An interesting article at Ars Technica takes a look at some compelling data (the longer-than-normal processor update cycles in Apple’s personal computer lineup) and speculates that Apple’s enthusiasm for its partnership with Intel might be cooling. Like Apple’s soured relationship with once-BFF Google, this may be the result of Intel’s increasing activities in the mobile computing space.Of course, it might just be because Apple just doesn’t care about old fashioned personal computers anymore. Then again, Apple’s accountants must still love Macs, because Apple just posted record Mac sales. But Apple jumping to AMD? As interesting as AMD’s Bulldozer architecture may turn out to be, we’ve all been burned by processor architectures that seemed awesome in concept but never delivered on their promises. PowerPC, anyone?
As the Ars article mentions, Apple’s reticence might simply be because they don’t like Intel’s Westmere chips that much, and is holding out for the upcoming Sandy Bridge line. And of course, how long has it been since any of us bought a new personal computer because the processor wasn’t fast enough? Everyone who’s doing video rendering and complex scientific simulations raise your hands. Everyone else, you are liars!
But the real conspiracy theory is that Apple is peeved about yet another deep-pocketed competitor entering its smartphone turf. Intel essentially has been saying, “we plan to design a complete reference smartphone package, from hardware to software to an app store, and then offer that to every single one of Apple’s competitors, who will either go straight to market with it or will improve on it and then go to market.”
Ars believes that the Intel-Apple relationship is sure to end badly. What do you think?
Sure it will end badly. No doubt about that. Might go on for a few more years, but once ARM CPUs have 3GHz and 16 cores the typical Apple fan will not care. IOS will replace MacOS eventually. Apple only cares for products with high margins or a possibly big future.
And I would buy a new CPU from AMD once they have AES accelleration like new Intel CPUs. That is a killer feature for encrypted SSD drives IMHO.
You forgot one other need: become 64 bit capable, AFAIK current ARM architectures are 32bit only which isn’t good enough in some case.
If memory serves, there was an ARM paper at Hot Chips, this year, which talked about this kind of extension..
IMO 64 bit isnt that big a deal… until you hit the 4Gb ram limit and must resort to things like PAE even then It might be better to go to something like 48 bit as it would be denser I believe some old IBM mainframes used something like that.
most of the stuff 64bit speeds up is better ran on a DSP than an applications processor anyway. video… and I believe checksuming for the ZFS filesystem would be good examples though I’m not sure how the latter would work on a DSP
If you really think about it most applications don’t even need 32bit can could get along fine on 16 or 8 bit systems, modern games and multimedia do pretty much need 32bit though.
With the ever increasing media needs and uses of phones these days, the 4GB “barrier” will be hit in short order on mobile devices. Don’t kid yourself, we are at most two years out from that limit on smart phones. Higher MP cameras and HD video will need more memory, if for nothing else than to buffer frames.
So you are expecting phones to have 4gb of ram in the near future? I don’t see that happening.
E.g. iPad has only 256MB ram, iPhone4 512MB. If plentiful ram was easy & cheap for these devices (as it is for PCs), they would have 1 gig by now.
It is increasingly easy for them to include more RAM (and physically, you can now fit 4 GB of ram in the same space that you can fit 512MB, just not for the same price). Also consider the mobile space is expanding at a far, far greater pace than PC’s are right now. I fully expect dual-core phones within a couple years as well. Call me crazy, but that’s my prediction.
I’d go on a limb and call you crazy. 🙂
Not on dual cores, but on 4gb+ RAM on phones. That would be overkill for any real world requirements.
Overkill today is a shortsighted limitation in months. Or are you new to computers? :p
No, and I’m not new to phones either. There are lots of limitations you’ll hit before the memory becomes an issue at all. And again, if it was easy to do, it would have been done already. Apple and Google added contorted task management systems to their platforms just because of the small RAM.
If you’re betting against increases in memory requirements, you obviously haven’t paid that much attention to the trends in this industry.
PLenty of people who had been around computer for a long time said that 640KB was plenty of memory, until it wasn’t.
Eventually, but I think 2 years is unlikely. First, because unlike the PC world, power consumption is critical rather than desirable – we’ll not see multi-core phones until they can get multi-core processors with heat output and battery life comparable to current generation phones. Second, because the cost will initially be prohibitive – even Apple’s most rabid fans will be hard-pressed to justify a new $2000 dual-core iPhone…
I think three years would be more likely, maybe four. Technology changes quickly, but it still takes time for it to appear, mature, and for people to build a product around it.
