Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 27th Oct 2005 20:09 UTC
"There have been a few recent PowerPC announcements that have caused the Mac Faithful to wonder anew about The Switch and the "real" reasons behind it. First, there was the 970FX announcement, which clearly showed that IBM is capable of putting out a 970 processor that compares quite well with the Pentium M in performance/watt. And then there's the 970MP, which Apple has used to make a monster of a quad-processor 64-bit RISC workstation. To make matters even more interesting, P.A. Semi has just announced a dual-core 64-bit PowerPC processor SoC that, if the specs and numbers are to be believed, could take PowerPC to a whole new performance/watt level."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
You forgot all the Ubuntu reviews ;-)
Seriously, this is an interesting story, though I think it's wrong and the tone is unnecessarily inflammatory. The author, Hannibal, is a man who knows a lot about microprocessor designer. Look over the CPU reviews in ArsTechnica that he wrote, they're pretty impressive.
Personally, I think the real reason for the switch is twofold
A Guarantee of Competitiveness
By alying itself to the dominant ISA, which has two aggressive rivals producing chips for it, Apple no longer has to be worried about being stuck in the CPU doldrums the way they were with the G3 and currently are in the laptop market with the G4. This P.A. Semi thing is due late 2006, early 2007: there is no way Apple can let the Powerbook and iBook ranges limp through another 12-15 months using 1.4GHz G4s; all the screen updates in the world won't help there (and it's worth remembering that a big problem with the G4 is not just its clockspeed, but also its really slow FSB).
A Cheap Platform
IBM sells CPUs to Apple at a price IBM can dictate, due to the slight impact the G5 has on its bottom line. Intel sells CPUs as cheap as possible because AMD is constantly harrying them. But that's not the whole story.
The last year Intel has being promoting its Centrino platform: a low-cost, all-in-one solution of low-power CPU and motherboard with integrated sound, wi-fi, bluetooth and optionally even graphics. This is a great solution for the Apple, which builds laptops and other small-factor PCs based on laptop parts. People should remember that Apple is not totally oblivious to price: they realise there is only so far they can get with style and marketing, before they have to justify the actual computing power.
As for the digital workplace Hannibal talks about, I'm sure Apple has its eye on it, but if you saw the "One More Thing..." announcement a few weeks ago, you saw Steve Jobs put the iMac right at the centre of it. Mac is a part of where Apple is trying to go, no doubt about it.