Apple Switching To Intel Chips In 2006 1427
telstar writes "According to C|Net, Apple has officially decided to drop IBM, and will use Intel processors starting in their '06 line of systems. This change was rumored last month. The announcement is expected Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, at which Chief Executive Steve Jobs is giving the keynote speech." From the article: "Apple successfully navigated a switch in the 1990s from Motorola's 680x0 line of processors to the Power line jointly made by Motorola and IBM. That switch also required software to be revamped to take advantage of the new processors' performance, but emulation software permitted older programs to run on the new machines."
It is NOT official (Score:5, Informative)
Don't start thinking you'l be able to . . . (Score:3, Informative)
Apple is a hardware company. They will make damn sure that you can only run their software on their hardware.
This obviously means no Powerbook G5s (Score:5, Informative)
It also occurs to me - another point that I'm sure others have already thought of - that this may be why they are forced to switch to Intel. They can't get chips small enough for a Powerbook G5 line.
Re:OH F**K... (Score:3, Informative)
I predict that Apple has gotten Intel to strip down its Itanium line of chips and bolt AltiVec on, as IBM did their POWER4. Remember, Intel does not necessarily equal x86 or x86-64. HP is selling iPods, and is also the premier Itanium vendor. Coincidence?
Re:April Fools? Right? (Score:3, Informative)
Uhmmmm, ever hear of embedded processors???
MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It is NOT official (Score:2, Informative)
Re:April Fools? Right? (Score:1, Informative)
A mobile CPU that consumes 20W.
A dual-core mobile cpu (Yonah).
A dual-core desktop cpu for $240.
Re:This obviously means no Powerbook G5s (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, except that it doesn't have to worry about pesky things like *running on batteries for a decent amout of time*.
The PPC970FX is ~50W average. Intel's Pentium-M line is closer to 20W max.
Designing a PowerBook G5 would require:
- Severely reduced battery life (e.g. the 2 hours typical of P4-M notebooks instead of the 4-5 hours typical of P-M notebooks). This would be a disaster for Apple as their product would look stupid compared to P-M based notebooks that offer both performance and battery life.
- A lower power PPC. PPC970FX is already on the latest process that IBM has. IBM simply does not have the power-saving technology that Intel does. Intel has spent years optimizing their core and their cache to save power.
- A switch to Intel CPUs. That likely means Pentium-M or Celeron-M in their small-form-factor (Mini, iMac, eMac) and notebook (iBook, PowerBook) computers, and potentially Pentium-4 in their desktop line.
Re:April Fools? Right? (Score:5, Informative)
There's the Celeron M [intel.com], which is based on the current Pentium M core (Dothan). A quick Froogle search [google.com] will find boxed Celeron M processors selling for less than $100.
If the CNET article is correct and the Mac mini is one of the first to adopt Intel chips (in 2006), then I'm sure it will use the Celeron M. By early 2006, the Dothan-based Celeron M will be previous-generation technology, just like the G4 is today. Apple should have no problem fitting the Celeron M into the tiny form factor for less than $500.
Re:Transitive Technologies (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Or not (Score:3, Informative)
Spin Control (Score:4, Informative)
Apple has used IBM's PowerPC processors since 1994...
Nitpick: More accurately, "Apple has used PowerPC processors since 1994." The way C|net wrote it, it sounds like IBM is the only game in town until you make it halfway down the page.
The earliest PowerPC chips were from IBM, the G3s were from either Moto or IBM, and G4s were from Moto (and now Freescale). Only with the G5 has it come back to IBM's PowerPCs in a big way.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Apple was considering switching to Intel
No, the Wall Street Journal did not. The Wall Street Journal's rumor page -- on par with such publications at The Sun and the National Enquirer, and not intended to be taken as factual -- printed this as a rumor. Not that this stopped Reuters or anyone else from reporting it as fact.
Keep also in mind that the shadowy mystery figures in the rumor are "two industry executives with knowledge of recent discussions between the companies" -- not Apple or Intel employees. Maybe it's Darl McBride and one of his other personalities!
