[clue-tech] Apple Switching to Intel

[Timothy Klein]

On Jun 6, 2005, at 9:36 PM, Greg Knaddison wrote:
> I don't get it.
>
> My understanding was that the video/audio creatives loved their
> hardware because the 64bit processors got them faster processing in
> that kind of work.  And I've read that they are going to x86
> processors, so I don't get that at all.

64 bit is nice, but the main selling point of the PPC is Altivec.   
PowerPC chips absolutely kick ass on vector floating point  
instructions compared to Intel, and they beat AMD in a lot of instances.

> If they're doing it to get a cheaper/faster processor then AMD makes
> _a_lot_ more sense not so much because AMD is that much faster/cheaper
> but because Apple has basically no volume discount bargaining power
> with Intel and has a lot more with AMD.

I kind of thought so, too, but I get the feeling Apple is going for  
stability here, not technical virtuosity.

> Maybe they finally realized that the proprietary hardware idea wasn't
> a good one and they want to move further into the software/consumer
> electronics market.

I doubt it.  By all indications, the new Intel Macs will be the only  
hardware blessed to run Mac OS.

> It sounds to me like they just really really needed to get away from
> the PowerPC because it was lagging badly and maybe that scared them
> from other "niche suppliers" like Transmeta and then AMD is seen as
> the cheap "white box" provider so they settled on Intel.

PowerPC isn't really lagging badly.  It works fine on desktops.  As  
mentioned above, it does very, very well in floating point.  It is  
losing in the integer execution arena, but not as badly as a straight  
MHz to MHz comparison might lead one to believe.  PowerPC chips are  
smaller than Intel chips.  I have also heard that they are cheaper.   
But what is killing Apple is the stall in pushing the PPC chip  
higher, and the complete inability to put the G5 into a laptop.   
Laptops are very important, particularly for Apple, and it seems to  
have become clear to them that there never was going to be a G5  
laptop.  And the G4 is old enough that that was going to really start  
hurting.

Others have speculated that this is the first move by Apple in  
abandoning the PC market, and moving off somewhere else.  Seems like  
complete bunk to me, but only time will tell.

But it does seem that sometime in the future, a tri-boot Mac OS X/ 
Windows/Linux machine is a real possibility.

Weird.

Tim