This transition is all about Apple joining the mainstream. Apple hardware will be just like everyone else's.
Quote:
This is Jobs last chance to really compete against Windows, to show that the Mac OS really is superior and have the marketplace agree.
These are HUGE risks. Don't take Microsoft so lightly. Apple won't grow marketshare just because it tried.
Microsoft has the size, resources, and patience to dominate which ever market it chooses. Microsoft has defeated companies which had a better position in a particular market which MS has entered late. Microsoft has defeated companies in their own markets with inferior software.
Because of Microsoft's size and resources it is able to refine mediocre software until it is good enough to overwhelm and take over a market. This has just happened recently with Palm.
The operating system is even more daunting because it is a market that Microsoft overwhelming owns. MS will fight tooth and nail to hold its dominance.
Apple has to exocute its Intel transition near flawlessly. Any misstep could cost Apple marketshare. Any weakness Dell, HP, Microsoft will be able to easily exploit.
Apple needs to stack the deck in its favor as much as possible. Macintosh and OSX have to be widely percieved as better than Dell and Vista. Apple cannot be the same as everyone else - it has to be better.
Unless intel is doing something drastic to the XEON that would make it obselete for high performance systems I just wouldn't expect see a Woodcrest, or even a Clovertown in PowerMacs. After Apple, and Nvidia finally made a quadro available I can't imagining Apple trying to go to market with a workstation that was second tear performance rated compared to BOXX, and Alienware.
How about the fact that all of the Xeons are being phased out? Do you want another Netburst chip? Around the middlw of next year the Netburst chips will be gone.
The performance of the Xeons is nothing to write home about. They are outclassed by the Opterons. The replacements are supposed to be better. The Conroe is the first of these replacements, as it is coming out earlier than expected (as is Merom). Woodcrest is just the lower power rack mount server version.
Of course if guys want to wait for both the Silverthorne and the Hapertown, be my guest.
You're syill living in the PPC dreamworld. Two G5's still don't equal two Xeons, but they're close. They fall further behind two Opterons.
Unless you are a member of Apple Hardware assigned to the industrial specs for the motherboard up to the chassis this article is a waste of time.
Apple will design the prototype with manufacturing aide from Intel.
Apple will Quality Test with aide from Intel.
Apple will certify motherboard stamp out with Intel doing the manufacturing.
Apple will contract their case they design and certify, along-side cooling systems (with aide from Intel) and finally Apple will contract another company to assemble the necessary parts once they have passed all hardware stress tests, heat tests, power dissipation tests etc.
Intel will prosper having cutting edge systems they have never been able to produce that are aesthetically appealing (something else Intel really has never been concerned with) and continue to make their margins on chipsets and now a specific line of motherboard exclusively manufactured with the joint efforts of Apple and Intel.
Bottom line: Intel suggests, Apple has final decision and Steve goes through iteration after iteration until they are no longer, "Shit." When Steve is satisfied along with the rest of the Industrial Design, Hardware and Software Engineering teams then the last hurdle is Marketing.
Steve knows this and will, in parallel, work with Marketing to nail down a campaign that isn't, "Shit."
When all ducks are in a row, "Steve will present."
Unless you are a member of Apple Hardware assigned to the industrial specs for the motherboard up to the chassis this article is a waste of time.
Apple will design the prototype with manufacturing aide from Intel.
Apple will Quality Test with aide from Intel.
Apple will certify motherboard stamp out with Intel doing the manufacturing.
Apple will contract their case they design and certify, along-side cooling systems (with aide from Intel) and finally Apple will contract another company to assemble the necessary parts once they have passed all hardware stress tests, heat tests, power dissipation tests etc.
Intel will prosper having cutting edge systems they have never been able to produce that are aesthetically appealing (something else Intel really has never been concerned with) and continue to make their margins on chipsets and now a specific line of motherboard exclusively manufactured with the joint efforts of Apple and Intel.
Bottom line: Intel suggests, Apple has final decision and Steve goes through iteration after iteration until they are no longer, "Shit." When Steve is satisfied along with the rest of the Industrial Design, Hardware and Software Engineering teams then the last hurdle is Marketing.
Steve knows this and will, in parallel, work with Marketing to nail down a campaign that isn't, "Shit."
When all ducks are in a row, "Steve will present."
