that he was tired of waiting for a 3 GHz G5 the G5 had actually ramped up in speed better than Intel's chips. Intel had the multiple cores, but IBM was close enough that Apple came out with the Quad G5 before the iMac Core Duo.
Jobs had been against the Power PC from the start. The switch to Power PC was made while he was away at NeXT, and the first software that came out of the Apple/NeXT merger was Rhapsody... on Power PC AND on Intel. NeXT already had multi-platform executables, and the proposed way forward in 1997 was to Yellow Box (OpenStep on Rhapsody, what became Cocoa) with existing Mac OS applications running under Blue Box (which evolved into Classic). Jobs could kill two birds with one stone... he had a path to back away from the Power PC, and he could dump the (truly awful) Mac OS API.
It was not to be.
The ISVs and customers rioted, and they went back to the drawing board, came up with Carbon as an intermediate API, and when OS X (finally) came out it supported Carbonised Mac OS apps almost natively, Cocoa, and legacy apps under emulation in Classic.
The reason they did this now, instead of in 2000 or 2003 or 2008, is because they were confident they could get away with it now. And I think the trigger happened in 2004. Late in the year they pulled the last OS-9-compatible Powermac G4 from the Apple Store... and nobody made a fuss. They'd tried it before, but every time the users were up in arms. This told them they'd finally scotched the classic serpent and could complete the conversion to NeXTstep.
Could you fill me in? I have no idea who the hell Maynard James Keenan is, and I've only barely heard of Tool. :-)
Congratutulations you are the first person to understand my post. Every other commentor has got hung up in knee jerk response to saying windows might be an important reason for IBM to port this to x86. The point of course was that there's lots of reasons this will happen and apple will be the beneficiary most poised to exploit it fast.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Incredibly uninformed/uninsightful source post.
/..
:)
Besides the *nix world, if anyone is close to understanding multi-platform OS support, it is Apple. The lessons Apple learned from the ongoing port from 68K to PPC (Davidian's emulator, dynamic recompiler, etc.) and subsequent optimizations are helping them now, and have facilitated the switch to Intel processors (despite the fact that Intel-based Macs will have sub-optimal performance until the software catches up, as was the case with PPC). Apple's various OSes (then and now) also implement hardware abstraction layers that further facilitate hardware mobility. So, who cares where they switch, except from a strategic, performance, marketing, and growth standpoint? Obviously, it was the right thing to do for all those reasons as amply discussed on
More importantly, a migration to Intel allows Apple to begin to slowly embrace greater plug and play diversity on equal footing with Microsoft, which is the one thing that the Mac OS lacks, although it certainly gained advantages from the switch to BSD. Despite the fact that Jobs says that Apple has no plans to make a stand-alone OS, I don't believe it for a second. The original Rhapsody architecture from the '90s (Yellow/Blue/"Red" Box) and Darwin would indicate a different core belief system.
However, Apple just hasn't had the horsepower to execute that vision in a public way without Quality and tech support nightmares. Up until recent years, they could barely prevent strangling in their own drool. Taking on the complex device landscape is possible over time, and moreso now with Apple's increasing resources and processor switch, putting everything into the main path of development -- smart. One reasonable question might be: what is the required amount of resources vs. the complexity of the plug-and-play problem and do they have enough resources to tackle it in a meaningful way? It takes a long time to work through the reasonably current device matrix and understand/develop/integrate all the code and test cases and implications.
If Apple were to successfully master a plug-and-play spectrum roughly equivalent to Windows OSes (including BIOS support which they already have), there would be nothing to stop user migration to the Mac platform on any box, not to mention changing the OEM landscape at PC provider companies (pick one - DELL, etc.)). I suppose you could make a software application argument, but things are basically on par for critical apps, except maybe in the CAD space.