The new Samsung Galaxy S has 2GB RAM. While I do not own one, it was a joy to use during a demo. It felt very fast while multitasking because backgrounded apps that would have been swapped out of memory on lesser phones reloaded quicker since their contents were still in memory. As other posters have mentioned, video apps that support 720p will likely take large chunks of memory. With the current progression of smartphones, I would have to agree with jgagnon and I would be surprised if we didn’t see smartphones with 4GB within the next two years.
erm.. no sPhone does not have 2Gb of ram. Maybe storage but not ram. It has 512Mb of LPDDR2 ram.
iPhone 4 for example has the same amount of slower LPDDR ram.
As for the dual core cpu’s in phones… I’m pretty sure both nokia and HP had those. Actaully those were dual CPU’s phones… but that counts too
It’s nokia N96 I think… and that’s an old phone.
To me Apple can use whatever CPU they want. I didn’t care for them when they were PowerPC and I don’t care for them being Intel … I prefer to choose what HW I want to run as much as I like being able to control *my* OS and do with it whatever I want.
Funny how people that “don’t care” about something care enough to read the article about something they don’t care about, and then care enough to waste time commenting that they don’t care.
Well, that was my point that you try to avoid
I think it’s pretty obvious that if a so called friend starts mowing your lawn, then you’ll get pissed.
Apple clearly wants the entire mobile market in my view and if Intel do deliver on the promise then they simply become competitors and will unlikely work co-operatively on most things.
It’s a reality that Apple needs to come to grips with. Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Intel to mention a few big players, not to mention all the Android-based devices.
No matter what each of us think of these variants of mobile devices, they each have their slice of the pie and I think Apple’s share in that pie is going to shrink pretty rapidly over the coming years if not months.
Feature parity isn’t far off.
Geeks look for features, average users look for simplicity. Everyone else still has a long way to go to offer the simplicity of the overall iPhone experience for the tech challenged user – which just happens to be the majority of the population…
Simplicity, of course, is a feature. 😛
No.
Don’t disagree with him, I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about. I’m positive he has spent extensive time demo’ing every other phone out there, including all flavors of Android and the custom user interfaces on top of it before asserting that the iPhone was the easiest to use.
the IPhone is not by a long way a simple phone, I would say if user wanted simplicity they would just buy phones not smartphone.
The IPhone succeed because it’s a trendy smartphone, and Apple got a very good PR. I think that my crappy normal japanese phone offers more feature than the iphone ( save for the non crappy browser ).
Rubbish. I tried downloading an app for my feature phone yesterday. Conducting street-side surgery is a simpler and less pain-inducing matter. The iPhone wrote eight years of mobile apps out of history because the usability was so night and day.
Rubbish ? When did you expected a phone to download application (normal phone not “smartphone”) ?
Quite right, which is why I have a cheap phone – I can talk to people with it, and send and receive the occasion SMS. For anything more, I have a real computer.
Simplicity in itself is a feature and the gap is closing. I doubt Apple denies this behind the scenes, even if their Legion of Loyal Fans do.
Why? I’d be happy if someone else mowed the lawn. Now, if they start putting up their own lawn furniture and turning it into a croquet feld, well, that’s a different matter.
It’s possible Apple might start buying AMD chips, though thinking about it with AMD’s market cap of $5-6bn and Apple’s cash reserves of $40bn+, they might just buy AMD outright
That’s just silly. Why invest in a market that quite clearly isn’t where the future lies (according to Jobs himself)?
Also, it would pretty much leave Intel as the only processor supplier, and I don’t think the various government institutions around the world are going to like that prospect.
Edited 2010-07-27 09:26 UTC
AMD is now a largely fabless company. It’s the IP and the brain-trust that matters. If Apple thought that had competitive value they would, I am sure, consider buying AMD.
Your second point does not make much sense. I assume your talking about anti-trust here but anti-trust does not come into play because Apple is not an existing competitor to Intel or AMD. Sure their acquisition by Apple (which would use their chips exclusively) would reduce Intel’s competition but anti-trust could not be used in this context to block the acquisition.
That said, I agree that this type of acquisition is unlikely simple because, frankly, AMD has no strategic value to Apple unless their latest IP is significantly superior to intel, which it’s not.
