Apple switching to Intel, by John C. Dvorak

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Gone !
March 18, 2003

Apple Switch
By John C. Dvorak

Prediction: Apple Computer Corp. will switch to Intel processors within the next 12 to 18 months.

The story starts with January's Intel sales conference. The surprise keynote speaker was Steve Jobs. And then, in the front row of Steve Jobs's keynote address at the last Macworld Expo were top Intel executives. Shortly thereafter, Pixar announced that it would become an Intel shop. That was all step one. Step two is coming.

Apple has been concerned about Motorola dragging its heels in the processor wars and failing to achieve clock speeds that are even half of what AMD and Intel are achieving. Apple has attempted to rationalize clock-speed issues, but the company knows that it cannot do this forever. Worse is the feud between Motorola and Apple, which began after Apple suddenly pulled the plug on the license it gave Motorola to clone the Mac.

Analysis follows:
Complete Story

Personal comment: Dvorak is supposed to be a very reliable source, IMHO. So ? Any opinions ?
 
Dvorak said it. It must be true.

Seriously, it's ridiculous.

His assertion that Apple would use PPC and Intel CPUs in the same computer is laughable. That makes no sense.

The IBM 970 is prepped and ready to roll in quantities this summer. The motherboards have been tapped out, and the cases are being worked on.

Might Apple use Intel chips in server products? Possibly. But any move to Intel is fraught with way too much uncertainty. The minute an Intel Mac is announced, even if it is just for servers, the Mac users will get wind of it, and will cease to buy PPC Macs. Apple would suffer HUGE. They know this, and are not likely to head down this path, unless it's a doomsday plan in the event of Motorola and IBM falling so far behind that their sales won't survive.

Being Mac users, we have an ability to use our heads, something the Dvorak apparently isn't able to do.
 
Okay, thanks for mentioning this, dloyd. Same, thanks serpicolugnut, I'm not enough in news & rumours to distinguish what's half-credible and what's complete b*llsh*t.
 
not only has this been posted before, dinglenuts (Dvorak) has made this prediction before....

I think he's just looking for free publicity (which he usually gets) and a few steamed mac users (which he also usually gets) :D
 
I believe it was approximately 12 to 18 months since he said this the last time :D

There are emulation cards available where you can actualy place an intel chip within your mac. I haven't used them in a number of years so I'm unsure of their viability today. Back in the day they worked great.
 
Originally posted by Rhino_G3
I believe it was approximately 12 to 18 months since he said this the last time :D

There are emulation cards available where you can actualy place an intel chip within your mac. I haven't used them in a number of years so I'm unsure of their viability today. Back in the day they worked great.
Apple produced a PC compatibility card for the Mac. FWB also produced them. I forget the price of the Apple card. However, the FWB cost about as much as a PC-compatible--because that is what it was.

PC-compatibility products for the Mac suffer from a serious problem. They sound like a great idea before you buy them. They have two advantages: 1) They make it possible to brag that you Mac runs PC software. 2) If you absolutely need it, it exists. I am one of those people who needs PC-compatibility now. For the vast majority of Mac users, however, these products are not needed. Once the novelty of running PC software on your Mac wears off, you use it less and less.
 
Originally posted by MisterMe
Apple produced a PC compatibility card for the Mac. FWB also produced them. I forget the price of the Apple card. However, the FWB cost about as much as a PC-compatible--because that is what it was.

PC-compatibility products for the Mac suffer from a serious problem. They sound like a great idea before you buy them. They have two advantages: 1) They make it possible to brag that you Mac runs PC software. 2) If you absolutely need it, it exists. I am one of those people who needs PC-compatibility now. For the vast majority of Mac users, however, these products are not needed. Once the novelty of running PC software on your Mac wears off, you use it less and less.

Actually Apple has made several, and several other companies have made several. The idea goes all the way back to the MacPlus (or was it SE?) with the MacCharlie (anyone old enough to remember that ;) It was an external unit that had a form factor that allowed it to stand beside the Mac and it attached via a cable. It contained basically a full pc and a 5 1/4" floppy drive. Ah the good old days ;)

Nice is that nowdays Macs are fast enough to do a reasonable job of emulating a pc at a decent speed, making hardware solutions less of a necessity. And anyway, if you really needed the performance, pc's are so dirt cheap that you are typically significantly better off just buying a pc anyway.
 
Originally posted by binaryDigit

Nice is that nowdays Macs are fast enough to do a reasonable job of emulating a pc at a decent speed, making hardware solutions less of a necessity. And anyway, if you really needed the performance, pc's are so dirt cheap that you are typically significantly better off just buying a pc anyway.

well actually that is not the reason why it can reasonably emulate a PC. A G3 would not be able to do it as well as a G4. The PowerPC is a risc chip and can switch between big and little endian. That means it can come very close to quickly calculating x86 instructions. With an altivec core on top it's pie.
 
