Yup, they have jilted Motorola…just as the rest of world moves to AMD chips. Heh.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Apple moves to Intel chips…June 10th, 2005 |
 32 comments to Apple moves to Intel chips… |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Intel makes more than just processors, unlike AMD. Intel makes entire CHIPSETS much more so than AMD. Intel is a PLATFORM provider. There’s alot more business smarts and thought that went into this than just “AMD is c00l with teh L1nuX n3rds” line.
I think it would be more accurate to say they jilted IBM, but no matter as Freescale (as the semiconductor division of Motorola was renamed and spun out) are both vendors of PowerPC instruction set processors.
The key change here is the change of ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) to the one shared by both AMD and Intel. Translation of code, although it can be partly automated, is not easy, especially if you want to get good performance. Fortunately, current Apple OSX s/w was always designed to be more portable than most (it’s still a big task). It’s still a big task to support the transition for their customers (but they did it before when they moved from x86 to powerPC).
The reason is that Intel (and AMD as an insurance policy perhaps) have a better roadmap because they are more focused on processors suitable for PCs and laptops and can bring greater resources due to their volumes. IBM/Freescale may be less upset than you’d think – most of their (quite successful) PowerPC family processors go into applications other than Apple computers (or indeed any PC-type products), so their roadmap concessions to Apple were probably modest (and they may have decided it better to lose the Apple business than to dilute their efforts on other higher volume applications).
So ‘jilted’ may not be the correct word at all.
As a Mac user, I have been reeling in shock ever since Monday, when the announcement was made at the WWDC. I am hoping that the end result will be more easily accesible software for Macs.
Overall, I have come to the conclusion that this is going to be a positive move in the end.
While AMD clearly do have superior (and cheaper) CPUs for desktop PCs and I certainly wouldn’t build a desktop PC based on an Intel chip at the moment, I wouldn’t buy an AMD based laptop either, for with the Pentium M Intel are similarly streets ahead in the low power/mobile/laptop world, and this is an ever lager share of the total PC market.
And that is what I think this is the main driving factor with respect to the timing of this: Motorola’s complete failure to supply a version of the G5 that will fit into a laptop, particularly a sleek and cute laptop of the kind that Apple would like to produce. The G4 laptops are now clearly trailing the Intel world in power, and they have maybe another year left in them before this is obvious to everyone. In addition, the Pentium M has raised the bar somewhat: Windows laptops are sleeker and lighter then they were a year or two back when they were typically running mobile Pentium 4s. This means that even if IBM can produce a G5 that will fit into a laptop, it is going to be a more power hungry and hotter chip than the Pentium M and Apple is probably going to have difficulty matching (say) the nicest Sony and Fujitsu laptops in terms of style. (And even Dell is getting better in this regard – the Inspiron 700m is quite a nicely designed machine). And all this is happening at a time when laptops are becoming a steadily greater portion of the entire PC market, and when Apple is a company that traditionally makes nice laptops.
In the desktop and workstation market, Apple was in far less trouble. The G5 is pretty competitive. Yes, it isn’t running as fast by now as Steve Jobs may have hoped a couple of years back, but the Pentium 4 isn’t running nearly as fast as Intel had hoped either, so there is no huge problem there. The G5 was good for three or four more years on the desktop if Apple waned to play it that way.
But there was clearly an imminent laptop crisis. And Apple is jumping to try to avoid it. If it had to happen at some point, now is not such a bad time. At this point in time OS X is clearly a much better operating system than Windows. Post Longhorn this might not be the case. (Or it might – right now we don’t know).
OS X never moved from x86 to powerPC, it really moved from Intel (as NeXt OS) to PowerPC, then they maintained a dual code tree, and now they’re going to flick the switch to release the heretofore secretly maintained Intel version. (In fairness, they did do a really good job with the OS 7/8 PPC emulator).
If they’re smart, they’ll do something to their machines to make it easy for users to install Windows on their machines, and yet make it difficult for Dell users to install OS X on Dell machines.
If that becomes possible, my next machine will probably be an Apple, despite my dislike of Steve Jobs.
