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

[Chris Olson]

On Jun 7, 2005, at 9:54 AM, Yuta Hsu wrote:

> The clockspeed doesn't matter story still holds.  I truly believe that 
> you get more bang for your clock-cycle with the PPC vs. x86.

I sat thru at least a half hour of Pentium bashing at WWDC 2003.  
Pictures of comparisons of pipelining between the two archs, 
benchmarks, etc..  I watched a dual G5 render a poster for "Finding 
Nemo" so much faster than a dual 3.06 Xeon that it made the Dell look 
like something that got shipped to the US on the Mayflower.  "This 
architecture has legs" I was told.

Now we get to WWDC 2005.  Apple does an about-face.  Macs are going to 
Intel.  The Windows guys have been on the right cpu architecture all 
along, and "we want to build the best computers for our customers".

I'm not buying it.  Especially when I see the Microsoft Xbox 360 being 
powered by a liquid cooled triple core PowerPC chip running at 3.2 GHz 
and cranking out floating point performance of 1 teraflops.  The linux 
guys are just drooling - waiting for the chance to get linux running on 
that Xbox.  And I see IBM preparing to release the Power 6 - a chip 
that has a ten fold computing power increase over anything the X86 line 
has in production.  And except for dual core manufacturing methods, 
there's not much in the x86 world that offers any hope of competing 
against it.

Moving to x86 puts Apple on a price point level with Dell.  Why buy an 
Xserve with dual Xeons when the master of cheap - Dell - can build the 
same thing at a lower price point?  And offer linux in it which is 
every bit as good of a server OS (in fact, I think quite a bit superior 
since linux has a long history of optimization on x86) as OS X Server 
for less money.

> But Steve made a good point... that's not the issue anymore.

It is to hardware people.  PC users aren't typically hardware fanatics. 
  Mac users are.

> The G5 is a spectacular chip, but what good does that do me when I 
> need mobility, and I can't have a Powerbook G5?  Intel has a plan for 
> chips that give more bang per watt, which is of vital importance, 
> especially in the mobile market.

Freescale has a very nice dual-core PowerPC chip that's pin-for-pin 
compatible with the current G4.  Mac users got sold out yesterday.

The hackers will have OS X running on a Dell in no time flat.  Legal or 
no.  If Apple uses proprietary firmware/hardware required to boot OS X, 
the PC guys will figure out how to emulate it in software.  Living 
proof is the PearPC project (http://www.pearpc.net/) - a bunch of 
hackers running OS X on their PC's with software PowerPC emulation.  
They aren't going to buy a Mac.  They'll run a pirated copy of OS X on 
a $199 hack box.
--
Chris