Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Feb 2007 21:56 UTC
Remember PA Semi? The company has just released, as promised, its first chipset. "They are full 64-bit PPC, support virtualisation, and would do Alitvec but that name is copyrighted by Freescale. Instead they do 'VMA'. The three parts run at a max wattage of 25, 15 and 10W for the 2.0, 1.5 and 1.0GHz parts respectively, with typical wattage listed at 13, 8 and 6W. The individual cores are said to have a 7W max and 4W typical power consumption at 2.0GHz." PA Semi was one of the prime reasons why Ars's John 'Hannibal' Stokes doubted Apple's reasoning for the switch to Intel.
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Member since:
2006-03-17
While I agree with your statements about the x86 line, I have to say that I feel Apple made a mistake in this 'switch' process.
I had an intense crash-course in the MacOSX world at my last job and I found them to be rather weak machines. Whether this was because they were older machines and I've been so spoiled by 2Ghz goodness, or if they really are as slow as they felt - I don't know, but they did have a different personality.
I've studied all the aspects (the Mach underpinnings, the tragedy of 'Classic', the bastardized unixness of it all, etc) - and I came to appreciate the amount of dedicated development time that went into making the total package. I personally don't really like the environment, but that's just my taste and I understand why some people prefer OSX over XP (and far too few consider Linux).
But for Mac users, I think it would have been best to maintain PPC chipsets - as there are many new PPC/variations coming into the market now. I've seen the poor performance of 'Rosetta' and feel pity for those that got stuck with new PPC laptops only to find they've been obfuscated. I know that it's great that new Mac laptops can run Windows, but to me - now it's just an over-priced PC laptop. If it had a unique CPU along with a unique OS - then I think it would be appropriate, but I've got a gut feeling that _someone_ will publicly crack OSX on X86 (correct me if this has not already happened, as it may) - so what's the value in a x86Mac? Show me a laptop based on the STI-Cell chip and I'd take more notice (this being feasable or not is probably fanciful musing).
While Intel will probably be providing Apple with their top-line Core2 chips, there's also AMD and others to consider (lets just say competitive options are better). I love my 2Ghz Turion64 (and I'm looking to upgrade CPU to an x2) But while Mac users can finally fight back against the "But it doesn't run windows.." argument, maybe it was better that they didn't. At least their machine was truly 'different', for better or worse.
Edited 2007-02-06 02:50