Intel-based Macs coming soon? - Page 8

If these rumors are true, IBM has shot itself in the foot. Sure the game consoles will make a great band-aid, but here they are on the cusp of a huge rise in Apple Macintosh marketshare and they don't want to develop for a "small volume" company. The idiocy of this is that if they would just produce a wide variety of PPc chips, that Apple would become a arge volume company in short order. Especially if one of those chips is a mobile G5. Powerbooks would probably surpass iPods in sales.

Foolish business logic by IBM. This hurts two companies
I guess IBM has no business ethics. They were just ufing the Apple relationship to get free advertising from Apples outstanding products and waiting for multiple customers to come running who they would then cater to while dissing the "small volume" company who got them there.

If the move to Intel enables my next Powerbook to run faster and as reliable as 2.3 GHZ a Powermac then all is well and good.

Otherwise...

If this rumor is true, I will never buy anything IBM related again. Just on principal and ethics.

If that means no Nintendo, microsoft, or sony, then so be it.

Its a cut-throat world out there.

Steve Jobs would not make the move, though, without a solid plan and without knowing for sure that the Intel procs would be superior to the IBM ones.

_peace

New Theory

The most unbelievable part of an all out transition to X86 processors is the time table. This flaw has been pointed out several times. Announcing such a plan will likely kill sales of current Apple products, as even the most loyal Mac users wait for the X86 generation of hardware.

Two alternative theories have been proposed that seem consistent with the news reports. One is that Intel builds a chip with a PPC front end and a means of handling AltiVec code. The second is that Apple will use Transitive's emulation technology to run PPC applications.

I'd like to propose a third theory. (If it has been mentioned, sorry for the repeat.) Possibly Apple plans to begin a dual platform strategy in a year. Rather than abandon the Power PC, Apple will add the X86, and Apple need not build all the hardware. Apple can approve certain models that will run OS X, for which the manufacture pays a fee. You might say this is a tightly controlled clone program.

Apple may build some X86 models too. For example, if neither IBM nor FreeScale can supply good enough PowerBook/iBook PPC chips, Apple may choose to go X86 for a while with these models. This gives Apple the options Steve likes to have, it seems.

The down side of such a plan, if it is a downside, is that two versions of Applications and the OS will need to be provided basically forever. Developers have a year to get ready for the light duty X86 Macs. In two years, even higher end X86 Macs will appear.

Such a plan would allow Apple to continue to making PPC Macs, using the best that IBM and FreeScale have to offer. Apple is simply adding the X86 to their portfolio of supported products.

THE ANSWER TO ALL QUESTIONS...

The illustrated dude overlayed on the pic looks like a NAMBLA reject.

Would be a custom chip-set for Apple only. It would be easy to drop in hardware based security. and not have to worry about OSX runing on Dells. As far as other equipemtn goes I would expect that code examples in x86 are easier to find than PPC. I know that Intel has said that they have wanted Apple for a customer for about 20 years. I think that the big win for Apple would be first cost of development, and availability. If you go to Intel.com they talk about having PentiumM Dual Core chips for late '05 or early '06, Centrino as well, workstation class will go dual core with HT. Dual cores 3+GHz, able to support 4 threads per core. Numbers are hard to pin down but they look fine and if you look almost every different processor type is going dual core. They have 15 different projects for dual core. This could be a huge win for Apple and I almost forgot Intel is building WiFi and all things wireless into their MBs no add-ons, and they have the Intel Multimedia support built into their boards as well. Intel is kicking or should be again very soon. If the rumor is correct I would suspect that iBooks and Powerbooks were a real big thing for Apple and the PPC not going past 3.0GHz a ful, year after they had been promised that they would ship 3GHz chips was the other big hitter.

That is somebodies rendition of SJ !?!?!?

I found this article via Google news. Its take is that the move to Intel is pushed by Job's desire for the Pentium D chips which in turn are being pushed by Hollywood in order to implement DRM on video. The article takes the stance that Apple is not willing to cede the video entertainment possibilities.

