Macs to use Intel chips?

Zaph0d wrote:

Does this mean the end of the Apple hardware monopoly? WIll it be possible to run MacOS on a PC?

Improbable. It will most likely not be a PC architecture, x86 or no.

hughchal wrote:

Ehhhhh, what makes it any more obsolete in mid-2007 than it would already have been, if the Intel anouncement hadn't been made? Over-reacting a tad aren't you? It's still a dual G5, it'llstill run whatever software you're running today. Hopefully the processors won't have melted

hc

It's just that it's the bloody story of my life !! I bought an Amiga 600 which was promptly superceded by the Amiga 1200 with AG bloody A. I bought an Amiga 4000/040 and Commodore promptly went bust !!!

I bought an iBook 2 years ago !! What did the f**kers do? Oh they only went and upgraded the f**king thing 2 months later to a flippin' iBook G4 didn't they !!! And now !!!! . . . they've bloody well done it again haven't they !!! My shiney new G5 has hardly lost it's new smell nor the bits of wrapping still on the feet/handles left there to protect it from scratches and the 2 GB of spanking new special RAM winging it's way from the UK hasn't even been introduced to its new home !! What do you mean I'm over reacting ?! I'll flippin' well over react if I want to !!!

Maybe the Wintel regime have something going for them . . . at least no matter what feckin' one I buy it'll still have the same spyware and malware available to run on it.

I feel . . . dirtier !!!

ZEN

A 2 grand PAPER WEIGHT !!

I'm jesting of course (not about the ibook or amiga though !) The G5 is a fantastic machine and I already have the apps I need. They're not suddenly going to stop functioning because of the new CPU in another machine !

In all seriousness though I wonder if Apples greater plan is to launch an attack on Microsoft Windows dominance in the descktop OS market once all the bugs have been ironed out and off the shelf Windows apps work directly with OS X. There goes our nice virus free life for ever when that happens !

ZEN

Just watched the WWDC video. Intel will be supplying the CPU's by the end of 2006. Apple just announced Leopard OS X for that time. What do you think . . Leopard . . changing spots . . . Intel CPU ???? Anyone ?

ZEN

I know it's kinda already been said, but just because apple is choosing to go with an x86 CPU doesn't mean that Windows XP will automatically run on it.

Case in point: Remember the Sega Megadrive, the SNES and the Amiga (I forget which one) - they were all based around the same CPU (the motorolla 68000 if I remember correctly - I think the old macs were as well)... yet they were all incredibly different! You'd need to work very hard to get something designed for one to run on another.

Just remember: The CPU isn't everything.

My own opinion, though, is that it seems almost like a step down for them, in the name of saving money and power. I remember seeing a case study comparing the G5 and the Pentium 4 and I must say the G5 just looks SO much better on paper... and I'm not even a mac fan. There again, that's on paper.

Take care,
P.B.

It was funny reading the older articles on various technews sites before and after the announcement. From - It'll never happen! to It was obviously going to happen! In fairness I didn't see it coming either, I was convinced they were going to eventually go with some version of the Cell cpu. Should've known from the lack of hype involving Apple and IBM.

As many have said, it doesn't really change much, just means Apple can take advantage of the AMD/Intel race like the rest of the PC Industry. I think they will release cheaper Macs (while still pimping the high end dream machines) probably in the Mini-Mac segment in order to strengthen them in the education market (get 'em young ).

I think this is good, I think Apple will get stronger in both the short and long term which in turn will put pressure on Microsoft which is already facing pressure at the other end from Linux. Pressure is good for innovation and competition. It's probably a relief to IBM as the deal with Apple wasn't hugely profitable.

amp: pc owner and Apple voyeur

wayne040576 wrote:

XP won't run on it easily but it should make it easier to port more linux distributions to the mac.

Erm, I'm curious. What do you think the barriers to porting a Linux distribution to PowerPC are? Linux has been running on PowerPC for years.

wayne040576 wrote:

I said it would be easier to port them. There are several distributions (debian, yellowdog, gentoo etc) that have an x86 version and an ppc version. There have been other non official verstions (slackintosh - port of slackware) that have been released.
I'm assuming it should be easier to maintain an x86 version now that should run on both pc and mac with a few tweaks. From the distro maintainer's point of view, it could make life easier.