"I don't know that Apple's market share can survive another architecture shift. Every time they do this, they lose more customers" and more software partners, he said.
Apple has changed architectures once, from the 68K to PowerPC. This change was, for the most part, completely transparent to users and developers. Why would they lose customers over something so painless? Next thing you know Detroit will be losing customers because their latest cars have a V8 and anti-lock brakes where last year's models had a V6 and a dashboard Jesus.
Even if you count OS 9 to OS X as an "architecture" change, nobody was forced into it and OS X did and does still run OS 9 -- and earlier -- apps.
Apple shipped 1.07 million PCs in the first quarter, and its move to Intel would likely bump up the chipmaker's shipments by a corresponding amount, McCarron added.
In other news, transferring $1.07 from your checking account to your savings account is likely to raise your savings balance by $1.07.
WiMax? Sure. ARM? Sure. Hell, might Intel even be getting into the PPC biz? Stranger things have happened.
If Steve Jobs stands on the stage at the Worldwide Developers Conference and announces Apple's moving to x86, Satan will rise up from the underworld and devour the souls of every innocent puppy and kitten. And then emit the fart that ends the world. This is, of course, completely unlikely to happen, as we all know Satan prefers chunky peanut butter to the souls of small animals.
Re:Intel knows how to make chips, not just x86 (Score:3, Informative)
Well, one reason is that the PPC is based on the POWER architecture--which was invented by IBM in the first place.
The 68K-PPC transition really sucked (Score:2, Informative)
The 680x0 emulator wasn't all that fast, and much of the operating system was running in emulation mode for years. Early PPC chips didn't have enough cache to contain the translation tables of the emulator, which resulted in cache trashing. And the change in floating point formats (the 68x00 floating point units could do 80-bit arithmetic, but the PPC only had 64 bits) broke all the engineering applications. Many of them never bothered to convert to PPC, and Apple exited the engineering market.
And that time, they didn't face an endian change.
Re:Transitive Technologies (Score:3, Informative)
About renaming, the PPC does it too (so it has even more registers), so you still have less registers. Also, the renaming is mainly there to allow the pipelines to work correctly. You still only have eight "logical" registers to put stuff in.
Last thing, AltiVec must be pretty hard to do efficiently on x86. First, it does twice the amount of computation as SSE does per cycle, but also because it does a MAC, which would have a 9-cycle latency if implemented in SSE.
Re:How many chips can Apple support at once ??? (Score:2, Informative)
All of them.
Basically, NeXT solved the multi-architecture binary problem over a decade ago. NeXT's development tools could build for MC68K, HPPA, SPARC, and x86, just by checking the boxes for which architectures you wanted to include.
If Apple finally does ship their OS on x86, it won't be a switch, it will be an addition. This is a Solved Problem.
Re:April Fools? Right? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Desperate Need For Validation In The x86 Wo (Score:1, Informative)
Re:April Fools? Right? (Score:3, Informative)
Sure:
Re:Apple has a history of swapping enemies and all (Score:3, Informative)
FWIW, Windows NT 3.51 (a.k.a. "Daytona") was the first PowerPC release.
Some kind of odd revisionist history? (Score:1, Informative)
B) If you look at the historical market share you'll note the biggest drop in share occured when Microsoft introduced Windows '95. (market share dropped slowly, about a percent a year when the Power PC was introduced and got nearly cut in half when Microsoft unleashed '95) While causality is generally difficult to assign I think this case is an exception to the rule.
But for these minor factual issues, you're all over it.
Re:easy to trace (Score:3, Informative)
What?
The whole point of Itanium was to ditch the legacy x86 kruft and go into the future with a clean, modern architecture. Intel would love to get away from x86 if the market would let them, because it's become a huge PITA to deal with, what with all the kludges and workarounds that have been tacked on over the years.
You seem to be under the impression that x86 is all Intel does, and manufacturing some other architecture would be some huge burden for them to take on. News flash: Intel isn't a one trick pony. Ever heard of something called the i960? How about StrongARM? Xscale? Intel does all those, and a host of other, non-CPU, chips as well.