Fiona, I never said that OSX moved from x86 to PowerPC. I said that Apple made this transition – it was well before OSX. The point is that they’re more experienced than probably anyone else at this type of thing. But that doesn’t make it easy and third party software is the big challenge in several respects (when available to run on new Intel-based Macs, will developers bother or just go PC, etc.)
Laptops clearly were the biggest problem as they’re increasingly important and Apple had, in the past, always had a big power (and hence battery life) advantage here. They were now faced with being hugely disadvantaged on power, or performance, or both, so something had to be done.
AMD won’t be upset with a change to their rival, Intel. In fact the change of ISA means that this increases their chance of getting Apple business at some time in the future.
Fiona, I never said that OSX moved from x86 to PowerPC. I said that Apple made this transition – it was well before OSX. The point is that they’re more experienced than probably anyone else at this type of thing. But that doesn’t make it easy and third party software is the big challenge in several respects (when available to run on new Intel-based Macs, will developers bother or just go PC, etc.)
Laptops clearly were the biggest problem as they’re increasingly important and Apple had, in the past, always had a big power (and hence battery life) advantage here. They were now faced with being hugely disadvantaged on power, or performance, or both, so something had to be done.
AMD won’t be upset with a change to their rival, Intel. In fact the change of ISA means that this increases their chance of getting Apple business at some time in the future.
As a former Intel employee for over 10 years, this is excellent news, no more than we deserved. Now Apple gets the chance to see just how good we are as a company.
And maybe it’ll shut up the “when hell freezes over” crowd and their snobbishness.
Guess what guys? Hell just froze over.
Yep. I’ll be going out today to get a new heavy coat. 🙂
Rumors like this have been floating around for years, so much so that I never thought they would come true. However, if, and that is a huge “if”, the transition is as smooth as Apple says it is, this is going to be great for everyone involved.
It will be very interesting to see how it all goes down. Anything that broadens OSX’s appeal has got to be a good thing. I am sure that Jobs & Co. are up to something that they think will be a big deal. Who know whether it will pay off in the end?
It will be very interesting to see how it all goes down. Anything that broadens OSX’s appeal has got to be a good thing. I am sure that Jobs & Co. are up to something that they think will be a big deal. Who know whether it will pay off in the end?
“Apple is probably going to have difficulty matching (say) the nicest Sony and Fujitsu laptops in terms of style.”
Is this a joke? Most PC designers appear to have had a frontal lobotomy at best. Whatever faults PC users perceive Apple as having, they only have to look at their largely ugly machines to realise what design is.
Sorry PC fans, Apple does win international prizes for its design.
The one advantage Apple may have in switching to Intel is that Apple may yet move their OS into the world of windoze. That should stir up Microsoft’s desperate attempts to hold on to its buggy software monopoly. Viruses and spyware, I’m lovin’ it.
Is this a joke? Most PC designers appear to have had a frontal lobotomy at best.
If Sony or Fujitsu are doing it with a Pentium M, and Apple with a G5 that uses twice the power and runs twice as hot, then the Apple laptop will need a battery that is twice the size, and the laptop will have much noisier fan and will consequently weigh a lot more. However brilliant the designers, that is a huge disadvantage to start with. And that is precisely what Apple is trying to avoid by making this switch.
Apple has never previously used the x86 processor family. The earlier transition was from the 68000 to the PowerPC. This, at least, had the advantage that both were big-endian processor families. Switching to a little-endian family may have some unexpected problems when dealing with data formats.
Also, this is a move away from IBM – Motorola hasn’t provided CPUs to Apple for several years.
Apple is 3% of world market. Who gives a fuck ?
If you want pretty very very expensive kit that looks cool in the coffee bar – fine. If you want something that does the job, is easily upgraded works with 90% of the software out there – well forget it.
Apple users – losers
“Sorry PC fans, Apple does win international prizes for its design.”
Yup. Never mind if it works well, as long as it looks fabulous.
Macintosh: the choice of metrosexuals everywhere.