I actually think an Apple acquisition of ARM is much more strategic (or Clear or Sprint).
]{
Buying AMD also gives you ATI. And GPUs are very very important these days and in the future. Also, remember that Apple bought PA Semi, a PowerPC maker, after the switch to x86 was done. Talking about “where the future lies” 😉
Never say never.
well I was just idly mulling, and it wasn’t a properly thought our suggestion, but here are a couple of ideas plucked off the top of my head:
* Jobs likes absolute control, owning AMD would mean he would no longer be dependent on someone else for chips (he as been burnt by chip suppliers in the past)
* Jobs is spewing marketing bullshit. He doesn’t believe that desktop computers are now obsolete due to the ipad. If he truly did, he would (a) discontinue the mac and macbook likes (b) release an ipad that didn’t require being connected to a pc and (c) replace every desktop and laptop computer in his empire with ipads
* The effect on Intel is not particularly relevant to Apple, monopolies formed not due to anti-competitive behaviour on the part of the monopolist are not prohibited.
Thanks for the most obvious proof that you don’t read articles.
The ArsTechnica article goes through great lengths to argue why using AMD CPUs is only remotely possible under one condition and that buying AMD altogether is not an option at all!
AMD-Intel cross-licensing deal ( http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.com/operations/ip/802.html ) basically says (this is simplified, for exact see section 6 on the link):
If AMD goes out of business, goes private, or gets acquired, then all AMD patents belong to Intel and possible buyer of AMD (in case of acquisition) loses right to produce and design x86 compatible chips.
Apple buying AMD would be favor to Intel and Apple would be left with nothing; they would need to produce new ground up design which is not x86 and not infringe any of AMDs’s own patents. Basically to reinvent a company.
Not to mention that it would be a disaster for CPU industry, and would leave everything to Intel.
Apple use their partners as stepping stones.
Steve Jobs is the kind of guy who thinks Intel is everything that’s vulgar about the PC. Switching Mac to x86 was an unavoidable choice after IBM let Apple down. Apple will not let this same thing happen again, even with Intel. Complete self-reliance is their goal.
Not sure I can agree with that. Apple relies on its developers heavily – very much so in the mobile market.
I think Apple is in a very interesting position here. On the one hand, they can stay with x86-64bit as the foreseeable future of the Macintosh line; whether that means staying with Intel or going with AMD is not really an issue.
But what if things really go sour with Intel, and they for whatever reason cannot or do not want to go with Intel? If they really want to stay with x86, they’d have to buy VIA (a big step backwards in speed and bandwidth) or design their own x86-compatible chip, which would be highly unreasonable. So what do they do? What is this, as Steve put it, “magical” device that has set sales records for the company?
That’s right: Your 2012 Mac desktop may just be ARM-based. After all, OS X runs on it (in the form of iOS), it’s highly energy efficient, and Apple has a great deal of control over the chipsets, just as they did with the PPC line. Of course this means we’ll be back in the land of Universal Binaries and a huge marketing scheme that explains why ARM chips are so much better than Core-series x86 chips, etc etc.
Do I really think this will happen? Of course not! But don’t be surprised if it’s rumored for the next few years as the iPad and iPhone4 continue to be leaders in their respective markets.
You don’t need to argue that ARM chips are better than x86 chips (even Apple boosters know RDF won’t stretch that far without breaking), they just need to say “performance doesn’t matter, it’s all about the apps and user experience”. Once they go ARM, their PC’s suddenly get “appstore-enabled”.
When you think of it – the future Apple PC is probably an extension of the iPad idea. Connect a keyboard and mouse, possibly a monitor, and suddenly you have a “pc” that’s enough for the vegetating populace of the world tomorrow.
Is that why Apple does not manufacture HW anymore?
He only really cares about his latest product-of-the-week.
Macintoshes? They’re last decade. Even iPods and the Apple TV are old hat. The iPhone will rapidly diminish into “abandonware” when Steve Jobs releases a new gadget.
Apple only concentrates on the two devices that have been most recently released, and those two do not contain Intel CPUs.
I disagree; I think he cares greatly about the Macintosh, he just cares more about the iDevices right now, as they are the big money makers at Apple.
As such, there will come a time when the two concepts merge and future Macs will either be hybrid OS X/iOS on x86-64 chips or — far-fetched but within the realm of possibility — they will be ARM based super-iDevices. Either way it will be a big shift away from what we OS X users are comfortable with.
