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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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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.
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...
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...
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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.
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?
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
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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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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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?
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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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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Windows may hold the Enterprise Desktop environment, but they are a far cry from holding the server market in business. IBM is the leader there. They build the top end, most reliable, and highly available systems short of a custom engineered product for complete failure detection. In short, IBM is doing more for large scale business than anyone else these days. If you were running a large company, say a Fortune 50 retailer, would you install a bunch of Windows servers and setup nightly reboot jobs to keep things running smoothly, or would you setup AIX servers with HACMP (IBM's high availability offering) to run even if the hardware dies, sites go down, net connections drop, etc... you get the drift. It's all about what people can afford and the best is IBM.
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So it doesn't matter if IBM has some new tech in 2 years. Their tech, if it materializes as promised, will be focussed on server and embedded markets. Intel's chief business, however, is making processors, motherboards, and associated devices for PCs. In two years, they'll also have better chips than those currently available, but for desktops/laptops/portable devices. That's who Apple wanted to cozy up next to.
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.
Universal Binaries are a transitional stopgap; Apple is, after all, referring to this as a transition to Intel.
Let's get a few things out of the way:
1.) This silicon technology isn't new, it's just the first news of it being rolled out in the desktop in major waves.
2.) This is IBM, who is famous for promising in press releases but never delivering. I still remember when the IBM guy said at WWDC '03 that the G5s would hit 3Ghz "by next summer."
3.) Apple isn't going to "switch back." For Pete's sake, how could anyone actually think they'd do it all again next year? Apple switched to have faster, cooler chips so they could update their Powerbook line. Portables outsell desktop machines in today's computer industry. They liked Intel's future low-power roadmap (particularly Merom). Steve Jobs originally considered x86 in 2000, and again in 2003 (but was dissuaded with the G5). Remember that Rhapsody ran on Windows NT for a while.
4.) Intel chips aren't magically going to sit still until 2007. Intel has already announced a dual-core 3.4Ghz Xeon with a unified 16MB cache, available this fall (AMD's fall server chips won't have unified cache until next year...they'll have two 512kb caches). And of course, Merom and Conroe are due out.
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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.
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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.
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.
The game console cores suck. They are 2-issue in-order designs with crappy branch prediction. Initial reports suggest that they are barely fast enough on integer code to keep the FPU fed, and that's with low-level gaming code. God help you if you're trying to run generic, unoptimized C code on it.
It's 2006 --- no programmer of desktop/workstation/server programs is going to spend time optimizing their code to make up for a flawed processor design. It's 2006, and a few things have happened that apparently no-one told the "Cell on the desktop" folks about:
1) Programs are becoming platform-agnostic. Especially at the workstation/server level, many important applications run on multiple platforms. This often means they are not highly optimized on any platform. This was always one of the things that held the G5 back --- it's high theoretical performance was often nullified by its reliance on tight, well-scheduled code tuned to its idiosyncracies. Super-optimized apps is a luxury few users have. Hell, as an engineer, much of the code I write runs in Matlab's JIT. You think that does G5 optimizations? A processor that does not run all these minimally-optimized apps well is not going to fly on the desktop/workstation.
2) The world is moving towards higher-level languages and higher-level programming constructs. If your CPU can't run machine code with whatever optimizations the JIT can spit out in 100 milliseconds, it sucks. As someone who does a fair bit of programming, I love the Opteron for one reason: it doesn't care how much my code sucks (from a performance standpoint). It lets me write clear, clean code, and runs it with decent performance. I don't have to drop into SHARK to figure out why my 5-issue processor is behaving like a 2-issue one because of instruction scheduling issues, I don't have to sacrifice virgin blood on the alter of code alignment, and I don't have to bust out Altivec to get good FPU performance. Programmers in the desktop/workstation/server markets have gotten used to processors that serve the software, not force the software to serve the hardware. A 2-issue in-order core is not going to fly with them.
3) Vector performance has largely become irrelevent except in a few markets. Yonah has shitty vector performance, and nobody in x86 land really cares. Most desktop CPUs these days spend their time running integer logic code, or double-precision floating-point, letting the heavy vector lifting be handled by the GPU. As API's like CoreImage/CoreVideo take off, things like VMX and AltiVec will become still more irrelevent, except perhaps to those people running FFTs all day long.
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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.
...but nothing in the article said IBM could sell those miraculous CPUs at a price affordable enough for consumer computers.
The thing I dislike about traditional X86 architecture is the cruft carried along for so many years, just in case I want to boot PC-DOS 1.0 and run IBM Alley Cat in CGA mode.
In fact, here's a hint to those making X86 hardware and software, I don't want to do that. I don't know of anyone who still needs compatibility even as far back as Windows 3.1, let alone DOS. Really, pretty much nobody needs that kind of backward compatibility since there are free reliable emulators out there that can simulate a DOS environment very effectively.