Given the incredibly slow pace of Windows development recently and the fact that when Longhorn eventually emerges it will be without several “key” features, some increased competition for Microsoft can only be a good thing. It seems we’re in a three-way fight – Windows, OSX and Linux.
If OSX is installable on non-Apple Intel hardware, I would definitely consider giving it a shot.
Yup. Never mind if it works well, as long as it looks fabulous.
Macintosh: the choice of metrosexuals everywhere.
Hmmm. Well, du Toit, as a current Dept of the Navy employee, and Army veteran, I use a Mac, and plenty of folks I know where I work do too, from engineers in the J9 experimentation directorate to special forces types. My prior experience has given me an appreciation for tools that just work, and that’s why I prefer Mac OS X to whatever MS has on offer.
You should reconsider parroting dumb stereotypes.
I have never had a mac, almost entirely because of the cost, but partly because I hate the form over function that they seem to exemplify. Since everything is built to a budget, I begrudge every penny spent on the ‘look’ of the machine that could have been spent on a bigger battery or more RAM. I would rather have a clunky utilitarian box that had plenty of power, that way I could render models of mac kit if i felt the need to look at sleek fancy dancy designs. I lump macs in with the starke-designed motorbike.
If, as Stevely says, macs ‘just work’ then hooray for him and whoever else who can justify the extra money for whatever they want to do. I find that Damn Small Linux ‘just works’ for most of my jobs too, and at £0, is a bargain.
And microsoft software sucks. It has been through many iterations, all of which sucked. Longhorne will suck.
What a bunch of misinformed and unIntelligent [geddit?] comments there are here.
“If Sony or Fujitsu are doing it with a Pentium M, and Apple with a G5 that uses twice the power and runs twice as hot, then the Apple laptop will need a battery that is twice the size, and the laptop will have much noisier fan and will consequently weigh a lot more.”
Sorry Michael but the 15″ Powerbook G4 only weighs 2.5Kg. While yes the the smaller Vaios weigh in at between 1.9 and 3kg don’t even think of comparing Fujitsu – their laptop PCs are not really intended as “laptops”, more as mobile desktop computers. Powerbooks use a convection system for cooling, unlike the colossal copper band duct and power fan you get inside a Fujitsu Amilo A, D or Celsius range. As for battery power all I can say is that I get between 4.5 and 5 hours computer use out of my Powerbook and it only takes about an hour to recharge. It has never at all crashed, not once, not ever. I can’t get a virus on it and Microsoft Office is actually usable on it (there is a massive online petition from angry Windows users to make Outlook act more like Entourage).
Regarding the lamentable comments about speed issues you guys must still be living in the mid to late 90’s or reliving the Apple vs Microsoft fanboys wars. For film and video work we use a number of G5 2.3 and 2.7Ghz Dual Processor machines. These are approximately 84% faster than any other retail computer, including a Flame or Inferno system using comparable software, so I guess the old “haha Apple make slow machines” routine gets turned on its head there.
So long as Apple doesn’t diminish the capability of its OS by using Intel-based chipsets I don’t really care about who supplies what component for their machines but I am very much looking forward to the day when you can buy a Vaio or a Dell and be asked, “which OS would you like with that sir, Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X?”
“Macintosh: the choice of metrosexuals everywhere.”
Yeah, right … whatever.
Anyone who seriously believes that a windows based intel box is better than a macintosh, in any way, is a misinformed fool.
Not just do macs have the best industrial design, but inside their attractive cases they are powerful unix workstations that are far more usable and reliable than any windows machine.
Speaking as a system administrator and a software developer I can say that the macintosh is the best consumer computer avalable, by far.
“Yup. Never mind if it works well, as long as it looks fabulous.”
This misconceived, ignorant, inaccurate view is yet more evidence of yet another non-Mac user who doesn’t have a bloody CLUE what they’re talking about. They look at Macs the way socialists look at the Western world – they surely can’t have their cake AND eat it??? – they surely can’t be fast, powerful AND good-looking at the same time???
For those of you interested in the facts: Mac OS X is the most stable, compatible, powerful, fast AND aesthetically pleasing operating system on the planet today.
It wipes its ass with Windows.
