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4.7GHz IBM Power6 Spotted
Ilgaz notes that The Register has posted benchmark results from Oracle 11i running on four 4.7GHz Power6 chips. Quoting: "The speedy chips confirm IBM's boasting that Power6 would arrive near 5GHz. They also show that IBM's customers have a lot to look forward to in terms of raw performance." Rumor has it that the Power6 chips will be announced on Tuesday.
Nope.
If Apple had been waiting until now for a 64-bit chip they could put into a portable, they'd be in Very Big Trouble.
The PPC has a lot going for it, but Apple made the right choice.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Huge increase in mac sales since the intel switch? Massive profits? Stock well over $100? Yeah they made a mistake. Look, sometimes business decisions are just that: business, regardless of whether they're the most exciting decision from a technical or geek standpoint.
"Did Apple make a mistake?"
No. Not at all.
The Power series was the high end server class, meant for big iron.
The PowerPC series was the vastly scaled down little brother intended for the desktop class.
IBM wasn't all the interested in making chips for Apple.
And who can blame them? Lower profit margins and less units sold.
Intel is a much better match for Apple, which is a consumer grade CPU manufacturer. And since the switch, Apple has not had the embarrasment of lower performing CPUs and long waits on CPU upgrades that IBM and Freescale saddled Apple with.
If Apple had stayed with IBM, they would have been pushed to the Cell processor. And that would be a bad PR move, running on the same CPU as your game consol runs on. And there would of course be no gaurantee switching to that processor family would result in better product cycles from IBM.
Apple made the right choice, The relationship with IBM was no longer viable.
why Apple doesn't just permanently keep its lineup as a mix of PPC and x86, picking whichever chip suits the particular machine they're designing at the time? Power6 Xserves along side Core 2 laptops... it sounds good to me!
As a software developer why you should work twice more (OSX intel / OSX ppc) to produce a piece of software that will work on roughly 2-3 % of the desktop computers out there?
If Apple would keep randomly altering their hardware and require compatibility with a range of completely different architectures, in the end it'll completely alienate the developers. As Microsoft knows very well, developers, developers, developers are you best asset in this fight.
Furthermore, no, being Universal binary is not a requirement, and I know few companies which release only Intel versions of their Mac software (example: Adobe's Soundbooth)
How much software is "optimized" for a specific architecture, beyond what the compiler does? How much "unnecessary work" is there, beyond what has already been done in the creation of universal binaries? It's extra work for Apple, but essentially none for the vast majority of application developers.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
By "work twice more" you mean "check an option box in XCode," right?
Yeah, just like how the wide range of different architectures most UNIX software runs on alienates developers...
...oh, wait.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think that you basically mentioned the only real place where there's a market for PPC: on servers. Although I've always been a big fan of the Power architecture (I have a dual-G5 spaceheater sitting under my desk that I'm writing this on, right now), I don't think that offering G5 PowerMacs along side Intel PowerMacs would really do anything besides confuse customers and potentially make the platform less appealing for developers who don't realize how easy Universal code is to produce. So I think that's a non-starter.
However, keeping OS X Server (which under the hood really isn't that different from regular old OS X, but it's marketed as a totally different product) Universal, and producing PPC XServes in addition to Intel boxes, might not be a bad idea. PPC XServes have always had a fair bit of popularity in the HPC and scientific-computing segments over x86, and for servers, a lot of the software in use is OSS anyway and is architecture-agnostic by design. So they wouldn't really be confusing any developers there -- most of the software that runs on OS X Server is either supplied by Apple, or is OSS, or (in the case of custom HPC code) may have been written/optimized specifically for Power/Altivec in the past already, so they'd be saving their customers work by offering a PPC product.
I think there could be a lot to gain by keeping a PPC model around. They might not even have to do too much hardware design; if they didn't burn too many bridges with IBM on the way out, they could probably use one of IBM's Power-based blade-server boards in a 1U case...particularly with the way Cell hasn't been selling, IBM would probably be happy for the microprocessor sales.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Because one of Apple's new selling points is the ability for all new Macs to run Windows as well as OS X. Can you imagine the nightmare Apple would have if they mixed processors?
--They say only a fool looks at the finger pointing to the sky...