Unfortunately Nothing you mentioned below has anything to do with Intel designing the motherboard. We are very likely to suffer through the same old stupid Apple design tricks that make their professional hardware a bit of a joke.
Quote:
Great news:
- Cheap Mactels.
- Mactels with great PC features like double DVD drives & more VRAM.
- Quiet Mactels.
- Frontal connectors.
- Virtualization to switch from Mac to Linux to Windows. Wow! That alone will sell many Mactels and boost market share!!!
As for the Intel sticker, it does not matter at all. It is absolutely irrelevant to me. A want a great OS inside a great cheap feature-rich hardware.
Don't get me wrong folks I think there is potentially some good to come from this. As has already been mentioned Intel designs some of the better motherboards out in the real world. The BIG BUT in this case though is that they are contractors to Apple here. This prety much means that Apple will have a hand in the feature set. Hopefully we will see innovation beyond the standard intel chips set, but even there I think it is a stretch.
I meant x86 machines, and the rest follows below. I should have been clearer.
Actually, it's the device tree. The Intel Macs don't supply a complete device tree. (From Apple's developers' Guide, pg 52).
If you can find any reference to any cpu other than ARM, PPC, or SPARC, I would be interested to know, as would the OFWG.
Now, here's the interesting part. While in theory, any cpu or bus can work, in reality, it can't.
"The architecture is independent of the underlying instruction set, bus, operating system, and so on. However, the core requirements and practices specified by the standard are augmented by platform-specific requirements. For example, processors such as PowerPC and SPARC, or buses such as PCI and Sun's SBus, have their own requirements and bindings. The union of the core and platform-specific requirements provides a complete firmware specification for that platform."
The "reality", as the documentation you reference suggests, is that Open Firmware for x86 would need some amount of chip and chipset-specific code to run, not that it's impossible to use Open Firmware at all. At some level every abstraction needs to be grounded to its specific environment. The paragraph you quotes COULD have just as easily stated "processors such as the PowerPC, SPARC, or x86, or busses such as PCI, SBus, or PCI-Express, have their own requirements and bindings." It's just that no one's ever put Open Firmware on x86 yet.
This debate is irrelevant, of course, because it's pretty apparent that EFI is the way to go here.
I think the whole point is that NONE of this is new information. This thread is just so much panty-wringing.
You're right about that. But until Stevie gives his speech, we're going to be doing a lot of it.
And in the years to come, with the confusing nature of x86 cpu and supporting chip lines, not to speak of the "AMD Question", we'll be doing more of it than we ever have in the past.
The "reality", as the documentation you reference suggests, is that Open Firmware for x86 would need some amount of chip and chipset-specific code to run, not that it's impossible to use Open Firmware at all. At some level every abstraction needs to be grounded to its specific environment. The paragraph you quotes COULD have just as easily stated "processors such as the PowerPC, SPARC, or x86, or busses such as PCI, SBus, or PCI-Express, have their own requirements and bindings." It's just that no one's ever put Open Firmware on x86 yet.
This debate is irrelevant, of course, because it's pretty apparent that EFI is the way to go here.
Not impossible, but highly improbable, given that Intel and MS would have had to support it, and there was simply no way that they would have. And now, it would have to be Apple and Intel.
I've been saying that Apple will likely use EFI for months now. So I certainly agree with that.
And, yes, it is irrelevent. But my post was in response to a question.
Actually, the last official news I heard was that it hadn't been decided. The current transition docs state that a developer cannot depend on OpenFirmware being there, but developer mailing list have stated that: 1. No one wants BIOS, 2. People who aren't familiar with EFI prefer OpenFirmware, 3. People who are familiar with EFI prefer EFI. That makes it sound like EFI will, barring any major engineering obstacles, be the likely winner.
I don't think there's any fundamental limitation in EFI that would prevent target-disk mode. (In fact, I think the capabilities of EFI are more or less a superset of OpenFirmware.)
Well, EFI has, from what I understand, all the features of OpenBoot, but without any of the draw backs of BIOS or OpenBoot.
As for verification - there are many things one can do, in regards to the motherboard, to make life difficult for Joe Hacker; EFI is flexible enough to make life difficult, and couple that with a piece of hardware or two on the motherboard, I don't see installations occuring without massive hoop leeping involved in the installation with buggy/dodgy reliability to follow.