This speed issue is retarded. Mac OSX is preferable not because the computers are faster, but because they work better. Jobs is right about that.
I use my Mac (an iBook G3) for audio recording, and it is a breeze to record with, requiring little to no set-up. Screw bothering with ASIO drivers or downloading patches just to be able to use external hardware. Screw buggy software that crashes in the middle of a session. No thanks, I’ll keep my Mac.
I have PC and ‘Nix friends who are of the opinion that “Windows (and Linux) isn’t that bad to set up, you just need to know how to do it. Just install all the security updates, run these patches, get the latest drivers, and avoid getting online (we’re talking dedicated audio workstations here) and you’ll be set.” for me, that’s case-in-point.
“Apple is 3% of world market. Who gives a fuck ?”
This is rude and unnecessary. There is also the highly-debatable assumption that the majority must be “right” or “better informed” in any activity.
Sadly, I don’t think this is true.
I have dealt with people who use all types of computers. The consensus is that Macs are easier to use, fast enough, stable and – to boot – better looking. Those PC users I’ve encountered who actually try a Mac are fairly soon won over.
Their problem is that IT departments in large organisations buy what they want for their own purposes, which helps account for a large part of the world’s reliance on Wintel boxes. Often this is “protectionism” from accounts departments bulk buying the cheapest they can, IT departments not wanting to handle more than one platform (they’re so busy fixing iffy PCs that they haven’t time anyway) and users buying a tired old “you can’t do that on Mac” line.
This is a fairly easy argument to dissolve: there is no function that a PC does that a Mac doesn’t. The only difference appears to be that PCs are commonplace on most High Streets and most people just want to do limited stuff (email, surf, play murderous-fantasy games) so don’t look around.
Yes, Wintel boxes despite their ugliness and in many cases, patchy reliability do have the bigger market share. But that wouldn’t fill me with much joy if I was in hock to Microsoft.
As a software engineer, I believe OS X is far and away the best desktop OS in existence today. It’s as stable as Linux, and a lot easier to use for a beginner (for a power user the gap is smaller). Windows, even XP, is a sad joke. Longhorn is still vapourware wherease we know there is an INTEL port of OS X. Kim, the problem with Windows-based machines is that they don’t work well. The 15% of machines in my company that run Windows generate 98% of the technical support problems. The Linux and BSD machines on which I and my colleagues do their development and which run our core and edge IT systems run flawlessly, week-in, week-out. In a previous company, we were running mission-critical applications under OS X server and it never needed rebooting. For an IT officer to recommend Microsoft products in a back-office environment would, in my view, place him in breach of his fiduciary duty.
For those expecting to be able to run OS X on generic hardware: don’t get your hopes up. Any production variant of OS X on Intel is virtually guaranteed to be using Le Grande technology to tie the OS to the hardware. For this reason, I don’t expect Intel Macs to be much cheaper than their PPC predecessors. By the same token, in liberating Macintosh from the moribund PowerPC line, I expect price/performance to drop.
I’m a little sad that IBM/Motorola couldn’t get their act together—the PowerPC was and is a beautiful architecture, with many more general purpose registers and a very orthogonal instruction set. But only a vanishing number of application developers still need to delve into assembler or machine code these days. Optimising compilers do a better job than hand-coded stuff most of the time. It’s only really embedded stuff where you need to go that deep, and PPC is regnant there anyway.
The main worry is that by announcing the switch so far in advance Apple will have poisoned its sales channels for the next twelve months. I hope they’ve got plenty of cash.
The interesting thing for me about the announcement of Apple switching to Intel chips was Jobs’ almost throwaway line that every single version of OS X has been compiled to run on Intel chips.
That’s why independent developers can get a kit including an Intel-powered Mac for a grand now. They’ve got 12 months or so to get to where Apple’s software is today; after that, it’ll be the emulation software to run PowerPC stuff on Intel chips, which will be about the same speed as on a G4 now – not bad, but Apple’s Intel-coded stuff will go like a greased weasel in comparison.
Final thought: I use a Mac for everything except games, but on an Intel-chipped PC, the possibility of running any Windows application you like under OS X without having to use Virtual PC just got an awful lot bigger.
