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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.
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...
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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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."
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?
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
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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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?
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.
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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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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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) 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.
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Yes, just like "hacking" and all the other words people have taken over to mean something different.
For all intensive purposes, I could care less.
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?
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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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.
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'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.
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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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That's one I pacifically can't stand.
Supposably it's said quite a lot.
Geez, you grammar nazis are really prophetic.
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?
Irregardless of the intent, you have hurt my self of steam with such statements.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You mispelled, Nintendo Armagedden.
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.
"Sufferin' succotash."
You misspeled Armageddon.
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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.
"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
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.
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!
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.
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.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
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
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