Moderator: James Steele
This one was interesting:
Dream on. Won't happen.[/QB][/QUOTE]Originally posted by Splinter:
.[/qb]
ah-huh, and Mac will never us x86, intel or AMD right? (grin)[/QB][/QUOTE]Originally posted by composer11:
Dream on. Won't happen.[/QB]Originally posted by Splinter:
.
Interesting story, I do think there is more to this announcement than we know because it is odd regarding timing. But I don't buy the part about Intel buying Apple.Originally posted by composer11:
Funny, After reading this comment, dream on, here is a new story that speaks of HP selling MACS - - target, MICROSOFT.....
Ok, fair enough, however, let me give you an example of how some OEM vendors are - in Tawain a few years back, a major motherboard manufacture DID NOT get an INTEL license for a "said" chipset, never the less, they went forth and produced the chipset motherboards, the board was a sucess, and Intel didn't do anything about it. (besides they got in enough trouble just last year with all kinds of law-suits (see Japan Raids Intel Headquarters in google/yahoo), anyway, the point is x86 is x86, and the MAC OS will be everywhere and anyway, but most users will buy it, but it will start off cracked, of course, if it doesn't offer any performance over windows in gaming, rendering, audio (which for the most part AMD owns the throne), then it will sort of die off.HP branded Macs? I could see that happening but only as a means of additional disti channels for Apple.[/QB]
Charming and all, but pure speculation.Originally posted by composer11:
Originally posted by composer11:
Dream on. Won't happen.Originally posted by Splinter:
.ah-huh, and Mac will never us x86, intel or AMD right? (grin)Funny, After reading this comment, dream on, here is a new story that speaks of HP selling MACS - - target, MICROSOFT.....
everthing I've been saying...
Dream on and read: (grin)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Going for Broke
Apple's Decision to Use Intel Processors Is Nothing Less Than an Attempt to Dethrone Microsoft. Really.
By Robert X. Cringely
The crowd this week in San Francisco at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference seemed mildly excited by the prospect of its favorite computer company turning to Intel processors. The CEO of Adobe asked why it had taken Apple so long to make the switch? Analysts on Wall Street were generally positive, with a couple exceptions. WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE!? Are these people drunk on Flav-r-Ade? Yes. It is the legendary Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field at work. And this time, what's behind the announcement is so baffling and staggering that it isn't surprising that nobody has yet figured it out until now.
Apple and Intel are merging.
Let's take a revisionist look at the Apple news, asking a few key questions. The company has on its web site a video of the speech, itself, which is well worth watching. It's among this week's links.
Question 1: What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel?
This is the Altivec Factor -- PowerPC's dedicated vector processor in the G4 and G5 chips that make them so fast at running applications like Adobe Photoshop and doing that vaunted H.264 video compression. Apple loved to pull Phil Schiller onstage to do side-by-side speed tests showing how much faster in real life the G4s and G5s were than their Pentium equivalents. Was that so much BS? Did Apple not really mean it? And why was the question totally ignored in this week's presentation?
Question 2: What happened to Apple's 64-bit operating system?
OS X 10.4 -- Tiger -- is a 64-bit OS, remember, yet Intel's 64-bit chips -- Xeon and Itanium -- are high buck items aimed at servers, not iMacs. So is Intel going to do a cheaper Itanium for Apple or is Apple going to pretend that 64-bit never existed? Yes to both is my guess, which explains why the word "Pentium" was hardly used in the Jobs presentation. Certainly, he never said WHICH Intel chip they'd be using, just mentioning an unnamed 3.6-Ghz development system -- a system which apparently doesn't benchmark very well, either (it's in the links).
So is 64-bit really nothing to Apple? And why did they make such a big deal about it in their earlier marketing?
Question 3: Where the heck is AMD?
If Apple is willing to embrace the Intel architecture because of its performance and low power consumption, then why not go with AMD, which equals Intel's power specs, EXCEEDS Intel's performance specs AND does so at a lower price point across the board? Apple and AMD makes far more sense than Apple and Intel any day.
Question 4: Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?