Good thing (for me) that Haiku is making steady progress.
I think we live on a capitalism-based society and apple is no exception. If intel processors is the best (in terms of cost and benefits) apple will keep using it. Simple as that.
Its about return for the shareholders, and consumers are just pawns to that end. Every single Apple product purchaser here should wake up, you are a Steve blowJobs Bukkake Stooge.
Usually it looks more like that Apple wishes to abandon the PC market altogether and concentrate on iPad/iPhone only.
The current Macs are not very good and I doubt todays update will help out all that much somehow.
OSX updates are left to be desired as well
Isn’t this more to do with the market though? At least I find myself increasingly doing my online activities from a mobile device. Usually my PC only gets booted for something a bit more complex, requires more rapid input (like monthly budgeting) or gaming.
“How long has it been since any of us bought a new personal computer because the processor wasn’t fast enough? Everyone who’s doing video rendering and complex scientific simulations raise your hands. Everyone else, you are liars!”
<raising hand>
I upgraded the CPU on my tower last year, and I don’t do video rendering nor complex scientific simulations.
I’m not a liar, I just play games sometimes
I hope to keep this one for some years.
Actually, I replaced my black MacBook with an aluminium one for the very same reason, but the difference was the GPU. If the Intel’s GPUs weren’t so crappy, I wouldn’t have.
I think Apple is now so successful they have to think a lot more about how their decisions affect their suppliers and partners – especially the ones who are trying to steal their business!
Steve Jobs probably doesn’t want to line the pockets of firms who are developing products to compete against them, why would he?
i think this comment describes pretty good what is really going on:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/07/there-will-be-blood-why-a…
Edited 2010-07-27 14:47 UTC
Apple did update the iMac, the Mac Pro and a 27″ display today.
and now even the smallest imac has a dedicated gpu from ati. apple doesn’t seem to be satisfied with intels integrated solutions.
edit – an that’s why:
quake 4
gforce 9400m – around 40 to 60 fps
intel gma hd – around 12 fps
Edited 2010-07-27 16:19 UTC
…. one more reason to support nvidia.
The mac pro seems a bit underwhelming with a nvidia 210 that’s a $40 card
Death to nVidia.
apple are control freaks, so anyone working with them is likely to have something go badly if for whatever reason you express an opinion different than Job’s.
Also, one of Apple’s issues is that the newer chicps don’t have the option of coming integrated graphics free.
Apple owns the Power PC’s so they can go back to them. IBM has some pretty impressive numbers.
I have to second the value of the IBM side of the PPC family. I work on a daily basis with their 64-bit systems on AIX (Power4 on up), and I have been quite pleased with the performance. The architecture is also far cleaner than the x86/AMD64 hydra.
This. Anyone into hardware loves the Power/PPC architecture. No programmer I know “likes” the x86 architecture. The x86-64 is a LITTLE better, but not nearly as nice as any of the RISC processors. Look at an industry that does not need to run legacy x86 software: the PPC is at the heart of all three current generation game consoles.
That’s why the comment in the article –
– is just nonsense. PPC delivered in spades. Apple switched to Intel for two reasons: Intel gave them a better deal for processors, and it made it easier for Macs to play Windows games… and that second reason is probably more important than the first.
I agree with the first point, but I don’t see any real push from Apple on the gaming side (and it’s been four years since the switch to Intel). If anything, I’d say they continue to be, at best, rather indifferent to gaming on the Mac. Case in point: not even an Nvidia card option on the new Mac Pro. The new iMacs are ATI-only as well.
The G5 was a very good chip when it first appeared in 2003 (I bought an original dual 2 GHz Power Mac G5 — now retired in favor of a $1000 Hackintosh that outspecs/outruns a Mac Pro priced at $3300), but it ran quite hot and required liquid cooling in its later iterations. Apple’s laptop processor at that time, the G4, was stalled at a bus speed of only 167 MHz for nearly 4 years before the Intel laptops were released.
Apple switched to Intel because it gave them processor parity with the rest of the PC industry and there’s no way they could put the G5 in their laptops, which have constituted a majority of Macs sold for quite some time now.
Ugh – not this laptop myth again! Apple used water-cooling for their desktops because they over-clocked their CPUs, but by the same token, they could have UNDER-clocked the CPUs to put them in laptops. IBM also came out with a low-power version of the G5 right before Apple announced their move to Intel.
