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:
2005-11-14
Your post is very beautifully written, but devoid of substance.
Classic wasn't a tragedy in any sense. When its legacy cruft became too much to bear, Apple moved to a completely new OS (compared to Vista) which still managed to bridge backwards compatibility.
The "new variations on PPC" you mention are largely Cell processors which no one has tried to pass off as being suitable for general-purpose CPUs, or more powerful PPCs which still consume too much power to be laptop-feasible. Laptop sales outpace desktop sales, and vendors ignore this at their peril.
I'm disappointed that IBM refused to invest their own money in Apple's corporate future, too, but realistically PPC entered Apple when Intel had no comparable offerings. Intel caught up, fast, but IBM saw no incentive to compete with Intel and even sabotaged Intel emulation in the G5s without telling Apple.
As far as the 'can't tell them apart' argument is concerned, Macs have been running standard hardware for close to a decade. ADB, NuBus, RS422 serial ports and nonstandard analog video all died back in the Clinton administration. The silent argument from Apple on hardware is the same: OS and hardware run smoothest when designed by the same people. It's the model that used to rule the industry, and until IBM and Microsoft it was unquestioned. Thanks to cloners and Windows, compatibility and driver BSODs are a real issue. Linux has to work twice as hard to resolve this problem because of the amount of blackboxing. Yeah, I'll pay more for a system that doesn't fight or guess to work.
This is about performance, not gut feelings.