Except the PPC distros will be maintained for a looooooooong time to come. m68k debian packages are still built, for instance. This just gives (potentially, but actually now looks unlikely) a second set of bootloaders to faff around with. Not as bad as the mipsel and mipsbe issues... (same CPU, one running in big endian mode, one running in little endian mode)

Well, first of all, there are computer manufacturers with far smaller volumes than Mac surviving (Alienware and such).

I find it implausible that they'll dro[ their operating system after 25 years developing it. They make ONE non-computer consumer product, and it's not dramatically profitable; one of its major functions is as a draw to the computers.

rsynnott wrote:

Well, first of all, there are computer manufacturers with far smaller volumes than Mac surviving (Alienware and such).

Oh sure. But none with Apple's global reach. There are basically three global PC companies right now: Dell, HP and IBM/Lenovo. All the rest are either regionally or nationally based. Fujitsu Siemens can't hack it in America; Gateway couldn't hack it in Europe and cleared off a few years ago.

If they're going with Intel there is no need for them to have their own hardware business any more. They can only survive on premium pricing, low overheads or volume.

Dell and HP -- volume
Regional players Fuj Siem, Gateway even on an Irish basis the likes of Iqon or PC Pro - niche players low-er overheads
Toshiba and Apple -- got away with premium pricing based on supposedly superior products for a long time. Now Toshiba's position is being eroded and Apple is relinquishing the source of its ability to charge premium pricing.

Why pay extra for an Apple when you could run exactly the same software on a bog-standard box from Dell, Iqon, Acer whoever?

I find it implausible that they'll dro[ their operating system after 25 years developing it. They make ONE non-computer consumer product, and it's not dramatically profitable; one of its major functions is as a draw to the computers.

Some would have thought it implausible that they would ever get into bed with 'Big Brother' IBM, or Microsoft, or drop their proprietary hardware architecture.

But they did all those things.

It won't make sense for them to remain as a PC maker in the long term unless they can persuade the world to move away from Windows. And I think they missed the chance to do that 20 years ago.

Speaking with hindsight of course.

OK. So Microsoft isn't going to buy Macintosh; Intel is. Or so the great Robert X Cringely thinks

Read on:


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.

rsynnott wrote:

That article is mostly nonsense.

Well, I'd actually agree with that sentiment, not because of the fine detail that I readily admit I don't know about or don't understand, but because he's making this all out to be a fantastically complex power play, manipulated by puppet masters in board rooms pulling all sorts of strings. I think the reality is a lot more prosaic.

Intel hate Microsoft? Nonsense. Without Microsoft there'd be little or no reason for people to stick to the dreadful old x86;

There is one very simple reason for people to stick to the dreadful old x86: cost. All the bollox spoken about super fast vector processsors built on chip, superpipelining, fewer transistors for comparable performance blah blah blah all the reasons down through the years people have offered for why the latest greatest new architecture will wup Intel's butt boil down to two simple questions: how many can you make and how reliably can you make them?

Intel's processor designs may be clunky compared to the super sleek purpose built RISC chips offered by their rivals but their manufacturing processes are second to none. And they have repeatedly bet the company by spending billions throwing up new fabs in the US, Israel and Leixlip. They can make more than anybody else and they make them with good yields. Therefore they can charge less.

That's all there is to it.

What is the most popular platform for Linux: Power PC, Alpha, Sparc Mainframe?

Nah. Intel.

Why?

Because it's cheap and powerful enough.

That's all. That's why Intel has won the processor war. The last volume computer maker on another processor architecture has given up. Sparc, Power, even MIIPS (does that still exist in computers as opposed to games consoles?)--they've all been beaten, not because they were bad but becuase they were too few and too expensive.

Apple has just taken a little longer to come to the same conclusion.

They'll stop making PCs fairly soon. They won't need to any more.

Software company.