This is the biggest question of all, suggesting Steve Jobs has completely forgotten about Adam Osborne. For those who don't remember him, Osborne was the charismatic founder of Osborne Computer, makers of the world's first luggable computer, the Osborne 1. The company failed in spectacular fashion when Adam pre-announced his next model, the Osborne Executive, several months before it would actually ship. People who would have bought Osborne 1s decided to wait for the Executive, which cost only $200 more and was twice the computer. Osborne sales crashed and the company folded. So why would Steve Jobs -- who knew Adam Osborne and even shared a hot tub with him (Steve's longtime girlfriend back in the day worked as an engineer for Osborne) -- pre-announce this chip change that undercuts not only his present product line but most of the machines he'll be introducing in the next 12 to 18 months?
Is the guy really going to stand up at some future MacWorld and tout a new Mac as being the world's most advanced obsolete computer?
This announcement has to cost Apple billions in lost sales as customers inevitably decide to wait for Intel boxes.
Apple's stated reason for pre-announcing the shift by a year is to allow third-party developers that amount of time to port their apps to Intel. But this makes no sense. For one thing, Apple went out of its way to show how easy the port could be with its Mathematica demonstration, so why give it a year? And companies typically make such announcements to their partners in private under NDA and get away with it. There was no need to make this a public announcement despite News.com's scoop, which only happened because of the approaching Jobs speech. Apple could have kept it quiet if they had chosen to, with the result that not so many sales would have been lost.
This means that there must have been some overriding reason why Apple HAD to make this public announcement, why it was worth the loss of billions in sales.
Question 5: Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?
People "in the know" love this idea, that Hollywood moguls are forcing Apple to switch to Intel because Intel processors have built-in DRM features that will keep us from pirating music and movies. Yes, Intel processors have such features, based primarily on the idea of a CPU ID that we all hated when it was announced years ago so Intel just stopped talking about it. The CPU ID is still in there, of course, and could be used to tie certain content to the specific chip in your computer.
But there are two problems with this argument. First, Apple is already in the music and video distribution businesses without this feature, which wouldn't be available across the whole product line for another two years and wouldn't be available across 90 percent of the installed base for probably another six years. Second, though nobody has ever mentioned it, I'm fairly sure that the PowerPC, too, has an individual CPU ID. Every high end microprocessor does, just as every network device has its unique MAC address.
So while DRM is nice, it probably isn't a driving force in this decision.
Then what is the driving force?
Microsoft.
Here is my analysis based on not much more than pondering the five questions, above, and speaking with a few old friends in the business. I won't say there is no insider information involved, but darned little.
The obvious questions about performance and 64-bit computing come down to marketing. At first, I thought that Steve Jobs was somehow taking up the challenge of making users believe war was peace and hate was love simply to show that he could do it. Steve is such a powerful communicator and so able to deceive people that for just a moment, I thought maybe he was doing this as a pure tour du force -- just because he could.
Nah. Not even Steve Jobs would try that.
The vaunted Intel roadmap is nice, but no nicer than the AMD roadmap, and nothing that IBM couldn't have matched. If Apple was willing to consider a processor switch, moving to the Cell Processor would have made much more sense than going to Intel or AMD, so I simply have to conclude that technology has nothing at all to do with this decision. This is simply about business -- BIG business.
Another clue comes from HP, where a rumor is going around that HP selling iPods could turn into HP becoming an Apple hardware partner for personal computers, too.
Microsoft comes into this because Intel hates Microsoft. It hasn't always been that way, but in recent years Microsoft has abused its relationship with Intel and used AMD as a cudgel against Intel. Even worse, from Intel's standpoint Microsoft doesn't work hard enough to challenge its hardware. For Intel to keep growing, people have to replace their PCs more often and Microsoft's bloatware strategy just isn't making that happen, especially if they keep delaying Longhorn.
Enter Apple. This isn't a story about Intel gaining another three percent market share at the expense of IBM, it is about Intel taking back control of the desktop from Microsoft.
Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.
So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin product with better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS. By the way, the new Apple OS for the Intel Architecture has a compatibility mode with Windows (I'm just guessing on this one).
This scenario works well for everyone except Microsoft. If Intel was able to own the Mac OS and make it available to all the OEMs, it could break the back of Microsoft. And if they tuned the OS to take advantage of unique features that only Intel had, they would put AMD back in the box, too. Apple could return Intel to its traditional role of being where all the value was in the PC world. And Apple/Intel could easily extend this to the consumer electronics world. How much would it cost Intel to buy Apple? Not much. And if they paid in stock it would cost nothing at all since investors would drive shares through the roof on a huge swell of user enthusiasm.
