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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?"
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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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 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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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.
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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).
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Do you mean Microsoft? Sony? Nintendo? Ford? BMW?
The PowerPC market is huge. Worldwide, half of all the cars manufactured this year will use at least one PPC.
Apple switched because they're sick of IBM marketing writing checks that IBM manufacturing can't deliver.
This vapor-chip is no different than the 1GHz multicore G4 (in large numbers) IBM promised when the first G4's were delivered.
Apple is probably not worried that IBM might actually deliver on this promise.
Look, I'd much rather see Apple stick to a multi-chip strategy, or just stick with PPC, myself. Because I think (and we're already seeing it) that even with VERY slick emulators and fat binary technology, switching from PPC to Intel is going to end up being a usability nightmare for non-technical users: (hey, your web browser still works, but not your plugins), and a compatability nightmare for technical users: (hey, your Photoshop/Video Editing/Audio Editing software still works, but not your favorite 5 year old set of plugins). But at the end of the day, there's only so many broken promises and marketing bullshit you can put up with from IBM. True - with the G5, it seemed, IBM was FINALLY delivering on the promise that was made when the PowerPC platform first was dreamed up in the early 1990's. Except that they hobbled the chip by getting rid of the litte/big endian translation, which made x86 emulation SLOWER than on the previous generation. Then they promised low heat and power consumption - making the high-end G5 Power Macs "whisper quiet" - until Apple learned that these machines were running dangerously hot, and had to patch the firmware to crank up the fans (yeah, I remember when I first got my dual G5, it *was* whisper-quiet. But not after the second OS update. . . ) - face it. Apple trusted Motorola, and got screwed. They trusted IBM, and got screwed. They know they can trust Intel, because if Intel screws them, then Dell, Gateway, and a zillion other manufacturers will go to AMD, and Apple can to. That's really the bottom line.
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Apple's claim that Intel won on watts has been thoroughly discredited in the press and in the blogosphere.
It has been discredited everywhere except in reality. IBM had no good competitor to Yonah and Conroe. The G5 was a long-pipeline, high-frequency design, and it just plain ran too hot for a laptop. Yonah is offering integer performance competitive with the top 970MP, with a power budget 1/3 the size and a CPU die about half the size. POWER6 is just another step in the wrong direction as far as Apple is concerned. It's got a higher frequency, longer pipeline, lower IPC, and an even worse INT/FP performance balance than the G5 had. It's the Pentium 4 all over again. Perhaps POWER6 will be the Pentium 4 done right, but no matter what, its not going to be a good chip for Apple's machines. Especially when you consider what will happen when you take a long-pipeline (inherently bandwidth hungry) design like POWER6, which is optimized for 32GB/sec of memory bandwidth and tens of megabytes of cache, and stuff it into a PC system with 8GB/sec of memory bandwidth and a power envelope of 60W.
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That would be really good thing.
I've often wondered about that. We have a lot of asymmetrical multi proccessor machines where there's general purpose processor which offloads tasks to GPUs, signal processors etc, but are there any computers which use multiple diffent general purpose CPUs?
Amiga's Sidecar had an Intel CPU and ran DOS from within the Amiga OS using Janus software and there were bridgeboards that could run Windows for later models. How hard would it be to write an OS which could address both CPUs and pass instructions to the most suitable processor?
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