Unless intel is doing something drastic to the XEON that would make it obselete for high performance systems I just wouldn't expect see a Woodcrest, or even a Clovertown in PowerMacs. After Apple, and Nvidia finally made a quadro available I can't imagining Apple trying to go to market with a workstation that was second tear performance rated compared to BOXX, and Alienware.
Your post seems self-contradictory. I'm not sure what point you are alluding to, something is missing somewhere.
If a computer is going to be sold as a legit workstation with Intel chips, it is pretty much accepted that it has to have Xeon chips. Woodcrest and Clovertown are codenames for future Xeon chips. The way your first line is written, its logic seems to claim that the only way Xeons would be used in Macs is when they are obsolete. That doesn't make sense.
If you are intending to suggest that AMD be the supplier of chips for Powermacs, I don't think that is a likely option for any of the first generation of x86 Macs. The Intel chips are currently lagging a bit in the high end, so it appears that Apple may have gone with the "loser" if it wanted the fastest chips available. That determination still depends on the performance of the new microarchitecture, as I don't expect to see Netburst based chips in Macs. On the up side, it wouldn't be running into supplier problems as it appears that AMD simply can't make enough chips to fill demand.
Also, for anywhere other than the emblem, only the first letter in Xeon is capitalized.
I wasn't aware that Intel had integrated firewire into its Pentium chipsets ?
Firewire is NOT 'Integrated' into the Chipset!!! BUT, Intel DO put Firewire chips on their motherboards these chips are connected to the PCI bus. There is a distinct difference here.
Your post seems self-contradictory. I'm not sure what point you are alluding to, something is missing somewhere.
If a computer is going to be sold as a legit workstation with Intel chips, it is pretty much accepted that it has to have Xeon chips. Woodcrest and Clovertown are codenames for future Xeon chips. The way your first line is written, its logic seems to claim that the only way Xeons would be used in Macs is when they are obsolete. That doesn't make sense.
Just to get my 2¢ in on this conversation I googled the woodcrest to see what I would find, and all I read was that Woodcrest was not a P4, but a PM like processor. The article I read never said it was going to be a replacement processor for the Xeon systems.
All I keep seeing/reading in here, and at the AI main page, and post is that these are desktop processors. Which in turn lead me to believe they were typical desktop processors. Like maybe an iMac level processor at some point. But if this is the new powerhouse from intel I'll be first to praise them when I see it in a PowerMac.
But now I'm wondering about the Dual core XEON that is due in first quarter of 2006 that isn't using the Lindenhurst server chipset? They will be using a new chipset called Twin Castle. I think the Dual core MP XEON processor is code named Tulsa, (based on a processor that was codenamed "Potomac") and has hyper-threading which makes a dual core processor look like 4 processors. Being that it's an MP processor two of them (like workstation powerMacs have) would seemingly appear as eight processors.
It doesn't look like they are phasing them too far out. And AFAIK those (Woodcrest and Clovertown) are not new XEON codenames.
don't go there. (as in i am saddened by news of lack of firewire400 in mainstream apples, and loss of firewire on all the ipods even and especially ipod video 30gb and 60gb)
You're right about that. But until Stevie gives his speech, we're going to be doing a lot of it.....And in the years to come, with the confusing nature of x86 cpu and supporting chip lines, not to speak of the "AMD Question", we'll be doing more of it than we ever have in the past.
yonah has put to rest any AMD Questions we might have for first half of 2006 \ let me know if you need me to elaborate...
and if intel starts sampling 45nm before the end of 2006, well, lets say 2006 and 2007 will be non-AMD years for apple...
PS.
<total sidetrack>anybody tried 64bit Source: Lost Coast yet?</total sidetrack>
Great news! Apple can definitely compete at the high end, high volume purchase of CPU's from Intel (lower costs versus the likes of Boxx, VooDooPC, et. al.), lower MB R & D and MB HW costs. Price a Boxx or a BYOB using a high end MB (Tyan) and 2 Opteron 285's, plus the rest of the system, compare this to a Quad G5, guess who wins?
Of course it will run Vista, of course it'll have some kind of Apple proprietary IC's (Intel designed).
How it boots, I don't care, how it looks, I don't care! It'll still be a Mac, inside AND outside!