That's the story as I see it unfolding. Steve Jobs finally beats Bill Gates. And with the sale of Apple to Intel, Steve accepts the position of CEO of the Pixar/Disney/Sony Media Company.
Remember, you read it here first.
Much more plausible and well thought out. That other arrticle was hooey.Originally posted by Timeline:
By Jon "Hannibal" Stokes
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Introduction
Now that the shock from the Apple-Intel announcement has had some time to set in, it's time to take a look at what this means for the Mac platform in the near- and long-term future. I've tried to make the present article a complement to John Siracusa's article on the transition, which means that I cover different ground and I address a few of the questions that he raised. Specifically, this article is focused on the CPU hardware part of the Apple-to-Intel transition picture, with some thoughts at the end on what it all means. Because I've saved my more general remarks on the significance of the transition for the article's conclusion, we can dive right into the technical details first.
A bottom-up transition
Steve Jobs' announcement that Apple would introduce Intel processors into its products at the laptop and low-end levels makes a ton of sense. First, portables are the place where Apple is hurting the most, due to IBM's inability to deliver a portable-class G5 chip. When I bought my 667MHz TiBook back in 2002, it was a solid value. There was no x86-based laptop that had the TiBook's combination of screen size, battery life, form factor, performance, and overall feature set for any price. So the ~US$3,000 that I paid for the TiBook, a price that wasn't much higher at the time than a high-end PC laptop, was fairly reasonable.
I don't really have to go into much detail about the current, pathetic state of Apple's portable line. Even if the Pentium M didn't spank the G4 in performance per watt, I could still sum up in a single phrase the reason that three years later I'm still limping along with the same TiBook: 166MHz frontside bus. This is just unacceptable for a machine with a price tag as high as the 15" PowerBook. In marked contrast to the currently stagnating G4, the Pentium M is fast, and Centrino is a great, full-featured, low-cost mobile platform that just kills anything that Apple could hope to offer based on parts from either IBM or Freescale. Apple needs the Pentium M in its mobile line, and it needs it yesterday.
The second reason why it makes sense to introduce x86 via the portable and low-end Macintosh lines is that neither of those lines have any need for a 64-bit processor. Yonah (see below), which is the dual-core Pentium M derivative that Apple will probably put in its first x86-based PowerBooks and Minis, will not support x86-64. By the time x86-64 has spread widely throughout the Pentium desktop line at the end of 2006, Apple will be ready to introduce 64-bit Pentium-based PowerMacs.
In this respect, Apple's x86 platform shift strategy is deliberately the reverse of Intel's 64-bit platform shift strategy. Intel is introducing 64-bit support into its products from the top down, with the mobile processors not getting 64-bit support until late 2006/early 2007. Apple, for its part, already has just such a 64-bit workstation/32-bit mobile split with the 970/G4 pairing. So Apple can swap the 32-bit G4 for Intel's 32-bit Yonah, and gain an instant performance boost where they need it most without sacrificing a prominent feature like 64-bit support. Later, as Intel moves to 64 bits across its entire desktop line, Apple will upgrade its existing 64-bit PPC parts with higher-performing 64-bit Intel parts. The end result is that as Intel makes the transition to 64 bits, Apple will make the transition to Intel.
The PowerMac and Intel: 2006 and beyond
64-bit support is just one of the things that Apple will probably require in their first Intel-based PowerMac. Intel's road map for 2006 and beyond is marked by moves in the following directions
Dual-core
64-bit support
65nm process technology
Security/virtualization (i.e., Lagrande, Active Management Technology, Vanderpool, etc.)
"Platformization" (i.e., development and marketing of CPU and feature-rich chipset combinations)
Performance per watt
You can expect that Apple will want the first Intel processors in the PowerMac line to embody all or most of the above elements. The big question is whether Apple will want skip the Netburst architecture altogether, or whether they'll use it in their first run of Intel-based PowerMacs. (For you Mac folks, Netburst is the deeply pipelined, high-clockspeed architecture that first debuted in the Pentium 4.) The timing of the PPC-to-Intel transition depends on how you answer that question.