Originally posted by terran74
well actually that is not the reason why it can reasonably emulate a PC. A G3 would not be able to do it as well as a G4. The PowerPC is a risc chip and can switch between big and little endian. That means it can come very close to quickly calculating x86 instructions. With an altivec core on top it's pie.

I'm not exactly sure what statement I made that you're referring to since the quote you snipped simply states that todays Macs do a decent job of software emulation.

In any case, the PPC's ability to switch endian'ness helps a lot more in dealing with data than simply instructions (and when you're emulating, the program code is just data to your application). It just saves a step that your emulator would have perform (ok, it could be multiple steps depending on how large of a data item you're dealing with). Remember that the PPC itself isn't trying to emulate anything, it's the emulator application that's doing it, so saying that the PPC can "come very close to quickly calculating x86 instructions" is misleading.

Plus, having AltiVec support only helps when the x86 code that is being emulated has floating point instructions. It won't do much for pure integer based stuff. Luckily with the complexity of todays gui's, there is a lot of floating point stuff that benefits from having faster floating point. A G3 would be very close to a G4 emulating integer based x86 instructions (actually the emulator would run about the same).
 
Originally posted by serpicolugnut
...His assertion that Apple would use PPC and Intel CPUs in the same computer is laughable. That makes no sense...[/B]
I'm surprised you would scoff and dismiss this so easily.

Apple HAS built machines like this with dual CPU's. these were in the Performa/Quadra days. They had 68040 & 486's. This is the best link I could find: http://www.lowendmac.com/quadra/q610dos.shtml

I remember someone who had one. It was a heck of a lot cooler than using SoftWindows. (Something like Virtual PC except it was Windows emulator rather than a hardware virtual machine.)

Given the chance, I'd sure love to run both W2k and OSX natively but for the moment I'll keep using VirtualPC. Either way having this all in one machine sure beats having to deal with a real physical PeeCee...


[edit]Oops... I guess I was not the first one to say this...[/edit]
 
Originally posted by TommyWillB
I'm surprised you would scoff and dismiss this so easily.

Apple HAS built machines like this with dual CPU's. these were in the Performa/Quadra days. They had 68040 & 486's. This is the best link I could find: http://www.lowendmac.com/quadra/q610dos.shtml
...

Right, but selling a computer with a coprocessor card and selling a computer with 2 cpu's on the mobo (or a mobo capable of having two disparate cpu's on daughter cards) is two completely different kettles of fish.

After all, Apple trying to achieve some amount of pc compatability with a daughter card is, as has been stated many times now, no big deal. Hardly any reason for anyone to think that Apple is going to do a switch. Thinking that Apple would design a system with both chips to facilitate the migration over to the x86 architecture is sheer folly.
 
Okay... That's your opinion.

All I'm saying is that it is NOT unprecedented... and therefore not necessarily laughable.

Let's wait and see...
 
Originally posted by TommyWillB
Okay... That's your opinion.

All I'm saying is that it is NOT unprecedented... and therefore not necessarily laughable.

Let's wait and see...

And I was just trying to point out that the dual-processor model used in the past was designed for a particular use (MacOS and PC side by side), NOT in a config where the two cpus existed side by side on the motherboard with the intent to ease migration. This has no precedant. Apple didn't even attempt this with the switch from 68K -> PPC even with the manufacturer of both chips on board (Mot). AAMOF, I'm unaware of a single system that has used this approach.

From a business perspective this is a very tough. After all, if Apple were planning on switching, the software cost is fixed, and having this mixed hardware only buys them more time, but at a cost.call. You increase the hardware R&D spending tremendously, with the only real benefit being time to market AND you end up with fairly expensive machines because of the hardware involved, and your costs to develop it. And then your software r&d increases because you have to come up with some fancy code to coordinate between the two processors. Now they might be able to justify the software expense by saying that the code they are developing might come in handy at some future point?

I'm not bashing your statement, just trying to put out a reasonably thought out (at least I hope it is) points about why I don't think it makes any sense, to the point of it really not being an option. I don't fall into the "Apple will NEVER switch to Intel" camp, so if they do, I think that they will do it in a way that makes business (and technical) sense. Of course Apple will come out with this magic box next week and prove me a fool ;)

Oh just FYI on this whole hetrogeneous cpu system topic. An early mainstream example of this is back from the late 70's early 80's when various S100 based boxes that utilized both a Z80 and 808x. An example of this would be the Zenith Z100 that could run CPM or MSDOS. I'm sure it goes back further, but I think these are the earliest examples of it's use for desktop computing.
 
The stupidity (or deceptiveness) of Dvorak's argument is what he leaves out of the discussion: the far less painful alternative of IBM 970 instead of Itanium; the 970 has has he same "64-bits her first!" appeal, and maybe even more GHz, for the marketing people.
 