That pretty much makes sense.........hollywood will be one step closer to ruling the world.

It must be true. The NYTimes is reporting the switch:

SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 - Steven P. Jobs is preparing to take an unprecedented gamble by abandoning Apple Computer's 14-year commitment to chips developed by I.B.M. and Motorola in favor of Intel processors for his Macintosh computers, industry executives informed of the decision said Sunday.

It seems like the Times simply read the rumor sites and turned all the info into an article based on unnamed "industry executives."

Normally, I'd be laughing with you, but the reporter in question is John Markoff.

Markoff is one of the few reporters Uncle Steve cannot afford to screw with. For long, anyway.

Nope, note that it says that is contains comments from industry execs on Sunday. That means they've dug deeper.

Real news organizations don't just quote internet stories, they research it and if they have confirmation they publish them.

The NYT isn't a blog...

I call BS.

I recently did an OS X port of some open source C code which had originally been written to run under x86 Linux. There were endian problems galore. Whoever wrote a few of the code modules couldn't decide between handling a few big tables of data as arrays of bytes or arrays of 32-bit words, and kept doing both all over the place, gleefully casting back and forth between uint8_t* and uint32_t*.

To get the code to run on PPC required adding some byte-order swapping in some places, but not in others, and determining where to swap and where not to wasn't at all straight forward. The port took measurable time and effort -- no way this was a case of "Oh, just recompile it!" I could have tried to rewrite the code to make it endian agnostic, but that would have taken even more time and effort -- a lot of time and effort since I didn't really understand how the code worked.

Would it have been better if the code had been written endian agnostic right from the start? Of course! But I also think it would be better if were paid 20 times my currently salary and only had to show up at work a couple of hours a week. If wishes were horses...

The world is fully of less-than-optimal, less-than-ideally-engineered code. In fact, the world depends on mountains of crappy code. Anyone who thinks the endian issue, and plenty of other issues, wouldn't make an x86 transition extremely painful hasn't a clue about the problems involved in that kind of porting.

Even if "Marklar" is ready to go and tuned to perfection on a few x86 Mac boxes deep in Apple's secret labs, that would represent only a tiny fraction of the development time and effort needed to get a user-satisfying number of x86/OS X apps, both Apple and third-party, up and running and reliable.

And how long did it take developers to stop producing 68k versions of their applications? The answer was not long at all. And how did developers charge for PPC upgrades of their apps? Full price. Look, I don't want to be accused of spreading FUD here, let's assume the story is true: If we're going to rely on the generosity and competence of third parties to provide PPC/86k binaries for Apple's customers, we should start making those Linux contingency plans now. Apple is not in the position it was in the pre-Windows 95 days, and it's going to be hard pressed to convince most every developer that this alleged drastic, abrupt transition will pay off. Unless Transitive is the ABI holy grail, an Apple transition to 86k is dead in the water.

I told somebody...

Pixar "MIND CONTROL MOVIE"

Correct if you're porting C code that does all the nasty things C can do.

Well written C++ has fewer problems, and fewer still if it is written using the Carbon APIs and uses the standard objects because they handle byte-swapping themselves.

More so with Cocao.

This task is exactly what I had to do in porting 500K lines of Objective-C for NEXTSTEP (68k) to NEXTSTEP/Intel (i386).

90% of it was a simple recompile, all the GUI, all the disk I/O was fine except where I had stepped outside the APIs and wrote my own stuff that did not account for endianness of the code.

My expectation is that people will find the same things in graphics intensive software where you monkey around but bits and bytes yourself. If you're using APIs to do it (e.g. CoreImage, quicktime) you won't have any problems.

That means that 90% of software will be trivial to port. My guess is that apps like iWork, Pages, Safari, iPhoto, even FCP and DVDSP will be pretty simple because all the frameworks are already multi-architecture. Apps that do more complex things (e.g. Photoshop) will be more problematic, but it's still doable.