Presler, a Netburst-based Pentium D successor, will debut in Q1 2006 with many of the features outlined above. It's dual-core, supports 64-bit x86, is built on a 65nm process, and includes the security and virtualization technologies listed above. Cedar Mill is a single core version of Presler that will debut around the same time. Could either or both of these wind up in the PowerMac line?
I think the answer is, probably not. First, Presler probably will not perform better on Apple's early 2006 application base than whatever dual-970 solution that IBM will have out at the time. In spite of the fact that it still hasn't hit 3GHz, the 970 is a really nice processor and it's going to be a nice processor for the remainder of 2005 and into 2006. Second, and even more importantly, Jobs' keynote described a two-year, bottom-up x86 transition that starts in early or mid-2006 with the Mac Mini, is "mostly complete" by June 2007 (the laggard is probably the Xserve), and is complete by the end of 2007 (including the Xserve). Since Presler and Cedar Mill are slated for debut at the start of 2006, this makes it unlikely that they'll go right into a PowerMac that ships shortly after their launch. Rather, Jobs' comments lead one to believe that Apple will start releasing Intel-based PowerMacs in late 2006, which is right about the time that Intel is planning to release Conroe.
Conroe is a dual-core desktop chip that has all of the features in my list above, and is based on the successor to the Pentium M's "Banias" architecture. This new, "completely revamped" dual-core architecture will supposedly give a 20-30% performance boost over the current Pentium M and will be the nail in the coffin of the power-inefficient Netburst architecture. I think Conroe is the most likely candidate for the first Intel-based PowerMac, because it would allow Apple to skip Netburst entirely.
The following hypothetical Apple-Intel road map is based on the reasonable presumption that Apple does not consider the ageing, power-hungry Netburst architecture to be an improvement over the relatively new and powerful G5 architecture, and that they'll skip Netburst entirely in favor of Yonah and its more power-efficient successors.
Time frame Apple product Intel processor
1Q 06-2Q 06 Mac Mini, iBook, and PowerBook Yonah: A dual-core Pentium M successor; 65nm process; 32-bit; SSE3; improved FPU performance
2Q 06-3Q 06 iMac Sossaman: A desktop Yonah derivative. This chip will have very low power consumption for a dual-core desktop design.
4Q 06-1Q 07 PowerBook
PowerMac Merom: A dual-core Pentium M (Banias) successor
Conroe: A 64-bit desktop version of Merom (see comments above about Conroe).
3Q or 4Q 07 Xserve A Xeon based on the same architecture as Merom and Conroe.
The above is, of course, just speculation. However, I do think it represents a realistic picture of how Apple's product line might evolve along with the Pentium M architecture.
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Dear sdafalk,Originally posted by sdfalk:
I wonder in this move to Intel processors will move Macs into the crosshairs of virus, spyware, addware etc.
How do you figure that?
It's mostly software not hardware is it not?
Welcome to the forum. We'll put the muzzle back on falk so he won't bite you next time. Really, he's a nice guy at heart. Periodically, though, he can't help himself, and he comes out with a real zinger like "how do you figure that?" Man, what nerve! We think it happens when he doesn't drink enough milk & honey for dinner. Why, just he other day, he brusquely retorted, "I disagree." I thought we were going to have to call the deputy. Or take the time he said, "No way!" Falk, it's just a forum. Remember the anger management classes!Originally posted by lush1:
Dear sdafalk,Originally posted by sdfalk:
I wonder in this move to Intel processors will move Macs into the crosshairs of virus, spyware, addware etc.
How do you figure that?
It's mostly software not hardware is it not?
I didn't "fiigure" anything. I merely posed a question, hoping those with greater knowledge than mine might consiider it and add to the discourse. I didn't believe it unreasonable to think that because both platforms will be sharing the same processor, that their software might become more similar, thus exposing a vulnerability. But I don't know about such things,so I asked. Your response of "how do you figure that" was brusque and rude.
I am new to the forum. I was led to believe that it is a friendly, open place for the exchange of ideas and information among people with similar interests. Imagine my disappointment having my first encounter be with you. I'll try not to let it dissuade me from using this forum. I'm sure there are many nice people here, but every thorn has it's {censored}.
Sure, we disagree and bitch at each other from time to time and get in each other's faces, but it's like an old friend... you get angry, get it out, talk about it, and make up. I hope you guys don't take it too personally. It's all good. 