Apple could stick an Itanium inside their machines to run Windows alongside Mac OS. Fine. It wouldn't be the first time. What Dvorak is suggesting, however, is that they put 2 completely different chips, the G4 and the Itanium, on the same bus, with the same instructions relayed to both, trying to run the same programs at the same time. The G4 and the Itanium are incompatible with each other and cannot run the same instruction set; therefore, Apple would need to revamp and revise Mac OS X to run on Windows hardware, which they certainly won't do unless both Motorola and IBM go bottoms up, Chapter 11, etc.

From Intel's page on the Itanium: "From large databases, to high-performance computing, to large-scale data analysis, the Itanium 2 processor is designed for business-critical application environments." This is certainly out of the range of the average Joe-checking-his-email-shmo's needed capabilities. Yes, Apple caters to professionals who want the utmost in service and quality, but the Mac is not the best OS for heavy-duty business operations. Apple will not include the Itanium in its computers.

Now, if Intel started making PPC-type processors, Apple may switch to them. I find it ironic that Apple uses a company like IBM, who made the PC mainstream (IBM-clone), and possibly Intel, the processor equivalent of Windows.
 
Originally posted by arden
Apple could stick an Itanium inside their machines to run Windows alongside Mac OS. Fine. It wouldn't be the first time. What Dvorak is suggesting, however, is that they put 2 completely different chips, the G4 and the Itanium, on the same bus, with the same instructions relayed to both, trying to run the same programs at the same time. The G4 and the Itanium are incompatible with each other and cannot run the same instruction set; therefore, Apple would need to revamp and revise Mac OS X to run on Windows hardware, which they certainly won't do unless both Motorola and IBM go bottoms up, Chapter 11, etc.

Actually that's not what he exactly meant. It makes no sense to have two different processors running the same instruction stream. As you pointed out, this would be a waste and is so out there as to not even be worthy of anything resembling consideration. Not only are they different processors, they don't even use the same same general "architecture", one is RISC the other VLIW. Anyway, since they are two different processors with two different instruction pointers. If they did want to create such a frankenstein, most likely what would happen is that one processor would be designated the primary and the other the slave. For the sake of argument, let's say the primary is the Itanic. Whenever the NEW IA64 version on MacOSX is running, the Itanic is executing, however, when userland code is being run that is still PPC, then the Itanic defers processing to the PPC. The PPC runs the userland code and when it's done, control goes back to the Itanic. While this is an interesting design, it would be so massively complex and bug prone (not to mention the development costs to come up with such a beast) that I think we can safely assume that this will NOT happen (and if it does, then Mac people better start getting their black suits and arm bands ready because Apple will be with us not much longer).


From Intel's page on the Itanium: "From large databases, to high-performance computing, to large-scale data analysis, the Itanium 2 processor is designed for business-critical application environments." This is certainly out of the range of the average Joe-checking-his-email-shmo's needed capabilities. Yes, Apple caters to professionals who want the utmost in service and quality, but the Mac is not the best OS for heavy-duty business operations. Apple will not include the Itanium in its computers.

Keep in mind that the same things were being said for the Pentium when the 486 was the dominant pc chip. This is what people like Intel do. When they release a new family of chips, they keep the prices high to make the margins high to help pay for the r&d costs of the chip. Every new family is aimed at the high end and will slowly filter down to the low end. Ditto the G4 vs the G3 vs the 604 vs the 601. Just because Intel is targeting the high end market at first speaks nothing for what an eventual system might be geared towards (other than the obvious fact that it would be expensive, so price wise it would be geared towards the professional). Remember, the reason we're even having this conversation is the fact that Motorola (and therefore Apple) is falling further and further behind in the cpu/performance wars. Of course they are going to be looking at a "powerful" chip.

Now, if Intel started making PPC-type processors, Apple may switch to them. I find it ironic that Apple uses a company like IBM, who made the PC mainstream (IBM-clone), and possibly Intel, the processor equivalent of Windows.

Intel making PPC compatable chips. Now that's funny. More chance of Strom Thurmond renouncing his race and joining the NAACP. IBM didn't make the pc mainstream, they made the PC, period ;) One thing about IBM, they are freakin huge. Their semiconductor arm is not related to their PC arm (talk about irony, IBM doesn't sell any PC's with the chips they manufacture, at least not any more). IBM lost control of the PC market a long time ago, they are a bit player (relatively) in the market they created. So it's not too surprising that they would be helping Apple out. What's even LESS ironic but more pathetic is Motorola. If Apple completely drops Motorola for the 970 or Itanic, Motorola will have once again lost a major manufacturer due to their incompetence with RISC (Sun being the first).
 
Originally posted by binaryDigit
IBM lost control of the PC market a long time ago, they are a bit player (relatively) in the market they created.
Hence the reason Apple pulled the plug on its clones. If IBM had done the same, we'd be having Apple-IBM wars, and who knows where Microsoft would be.

If Motorola does drop off the map, where will Apple go, fully IBM?

(BTW—add a / to your post, please! :))
 
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