[Ti] The reason we use Macs instead of PC's (long)

[Chris Olson]

On Nov 22, 2005, at 1:15 PM, alexandre wrote:

> thanks for those in-depth explanations. while i can see your point  
> technically, this still doesn't explain why in 3 years (34 months  
> to be exact) our powerbooks have gone from 1ghz to 1.67

Perhaps you've been caught up in Intel's marketing where the bigger  
the Ghz number, the better it is.  This is simply not so.

Check out the IBM Power5 - a processor with 36 MB L3 on a 256-bit bus  
and bandwidth of 20+ GB per second to the memory bus, per cpu core.   
It would take a room full of the hottest boxes Intel could build to  
match one Power5 p-series IBM server in raw power.  Sure the Power5  
is designed for high-end mainframes, big-iron Unix servers and  
supercomputers.  But like the G5 (a Power4 derivative), that cutting  
edge technology is the eventual basis for the desktop processors we  
all use.

For those who like reading about cutting edge technology, here's a  
pretty good article on the Power5 written in layman's terms.  The  
article summary:

"Power5’s got just about everything: speed, simplicity, innovation,  
seamless backward compatibility, a mature development toolset, and  
the backing of a technological giant.  It’s an unrivaled engineering  
achievement, created by what may be the world’s smartest engineers.   
If IBM’s marketing ever matches the intelligence of its engineering,  
watch out, Intel."

The article is here:
http://www.infoworld.com/infoworld/article/04/12/10/50FEpower5_1.html

Admittedly Motorola lagged in development of the 74xx (G4) series of  
desktop processors because it simply wasn't profitable for them to  
stick big resources in it.  The embedded market is much more  
lucrative for Motorola (now their Freescale Semiconductor spinoff).   
That's why Apple went to IBM.

The rest, as they say, is history and will probably be debated ad  
infinitum.
-- 
Chris

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