I've been through this before and yes, it's a pain, but nowhere near the pain of having to completely rewrite your code - unless you've been a bad programmer in which case you deserve to be spanked, preferably by someone in leather - and you're NOT allowed to enjoy it.

New Coke was mighty tasty.

THIS IS THE REAL POOP. Thanks to the guy that posted it first...

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125...w=wn_tophead_1

"Transitive's QuickTransit allows any software to run on any hardware with no performance hit, or so the company claims. The techology automatically kicks in when necessary, and supports high-end 3D graphics. It was developed by Alasdair Rawsthorne.

When I wrote about the software for Wired News last fall, the company had PowerBooks and Windows laptops running Linux software, including Quake III, with no performance lag whatsoever.

If Apple has licensed QuickTransit for an Intel-powered Mac, all current applications should just work, no user or developer intervention required.

Programmers could port their software to the new platform slowly and steadily, and the shift would be as relatively painless as the recent move from OS 9 to OS X, which, of course, relied on emulation in the Classic environment.

But why would Apple do this? Because Apple wants Intel's new Pentium D chips."

INFO for you new timers, Apple has used Transitives software a couple of times in the past.

"According to News.com, the Intel transition will occur first in the summer with the Mac mini, which I'll bet will become a mini-Tivo-cum-home-server.

Hooked to the internet, it will allow movies to be ordered and stored, and if this News.com piece is correct, loaded onto the video iPod that's in the works."

"Presumably, Jobs used his Pixar moxie to persuade Hollywood to get onboard, and they did so because the Mac platform is seen as small and isolated -- just as it was when the record labels first licensed music to iTunes. The new Mac/Intel platform will be a relatively isolated test bed for the digital distribution of movies and video.

Will current Mac users like this new locked-down platform? I doubt it, which I guess is why it's going into consumer devices first.

In the PC industry, Apple lost the productivity/office era to Microsoft, but it's trying to get the jump on the next big thing: the entertainment/creativity era, and it's going to drag it users, even if they're kicking and screaming, with it."

WIRED always has the BEST news !!!

I'm afraid you may be right. Too much change may mark the end of Apple. How many rivers must we cross to stick with an admittedly great platform? Jobs may end up trying everyone's patience, from his customers to his developers to his own amazing employees. (And the husbands and wives at Cupertino were complaining about too much overtime a few months ago ... Just think what the mood at Apple will be like if there's a full-court press for x86.)

we've come to hate Intel so much. I don't think many will be able to accept the switch. seriously.

I would die before buying a powerbook with an Intel Inside sticker.

god damn.

I don't mind Intel at all, in a lot of ways IBM is worse then Intel.

Now Microsoft, without question they IS BEAST !!!

amen, brotha. this will be "character building" for many of us.

The huge rise you allude to will turn to vapor unless Steve and company have plans for an amazingly seamless transition to Intel. Like everyone, I'd love to be wowed by news tomorrow of a painless segue, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Why? You don't want a computer that's always at least as fast hardware wise as your windows "friends"? You'd rather it get slower? Apple has always had problems since the beginning of time. They always come out with something super fast and amazing only to not be able to update it for 2 years... The history with motorola, ibm has been bad. At the very least with Intel you'll get a faster computer now.

I love my dual 2.5ghz g5, fully loaded, that cost me $3,900.... However my $1500 windows machine at work is much faster, and cheepier to maintain.

Imagine more affordable computers with OS X, that are even faster than what you have now.

From www.barefeats.com

I often get asked to do price/performance comparisons on the Mac vs PC. It's hard to do since the price of the Windows PCs vary widely depending on the motherboard used and from whom you buy. I did go to @XiComputer for a quote on the AMD Opteron 252 (Dual 2.6GHz) with 4GB of memory, DVD burner, 10K Raptor boot drive, and 160GB data drive, a configuration that matched the Dual G5/2.5GHz Power Mac we tested. I also ran their numbers for the Intel Dual Xeon 3.4GHz system (same config):

The Dual Opteron 252 quote came in at $5593 (before tax and shipping).