Would a Mac built using Le Grande technology be capable of running an NTFS volume with Windows installed on it? That way you could conceivably end up with a Mac being dual-bootable into either OS X or XP.
Oh, one thing I forgot from my earlier comment – the Mac Mini (1.25Ghz, 256Mb RAM, DVD-ROM/CDRW etc) starts at £339.00 – considerably less than a Windows machine.
Julian, you can bet your bottom dollar that future versions of OS X will have Windows as a compatibility layer. WINE and Virtual PC already exist for Un*x. And WINE works. I know this. It’s a short step from this to having Windows run in a sandbox like System 9.
Julian: I wasn’t talking about G4 laptops – they are indeed very nice and the G4 does indeed run nicely at low power and does lead itself to nice elegant laptops. What I was talking about was the suitability of present and future variants of the G5 for building laptops when the G4 runs out of steam. Any laptop that Apple’s designers try to build with it is going to face reallys serious power consumption and heat issues, and these things are going to affect the aesthetics and size of the resulting design.
As for Fujitsu, I suppose I was thinking of things like this – until recently Japan only but now being sold in Europe as well. Fujitsu seem to be one of a relatively small number of companies (Sony being the main one, but also Panasonic to some extent) doing interesting things with the low volatage and ultra low volatage variants of the Pentium M.
“Sorry PC fans, Apple does win international prizes for its design.”
Yup. Never mind if it works well, as long as it looks fabulous.
Macintosh: the choice of metrosexuals everywhere.
How very droll Kim.
Never mind the fact that despite all the abuse I give my Mac (installing stuff all time, never re-starting it etc etc) OSX has never crashed. Not once. What the hell is wrong with something that works well and looks good? Surely that is what you want in a piece of machinery whether it be a car, a gun or a computer?
How many of you mac users can really say that you know how to use a Mac? i use both windows and mac osx and I find that they are both good and that they do crash. I have a PC that I built and a Mac. All this windows bashing is quite petty, now if you really want to rant talk about something other than, ooh, windows gets a lot of viruses and windows crashes a lot. First of all, stop looking at porn, and don’t allow unknown active x controllers. It pisses me off when Mac users use that. And that talk about never crashing, OSX will crash, it pisses me off that when I’m encoding a DVD and I get errors, I cannot recover from it not can I eject the DVD and what happens, I have to reboot the Mac and there goes all my work. I’ve also encoded DVD’s on my PC and it will crash sometimes but I can easily recover. Unlike the Mac the end task feature will work most of the time and I do not have to reboot the computer reducing downtime, oh and I can eject the DVD. The thing with Mac is that when it screws up, it will really screw up.
“I have dealt with people who use all types of computers. The consensus is that Macs are easier to use, fast enough, stable and – to boot – better looking. Those PC users I’ve encountered who actually try a Mac are fairly soon won over.”
That’s because they are morons and are lazy. Ever wonder why it hasn’t hit big as a business workstation, easy, windows 2003 server has security policies for controlling everything.
Also, if those IT people graduated from ITT tech, it doesn’t count.
Don’t think that MS is getting away. Here’s a list of things that can improve.
Finish up with IE7
Add HPFS support
Create an import export feature for both MS Outlook and Entourage. I wanted to migrate to OSX and had to go through other methods to migrate.
Ok so I don’t have much but the fact that I own both means that i am not closed minded to just one OS.
Windows XP is not a sad joke, ok, maybe it was prior to service pack 2 but so was OSX prior to 10.2, has anyone noticed that 10.4 is a bit slower. SP2 is what made XP better the system restore was pure genius. Especially for all those pervs out there that screw up. Popularity is what drives spyware, viruses and malaware. If you were a programmer that wanted to cause trouble, who would you harass?
Windows or OSX? Who will be affected? Don’t you think that if Mac becomes more popular it will also suffer the same fate as windows? UNIX safe, ha. Talk to a real software engineer and they will tell you that UNIX is open source. The kernel is out there. Once you control the kernel its all over. No one out there is invulnerable.