Not that low-power in laptops even mattered at the time. They were making laptops at that time using the PRESCOTT CPU! There were enough lap-scorching Intel laptops out at the time that lap protectors were a big item. So let’s not hear anymore of this nonsense that “Apple couldn’t put a G5 in a laptop.” It’s just as stupid as people STILL posting jokes about Mac mice having one button.
Edited 2010-08-01 00:15 UTC
Yea but that has more to do with reducing manufacturing costs with a custom in-order cpu than dropping x86 overhead.
No they switched because the PPC couldn’t deliver when it came to processing/power. Intel was leagues ahead when it came to power efficiency and Jobs couldn’t wait for IBM to catch up.
Yes, but the statement about Windows is correct. There are a lot of people who need Windows on their job. A lot more than those who need a Mac, and with an x86 chip Apple can serve both worlds. And Linux and everything else.
People loves Macs, and they’re much more prone to buy them if they know they can always run Windows.
PPC spades – upto a point.
IBM – Motorola – Apple had a joint development center in Austin. However, the direction each wanted to take with PPC differed.
I believe IBM wanted to focus more on high-end servers and did not see much value in throwing effort into PPC. Apple was interested in buying low-power client parts to fuel their cool Cube, iMac, and Laptop designs.
Motorola, the other company fabricating PPC, could not keep their fabs tooled for next gen processes. PPC was fairly low volume for them to justify investments I guess. They also had trouble delivering processors (G4 or G5) on time.
So yes PPC delivered in spades – but only certain markets. Desktops – yes in spades. Low-power laptop space – not so great.
Edited 2010-07-31 06:46 UTC
Funny how the author is talking without facts!
PowerPc is one of the successful chips to ever come along. hmmm lets see PS3 based on the powerpc with over 35M units sold,
ok..how about the all famous microsoft xbox with “xenon chip” in the xbox that has sold 39M units, is oh lets all guess together.. yes powerpc architecture.
just because apple failed to use it to its full potential is not powerpc’s fault, they are a for profit company and will do what is necessary to increase profits further.
arm processors will go to 64bit when the market warrants it, there is ALOT competition for 64bit cpu’s out there like the Quad core 64bit mips SOC from broadcom
I find it reasonably unlikely the “Mac” line will stray away from Intel in the foreseeable future. OSX would require complete re-work, not to mention the 3rd party applications. There are two types of mac user: Casual home user / dont wanna mess with it — And the hardcore multimedia stead fasters who never went to PC, and that end of them would be boned by going to ARM.. ARM is a respectable enough CPU, however even if you did ramp the speed up to 3ghz and add 16 cores, its still not going to run with a modern Intel in the multimedia rendering arena, nor gaming for that matter. Then there is the momentum Apple has gained with their Mac line in the recent years, that would basically vaporize.. Software companies dont like total arch changes, and are slow enough to adopt an x86 mac variant, much less anything else.. So they may as well just stop making computers and go exclusively gadgets before they switched the Mac to a non x86 CPU. As to them using AMD, seeing as how AMD is second place and considered “economy” in most circles, the elitist attitude of Apple would seem to be at odds with using something thats a known #2, they are FAR to self obsessed for that.
I’m biased but my history with Apple make me believe that *any* relationship with Apple is sure to end badly.
Apple is a closed ecology system for a reason. In the end, closed becomes closure.
Obviously Apple and Intel might clash. Apple doesn’t like Intel supporting the MeeGo community. I think Apple will do something rather radically different, as always. Here’s my crazy thoughts:
1. Apple would expand its software lines beyond the mainstay pieces of software like iTunes.
2. Apple would make its own programming languages like Microsoft and Google.
3. Apple would make a brand new operating system from scratch.
4. Apple would make a deal with Sony and IBM to relaunch PowerPC desktop computers.
I know I sound crazy right now. So does Apple. Maybe crazy people don’t understand crazy things, I suppose.
Way ahead of you. Objective C is essentially Apple-only language these days (nobody else uses it).
I don’t know where these people that think Apple are “crazy” are. Certainly stock market isn’t thinking that way, and they would probably be the first to take note of insane behavior.
People that think Apple are crazy should get their own head checked.
You have way too much trust in the stock market.
Where was the market four years ago at the height of the real estate / mortgage bundle?
Heavily invested in sub-par mortgage backed securities.
Right, because that’s not crazy.