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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?"
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.
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.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
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.
Technically, didn't they have two before? IBM and Freescale?
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Apple switched because Intel offers a better deal right now.
I seem to recall it was also a matter of supply problems: IBM couldn't keep up with Apple's demand, while Intel is (apparently) having no problems doing so. In this case, switching back to IBM would just mean inviting this problem back.
Its not implied - its stated. Look at Steve Job's words at the keynote where he announce the intel macs Maybe they can go back - but Steve sure as hell abandonded PPC during the keynote.
My pics.
Because, up until recently (2004 or 2005), the PowerPC still was a better performing chip (and the G5 is still better in many ways). The G5 came out in 2003, and it knocked the socks off of any Intel offering at the time. However, the PowerPC G4 was left to get old and rust (As much as I hate the x86, I will admit that the G4 performance sucks in comparison to the Pentium M and Solo/Core Duo), and they couldn't fit a PowerPC G5 processor into a laptop, which is Apple's bread and butter. I would much rather have a PowerBook Core Duo^W^W^W MacBook Pro than a PowerBook G4 (even though I would much rather have a PowerBook G5 than a MacBook Pro if the G5 existed).
Apple's switch to Intel is about performace per watt. The G4 is getting too ancient compared to Intel's offerings, and the G5 isn't designed for laptops and other small-form computers (like the Mac mini, for example).
It sounds like that to me too. It also sounds like strained silicon, so maybe a combination of both. (wiki says stretched, the IBM guy says squeezed)
"You literally can squeeze silicon, and thereby give it properties to make it faster. The thing that is making it run faster is not just that it's smaller but because you're changing its basic physical properties," Meyerson told Reuters in an interview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strained_silicon
Strained silicon is a layer of silicon in which the silicon atoms are stretched beyond their normal interatomic distance. This is accomplished by putting the layer of silicon over a substrate of silicon germanium (SiGe). As the atoms in the silicon layer align with the atoms in the silicon germanium layer where the atoms are farther apart, the silicon atoms become stretched. The electrons in strained silicon move 70% faster allowing strained silicon transistors to operate 35% faster.
...and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.
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?
I seem to recall it was also a matter of supply problems
That, and the impossibility of getting a G5 into a laptop.
Apple probably lost a billion dollars or more every quarter since the G5 came out, because of supply restrictions. It's a fine CPU, but we just couldn't get enough of them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Not vaporware, just bad reporting. IBM's indicating that the chip will use SOI and strained silicon... if the reporter is too daft to realize that's unrevolutionary, whatever.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
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.
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.
While not GPL, Apple has released much of the source code under APSL.
These are some of the things molecules do...... given 4 billion years -Carl Sagan
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.
I beg to differ. Although Windows rules on the desktop, the server market is a far different matter. In Webservers, for instance, Windows is a minority. I have also worked at several large companies that used Linux or Unix servers even though all their desktops were Windows based. Windows just doesn't cut it for reliable, high availability servers.
This shows a real strength of Linux and BSD; they have both been ported to a multitude of different architectures. Apple successfully moved their BSD-based system to a new architecture and can move it to any other arhitecture in response to whatever new technology comes down the pike.
There are two parts to that question: "...went with a 32-bit part" and "...went with an Intel part".
I have no information on why Intel was chosen. Plenty of people probably have their own theories about that.
Once Intel was chosen, however, at least for the MacBook Pro, a 32-bit part was the obvious choice if you don't want a Pentium 4 (e.g., too much power, too much heat) and want to ship machines before Merom ships; it's not as if the PowerBooks were 64-bit.
The iMac might not have the same power and heat concerns, and the previous version was already 64-bit, so perhaps a case could've been made for using an EM64T P4 there. I'm not a hardware or business guy, though, so I'm not sure whether that would've made sense or not.
In any case, as the next-generation x86 chips from Intel will be 64-bit (if Paul Otellini wasn't lying in his presentation at the Intel Developer Forum, where he said
showing 64-bit OSes running on Merom and Conroe prototype boxes), so any Macs with next-generation x86's will have 64-bit processors.
Unlike the transition from 68K to PowerPC, the operating system itself is running native in x86 assembly. When Apple transitioned to PowerPC, they rewrote less than 5% of the OS and added the Mixed Mode Manager and the Code Fragment Manager and then shipped it. The system was quite often running in 68K mode. Over time, they made more of the OS PowerPC native. Thus, Mac users got used to equating an OS update to mean "faster system" while in the Windows world the opposite is true.
This time, the OS is written in a high level language and has been maintained in X86 for years.
I think the one serious problem with this scheme is that they think they can drop support for Classic. I think more people use Classic than they think.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
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.
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
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?