But I would like it to look more like this,
than this,
Memo from Apple to Intel:
Reply from Intel to Apple:
Memo from Jobs to Gates:
Reply from Gates to Jobs:
Big Show (nee Gates) versus Mysterio (nee Jobs), winner TBD!
Comments
This transition is all about Apple joining the mainstream. Apple hardware will be just like everyone else's.
This is Jobs last chance to really compete against Windows, to show that the Mac OS really is superior and have the marketplace agree.
These are HUGE risks. Don't take Microsoft so lightly. Apple won't grow marketshare just because it tried.
Microsoft has the size, resources, and patience to dominate which ever market it chooses. Microsoft has defeated companies which had a better position in a particular market which MS has entered late. Microsoft has defeated companies in their own markets with inferior software.
Because of Microsoft's size and resources it is able to refine mediocre software until it is good enough to overwhelm and take over a market. This has just happened recently with Palm.
The operating system is even more daunting because it is a market that Microsoft overwhelming owns. MS will fight tooth and nail to hold its dominance.
Apple has to exocute its Intel transition near flawlessly. Any misstep could cost Apple marketshare. Any weakness Dell, HP, Microsoft will be able to easily exploit.
Apple needs to stack the deck in its favor as much as possible. Macintosh and OSX have to be widely percieved as better than Dell and Vista. Apple cannot be the same as everyone else - it has to be better.
Originally posted by onlooker
Unless intel is doing something drastic to the XEON that would make it obselete for high performance systems I just wouldn't expect see a Woodcrest, or even a Clovertown in PowerMacs. After Apple, and Nvidia finally made a quadro available I can't imagining Apple trying to go to market with a workstation that was second tear performance rated compared to BOXX, and Alienware.
How about the fact that all of the Xeons are being phased out? Do you want another Netburst chip? Around the middlw of next year the Netburst chips will be gone.
The performance of the Xeons is nothing to write home about. They are outclassed by the Opterons. The replacements are supposed to be better. The Conroe is the first of these replacements, as it is coming out earlier than expected (as is Merom). Woodcrest is just the lower power rack mount server version.
Of course if guys want to wait for both the Silverthorne and the Hapertown, be my guest.
You're syill living in the PPC dreamworld. Two G5's still don't equal two Xeons, but they're close. They fall further behind two Opterons.
Conroe will better this.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/10/17/intel/index.html
Apple will design the prototype with manufacturing aide from Intel.
Apple will Quality Test with aide from Intel.
Apple will certify motherboard stamp out with Intel doing the manufacturing.
Apple will contract their case they design and certify, along-side cooling systems (with aide from Intel) and finally Apple will contract another company to assemble the necessary parts once they have passed all hardware stress tests, heat tests, power dissipation tests etc.
Intel will prosper having cutting edge systems they have never been able to produce that are aesthetically appealing (something else Intel really has never been concerned with) and continue to make their margins on chipsets and now a specific line of motherboard exclusively manufactured with the joint efforts of Apple and Intel.
Bottom line: Intel suggests, Apple has final decision and Steve goes through iteration after iteration until they are no longer, "Shit." When Steve is satisfied along with the rest of the Industrial Design, Hardware and Software Engineering teams then the last hurdle is Marketing.
Steve knows this and will, in parallel, work with Marketing to nail down a campaign that isn't, "Shit."
When all ducks are in a row, "Steve will present."
END OF SPECULATION.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051011-5416.html
Clicking the Woodcrest link at the bottom:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050823-5232.html
Explains this further.
also, clicking the "bizarre speculation" link on the top of THIS page gets to what some here have been arguing with me about.
Originally posted by mdriftmeyer
Unless you are a member of Apple Hardware assigned to the industrial specs for the motherboard up to the chassis this article is a waste of time.
Apple will design the prototype with manufacturing aide from Intel.
Apple will Quality Test with aide from Intel.
Apple will certify motherboard stamp out with Intel doing the manufacturing.
Apple will contract their case they design and certify, along-side cooling systems (with aide from Intel) and finally Apple will contract another company to assemble the necessary parts once they have passed all hardware stress tests, heat tests, power dissipation tests etc.