The Dual Xeon 3.4GHz came in at $4197.

The Apple Online Store quote for the G5/2.5GHz Power Mac was $4870 + $179 for the 10K Raptor (ZipZoomFly) for a total of $5079. (Apple typically overcharges for memory. Buying the four 1GB PC3200 modules from sources at "sane" prices drops the overall price of the Mac to $4351.)


This was from the last cross platform shootout they had. Now with that said I would like to think that these manufactures are not shipping in the volumes that Apple would be so the price break would be better for Apple and I would think that there would be a special Apple discount as well so it looks like Apple could drop prices maybe by as much as 20% but maybe more like 10 or 15%.

I just read an article at the NY Times. Here are some quotes from the article titled, "Apple Plans to Switch From I.B.M. to Intel for Chips"

Quote #1
---------
"Microsoft's decision to build its own computer hardware, with help from I.B.M., was a direct assault on a market that Intel was counting on for future growth. It is likely that Intel forged the alliance with Apple in an effort to counter the powerful home entertainment and game systems coming from Microsoft and Sony."

My comment: Perhaps, Apple gets a good deal from Intel as a result of the Microsoft move to IBM for the XBox

Quote #2
--------
"While the new partnership is a clear and long-coveted win for Intel, the world's largest chip maker, it portends a potentially troublesome shift for Apple, the iconoclastic maker of sleek personal computers and consumer electronics gadgets."

My Comment: Tme & technical issues will tell

Quote #3
---------
"Mr. Jobs, who left Apple in 1985 to found Next Inc., went through a similar transition when he moved his NextStep operating system from Motorola chips to Intel's x86 processors. When Mr. Jobs sold Next to Apple in 1997 and then returned to the company to lead its resurgence, he moved the operating system to the PowerPC. But it has been widely reported that the company has kept alive a small development project called Marklar that has developed an Intel-compatible version of the Macintosh operating system."

My comment: This is the first I've ever heard of this, I've never heard of Marklar ... this sounds interesting and may be the clue to how this (speculated) partnership between Apple and Intel may work

The article is located at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/06/te...y/06apple.html

You were replying to a guy that just off hand has said that a cheap Windows Machine is faster than a MACchine.

When ever I have responded through the years to one of these challenges stated exactly the same way in person, MACs always win by a large margin.

When I have done this even cheap old MACchines beat new winWows.

I am often surprised at how slow the Mac feels, and yet how badly it beats winWows in a side by side comparison.

The reason winWows lovers respond the way they do is because winWows refreshes the window first as soon as possible, but the menus and tools are not usable until later.

Even if you show them that the Mac is MUCH FASTER they will still say they prefer winWows.



ITs A THING IN THE HUMAN PSYCHY. WE WANT SO BADLY FOR THINGS TO BE SIMPLE AND LOGICAL. Especially programmers are built this way, most of them will NEVER get past thinking Microsoft is good at software development, Chevy builds stylish cars, and Bank of America is the safest bank.

Whatever is the biggest they MUST believe in no matter how much proof you give to the contrary they will NEVER believe in your more complex world, but it does make them good at coding simple stuff !!!

The bottom line is winWows feeeeels fast but it is actually very slow, which means it is making YOU SLOW !

I have a question for YOU unruly MACInteliminaters ???

What changes would you make to Intel processors to Macintize them ??????????????????????

Well, we've pretty much talked out every possibility. Let's see what happens tomorrow.

My final thought for the weekend is, given the amazing amount of ink this story has generated in the mainstream press (MSNMB, WSJ, NYT), nobody from IBM or Apple has stepped forward to say the rumors aren't true.

That's curious. You'd think if IBM and Apple were staying married, one party or the other would speak up rather than see their relationship sullied in the press.

