Re(2): [Ti] A different view on Intel/Apple marriage

[Chris Olson]

On Jun 6, 2005, at 5:55 PM, Hector Luna wrote:

> Are we getting sold down the river for the same clockspeed we've been 
> told for years didn't matter?

There's only two choices for 64-bit processors - Apple's G5 and AMD64.  
The rest are has-beens.  Jobs almost stumbled over his words today 
during the Stevenote because Apple got caught between the proverbial 
rock and hard place.  It's good Apple had a backup plan, but the moral 
to this story is you NEVER trust IBM.  I think SCO already found that 
out.

The PowerPC 970 is so vastly superior to the Intel x86 processor that 
it's a joke.  Things like the Virginia Tech supercomputing cluster were 
made possible because of the PowerPC 970 and it's power per watt 
allowing great savings in the cooling system for the computer room.  
The PowerPC 970's superior power dissipation characteristics is what 
made it the cpu of choice (in the Xserve G5) for the US Navy on their 
nuclear subs.

My Take:
IBM got all the business of the three major game consoles running 
PowerPC chips that are loosely based on the 970.  Take a look at the 
specs on that triple core PowerPC Xbox 360 chip once.  Floating point 
power of OVER 1 TERAFLOPS????????

Holy cow, Batman!

It took 1100 PowerMac G5's to make something like 10 teraflops in the 
Virginia Tech supercomputing cluster, which at the time was the third 
most powerful cluster on the planet.  IBM decided to channel all its 
development resources on these new triple core gaming chips then turned 
around and told Apple "you ain't big enough and don't have enough 
market share - if you want PowerPC970's we're going to jack the price 
and we'll develop them when we get time".

Apple got screwed.  Big time.  They had to revert to "plan B".  God 
only knows why they went Intel.  AMD64 would've been a better choice, 
IMHO.  Maybe Intel has some new tricks up their sleeve that we don't 
know about.  But not for me.  I'm going to buy every dual cpu PowerMac 
G5 I can get my hands on.  They're going to be worth big bucks in a 
couple years unless somebody else starts building affordable PowerPC 
hardware.
--
Chris