If Jobs hasn't taken this step to set the stage for the release of a mature, stand-alone OS in the next few years, then that would be rather foolish, in my opinion. The paradoxical marketshare rhetoric from a company that makes industry-defining products, yet refuses the path that would truly capitalize on that vision, or empower the masses with those visionary products, grows thin. With a software model and an open box, the world would be much more Apple-colored, and that would be a good thing. But, the software/hardware discussion is nothing new.
What is new is the sense that, with the switch to the Intel platform, there is a moment of punctuated evolution on the horizon where all the necessary OS support might finally be in place and the MacOS might have the support (from all sides) and level of adoption it deserves. AppleWars Episode IV: A New Hope. Also, what a great story of market competition it would make, especially considering the long and convoluted genesis of both Microsoft and Apple.
Even if there were better PPC's available, the switch to the Intel platform would be right for many other reasons. Apple just had to do it at a time when there was substantial market justification to avoid the majority of ignorant user backlash embodied in the source post. Instead of reporting about jumping the gun, maybe you should shoot yourself with it?
Next Computer had Openstep/nextstep running on HP machines, Sun machines, their own hardware moto 68k, and intel (486).
I suspect they will leverage both architectures. I think machines are just fast enough today to do what we will want of them. What else could someone want?
I just see Apple making server iron with ibm's chips. IBM has the lock down on this sort of thing, because apparently HP, Sun, Dell, SGI don't.
Personally I would like to see Mac os X developed so that it is even usable on a LC III (68030) or an old 486. I mean, cause isn't that what linux is always crabbing about(running on vintage hardware).
I have a dual 1.8Ghz G5. I think my next 2 machines will just be the same, only all hooked together.
Apple trusted Motorola, and got screwed.
1) Trust is something between people. Not people to corporations, or corporations to corporations.
2) As I remember, Apple is the one who cancelled contracts - the Apple Mac clones. Killing the clone business hurt Motorola. So are you sure about your 'screwing order' here?
My belief is that Universal binaries and Rosetta are both here to stay. Apple will not phase them out until they are obsolete. These technologies will not go obsolete in any conceivable way.
Through the use of these technologies, Apple has made it's operating system into a chip-neutral platform. It doesn't have to "switch" or "switch" back. It can just happily sit there and continue to support both PPC and x86 for the conceivable future. Soon, it will add 64bit x86 and there is no reason to believe it couldn't add support for another processor if it so chose.
If the new IBM chips are good, Apple can always release product carrying the chip. It should *just work* for all but those few products (I am thinking games now) where the vendor chose not to build Universal binaries.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
But what happens in two years when the Power architecture hits the wall again? More magical IBM foo?
I just wish Apple would have gone to AMD.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Being processor neutral is a good thing. I think this could be really interesting for the new game consoles based on the Power CPUs. Both the XBox 360 and the PlayStation 3 (and any other systems using the Cell processor) should be able to benefit from such changes. It wouldn't be unlikely to see an upgraded version of these consoles in a couple years, as Sony often does anyway, that offer more power in a smaller space. Or maybe it'll just impact their next gen consoles.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Apple added another supplier of CPUs. Many other manufacturers have more than one CPU supplier, what's the big deal? Notice the high end Mac is still the quad 64 bit G5? I don't see the core duo challenging that model. If IBM brings out a super 6"XX" processor I don't see why it couldn't make it into a new model Mac or even if a AMD made it into a Mac. This is more of a PC buyer mindset than a Mac mindset, we don't build our own and what chip Apple puts in is not a big deal for us. Our criteria is centered around getting our jobs done not bragging rights of the clock speed or how many pieces of software there are that we don't use. (and its nice ducking all those Windows problems our friends have)
Let Apple work out the hardware and the OS and give me a machine that just works. I don't want Apple to become a PC company and I don't want windows issues. I'm also an old SGI graphic workstation user, didn't they also supply the hardware and the OS and they changed chip suppliers a few times? boy I miss them, they were good machines and stable systems.
You don't know wtf you're talking about. Have yopu ever met a Mac user?