Huh... I thought that it showed that these machines that perform about the same cost about the same. You can see a high end, not the Mac and a low end, not the Mac. My point was that Apple could have some costs reduced as in Intel could design the MBs or at least work with Apple and maybe even manufacture them for Apple. I know that some windows machines can be slow but maybe that has some to do with the software as well. It will be up to Apple to insure that OSX runs well on Intel hardware. If you look at the results of the tests you will see that all of these machines are running neck and neck, so switching hardware should not hamper Apple that much. Maube it is time to do a few things, such as, put OSX on Intel hardware and see what runs faster then, and get with a supplier that has been courting Apple for the last 20 years, and put most supply and pricing issues behind them. I think that we would all be happy with Intel inside if Apple does that. Big if still. And don't forget what Andy Grove promised to Steve 'supposedly Apple would not be able to beat the pricing / savings, and the supply.

PS I was also trying to say that a $1500 Wintel was not in the running. Prices would not that much maybe more like 10 to15% if Apple chooses to pass along the savings. Intel would have special pricing for Apple either way. I know that if this happens that Intel would be a very happy company. I know that they would love to work with Apple that has 'the' reputation for making cutting edge technology accessable to a huge audience, windows no, OSX yes. This helps Intel more than most can imagine. Intel is building all things wireless into their MBs, Intel would most likely want to work on the next versions of USB/Firewire, Apple would love to have seamless wireless networking built into their portables, Apple would love to offer Dual Core CPUs in their laptops. Intel would love to innovate and not be tied to the MS legacy as mch as possible.

I've owned one of most of the generations of the mac since 1985. I love Apple and will go with it anywhere. I will follow Steve to the dark side, if that's where he wants to take Apple.

I can't wait to see the plan.

YES, you showed that, but I was pointing out that people that make obviously incorrect statements like that usually don't change their minds, proof or evidence has no effect on them.

These types always publicly bow to the GODs of bullies and say "See we won." Even when they have lost, money and BIGNESS is the only thing that matters to them.

Well from what I have heard from the NeXTies get ready to crow if Apple does move to Intel. Apparently OSX should FLY on these machines.

PS not an Intel lover, just repeating what I have heard and this is from about three years back long before this brew-ha-ha.

Wow, I'm sorry I was away this evening!

Too much stuff to comment on.

Will we be able to see video of Steve's keynote at the WWDC tomorrow? Will it be posted on Apple.com?

Normally, when that happens Apple makes it known well in advance. They didn't broadcast his last keynote at Macworld.

They haven't said a thing about it. It would be on their site, but it's not.

Perhaps they won't be doing it anymore. I can't imagine why.

yes, thank you for telling me how I feel.

No my windows machine at work, is far cheepier than what you quoted here. I love how people always retort that it's not really that much more expensive, and macs are faster. There's like 6 people that actually believe that. I like the g5 chip, and in some cases it's faster than your average dell.

But consider how optimized windows is on a comparible chip and things are just much faster. Maybe photoshop is faster on my mac, but the things I do everyday web, email, and browsing are faster on my pc. Better graphics drivers, and much more optmized browser connection. I have a top of the line windows machine and mac both sitting on my desk at work. My collection of macs numbers in +50 with 4 g5s currently running.


If you check out Tom's hardware you'll see how badly the g5 gets creamed in some pretty basic tests. All I know is that photoshop cs2 takes 8 seconds to launch on my g5, and 4 seconds to launch on my slower windows computer. My windows machine also renders the same effect on the same file nearly 2 minutes quicker.

This aside doesn't mean anything... None of it. You'll all be sipping the koolaid tomorrow when steve shows a intel processor outperforming current macs by a very large margin.

Ever thought of looking at the comments to TFA? His exact quote is this: "Brian: I've heard it from several different executive-level sources inside Apple. Hope that helps."

You must be smoking something if you think I would invent something that can be so easily verified.

1. CISC -> RISC
2. AltiVec
3. a special chip so Mac OS X won't run on any old x86 machine (assuming they go to x86 which I doubt)

Sure. You claim you talked to some "NeXTies" back when we were mired in G4 land, and you think those comments still apply to today? Great anal-ysis.