Intel will prosper having cutting edge systems they have never been able to produce that are aesthetically appealing (something else Intel really has never been concerned with) and continue to make their margins on chipsets and now a specific line of motherboard exclusively manufactured with the joint efforts of Apple and Intel.
Bottom line: Intel suggests, Apple has final decision and Steve goes through iteration after iteration until they are no longer, "Shit." When Steve is satisfied along with the rest of the Industrial Design, Hardware and Software Engineering teams then the last hurdle is Marketing.
Steve knows this and will, in parallel, work with Marketing to nail down a campaign that isn't, "Shit."
When all ducks are in a row, "Steve will present."
END OF SPECULATION.
And, this is new information, because?
Originally posted by zunx
Unfortunately Nothing you mentioned below has anything to do with Intel designing the motherboard. We are very likely to suffer through the same old stupid Apple design tricks that make their professional hardware a bit of a joke.
Great news:
- Cheap Mactels.
- Mactels with great PC features like double DVD drives & more VRAM.
- Quiet Mactels.
- Frontal connectors.
- Virtualization to switch from Mac to Linux to Windows. Wow! That alone will sell many Mactels and boost market share!!!
As for the Intel sticker, it does not matter at all. It is absolutely irrelevant to me. A want a great OS inside a great cheap feature-rich hardware.
Don't get me wrong folks I think there is potentially some good to come from this. As has already been mentioned Intel designs some of the better motherboards out in the real world. The BIG BUT in this case though is that they are contractors to Apple here. This prety much means that Apple will have a hand in the feature set. Hopefully we will see innovation beyond the standard intel chips set, but even there I think it is a stretch.
Dave
Originally posted by melgross
I meant x86 machines, and the rest follows below. I should have been clearer.
Actually, it's the device tree. The Intel Macs don't supply a complete device tree. (From Apple's developers' Guide, pg 52).
If you can find any reference to any cpu other than ARM, PPC, or SPARC, I would be interested to know, as would the OFWG.
Now, here's the interesting part. While in theory, any cpu or bus can work, in reality, it can't.
"The architecture is independent of the underlying instruction set, bus, operating system, and so on. However, the core requirements and practices specified by the standard are augmented by platform-specific requirements. For example, processors such as PowerPC and SPARC, or buses such as PCI and Sun's SBus, have their own requirements and bindings. The union of the core and platform-specific requirements provides a complete firmware specification for that platform."
This is the reality.
EDIT: Sorry, the area between quotes is from:
http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/firmware/
Bolding is mine.
The "reality", as the documentation you reference suggests, is that Open Firmware for x86 would need some amount of chip and chipset-specific code to run, not that it's impossible to use Open Firmware at all. At some level every abstraction needs to be grounded to its specific environment. The paragraph you quotes COULD have just as easily stated "processors such as the PowerPC, SPARC, or x86, or busses such as PCI, SBus, or PCI-Express, have their own requirements and bindings." It's just that no one's ever put Open Firmware on x86 yet.
This debate is irrelevant, of course, because it's pretty apparent that EFI is the way to go here.
Originally posted by Hiro
I think the whole point is that NONE of this is new information. This thread is just so much panty-wringing.
You're right about that. But until Stevie gives his speech, we're going to be doing a lot of it.
And in the years to come, with the confusing nature of x86 cpu and supporting chip lines, not to speak of the "AMD Question", we'll be doing more of it than we ever have in the past.
Originally posted by Booga
The "reality", as the documentation you reference suggests, is that Open Firmware for x86 would need some amount of chip and chipset-specific code to run, not that it's impossible to use Open Firmware at all. At some level every abstraction needs to be grounded to its specific environment. The paragraph you quotes COULD have just as easily stated "processors such as the PowerPC, SPARC, or x86, or busses such as PCI, SBus, or PCI-Express, have their own requirements and bindings." It's just that no one's ever put Open Firmware on x86 yet.
This debate is irrelevant, of course, because it's pretty apparent that EFI is the way to go here.
Not impossible, but highly improbable, given that Intel and MS would have had to support it, and there was simply no way that they would have. And now, it would have to be Apple and Intel.
I've been saying that Apple will likely use EFI for months now. So I certainly agree with that.
And, yes, it is irrelevent. But my post was in response to a question.