Monopoly? Apple is, why, they make their own stuff but that’s good because it keeps crap like dell away. PC manufacturers is what makes the pc experience a bad one they all use low grade parts, how many of you have had to return a hard drive from dell? Want a good PC? Build one. The only good laptop vendor out there is IBM and Toshiba. And this crap about over price, they are just about the same, but remember what you pay for. Apple sells quality hardware, except for their mice. Toshiba and IBM are excellent companies. Alien ware? That’s if you have lots of money to burn. Actually I’m planning to buy a power book not because of how pretty it looks but how its built? Its solid. I’m waiting for the x86 conversion I’ve tested the OSX x86 on my PC, AMD 64bit 3200+ and it runs very nice. Dang, Apple should have gone with AMD, oh well perhaps one day. Imagine running OSX on a dual core AMD 64 with 2GB of RAM and a SATAII hard drive? BTW, I wonder when Apple will ship their computers with SATAII.
How many of you mac users can really say that you know how to use a Mac? i use both windows and mac osx and I find that they are both good and that they do crash. I have a PC that I built and a Mac. All this windows bashing is quite petty, now if you really want to rant talk about something other than, ooh, windows gets a lot of viruses and windows crashes a lot. First of all, stop looking at porn, and don’t allow unknown active x controllers. It pisses me off when Mac users use that. And that talk about never crashing, OSX will crash, it pisses me off that when I’m encoding a DVD and I get errors, I cannot recover from it not can I eject the DVD and what happens, I have to reboot the Mac and there goes all my work. I’ve also encoded DVD’s on my PC and it will crash sometimes but I can easily recover. Unlike the Mac the end task feature will work most of the time and I do not have to reboot the computer reducing downtime, oh and I can eject the DVD. The thing with Mac is that when it screws up, it will really screw up.
“I have dealt with people who use all types of computers. The consensus is that Macs are easier to use, fast enough, stable and – to boot – better looking. Those PC users I’ve encountered who actually try a Mac are fairly soon won over.”
That’s because they are morons and are lazy. Ever wonder why it hasn’t hit big as a business workstation, easy, windows 2003 server has security policies for controlling everything.
Also, if those IT people graduated from ITT tech, it doesn’t count.
Don’t think that MS is getting away. Here’s a list of things that can improve.
Finish up with IE7
Add HPFS support
Create an import export feature for both MS Outlook and Entourage. I wanted to migrate to OSX and had to go through other methods to migrate.
Ok so I don’t have much but the fact that I own both means that i am not closed minded to just one OS.
Windows XP is not a sad joke, ok, maybe it was prior to service pack 2 but so was OSX prior to 10.2, has anyone noticed that 10.4 is a bit slower. SP2 is what made XP better the system restore was pure genius. Especially for all those pervs out there that screw up. Popularity is what drives spyware, viruses and malaware. If you were a programmer that wanted to cause trouble, who would you harass?
Windows or OSX? Who will be affected? Don’t you think that if Mac becomes more popular it will also suffer the same fate as windows? UNIX safe, ha. Talk to a real software engineer and they will tell you that UNIX is open source. The kernel is out there. Once you control the kernel its all over. No one out there is invulnerable.
Monopoly? Apple is, why, they make their own stuff but that’s good because it keeps crap like dell away. PC manufacturers is what makes the pc experience a bad one they all use low grade parts, how many of you have had to return a hard drive from dell? Want a good PC? Build one. The only good laptop vendor out there is IBM and Toshiba. And this crap about over price, they are just about the same, but remember what you pay for. Apple sells quality hardware, except for their mice. Toshiba and IBM are excellent companies. Alien ware? That’s if you have lots of money to burn. Actually I’m planning to buy a power book not because of how pretty it looks but how its built? Its solid. I’m waiting for the x86 conversion I’ve tested the OSX x86 on my PC, AMD 64bit 3200+ and it runs very nice. Dang, Apple should have gone with AMD, oh well perhaps one day. Imagine running OSX on a dual core AMD 64 with 2GB of RAM and a SATAII hard drive? BTW, I wonder when Apple will ship their computers with SATAII.