Originally posted by Booga
Actually, the last official news I heard was that it hadn't been decided. The current transition docs state that a developer cannot depend on OpenFirmware being there, but developer mailing list have stated that: 1. No one wants BIOS, 2. People who aren't familiar with EFI prefer OpenFirmware, 3. People who are familiar with EFI prefer EFI. That makes it sound like EFI will, barring any major engineering obstacles, be the likely winner.
I don't think there's any fundamental limitation in EFI that would prevent target-disk mode. (In fact, I think the capabilities of EFI are more or less a superset of OpenFirmware.)
Well, EFI has, from what I understand, all the features of OpenBoot, but without any of the draw backs of BIOS or OpenBoot.
As for verification - there are many things one can do, in regards to the motherboard, to make life difficult for Joe Hacker; EFI is flexible enough to make life difficult, and couple that with a piece of hardware or two on the motherboard, I don't see installations occuring without massive hoop leeping involved in the installation with buggy/dodgy reliability to follow.
Originally posted by onlooker
Unless intel is doing something drastic to the XEON that would make it obselete for high performance systems I just wouldn't expect see a Woodcrest, or even a Clovertown in PowerMacs. After Apple, and Nvidia finally made a quadro available I can't imagining Apple trying to go to market with a workstation that was second tear performance rated compared to BOXX, and Alienware.
Your post seems self-contradictory. I'm not sure what point you are alluding to, something is missing somewhere.
If a computer is going to be sold as a legit workstation with Intel chips, it is pretty much accepted that it has to have Xeon chips. Woodcrest and Clovertown are codenames for future Xeon chips. The way your first line is written, its logic seems to claim that the only way Xeons would be used in Macs is when they are obsolete. That doesn't make sense.
If you are intending to suggest that AMD be the supplier of chips for Powermacs, I don't think that is a likely option for any of the first generation of x86 Macs. The Intel chips are currently lagging a bit in the high end, so it appears that Apple may have gone with the "loser" if it wanted the fastest chips available. That determination still depends on the performance of the new microarchitecture, as I don't expect to see Netburst based chips in Macs. On the up side, it wouldn't be running into supplier problems as it appears that AMD simply can't make enough chips to fill demand.
Also, for anywhere other than the emblem, only the first letter in Xeon is capitalized.
Originally posted by heaven or las vegas
I wasn't aware that Intel had integrated firewire into its Pentium chipsets ?
Firewire is NOT 'Integrated' into the Chipset!!! BUT, Intel DO put Firewire chips on their motherboards these chips are connected to the PCI bus. There is a distinct difference here.
Originally posted by JeffDM
Your post seems self-contradictory. I'm not sure what point you are alluding to, something is missing somewhere.
If a computer is going to be sold as a legit workstation with Intel chips, it is pretty much accepted that it has to have Xeon chips. Woodcrest and Clovertown are codenames for future Xeon chips. The way your first line is written, its logic seems to claim that the only way Xeons would be used in Macs is when they are obsolete. That doesn't make sense.
Just to get my 2¢ in on this conversation I googled the woodcrest to see what I would find, and all I read was that Woodcrest was not a P4, but a PM like processor. The article I read never said it was going to be a replacement processor for the Xeon systems.
All I keep seeing/reading in here, and at the AI main page, and post is that these are desktop processors. Which in turn lead me to believe they were typical desktop processors. Like maybe an iMac level processor at some point. But if this is the new powerhouse from intel I'll be first to praise them when I see it in a PowerMac.
But now I'm wondering about the Dual core XEON that is due in first quarter of 2006 that isn't using the Lindenhurst server chipset? They will be using a new chipset called Twin Castle. I think the Dual core MP XEON processor is code named Tulsa, (based on a processor that was codenamed "Potomac") and has hyper-threading which makes a dual core processor look like 4 processors. Being that it's an MP processor two of them (like workstation powerMacs have) would seemingly appear as eight processors.
It doesn't look like they are phasing them too far out. And AFAIK those (Woodcrest and Clovertown) are not new XEON codenames.
How will this impact support for firewire ?
don't go there.
ps. can i have heaven AND las vegas?
You're right about that. But until Stevie gives his speech, we're going to be doing a lot of it.....And in the years to come, with the confusing nature of x86 cpu and supporting chip lines, not to speak of the "AMD Question", we'll be doing more of it than we ever have in the past.
yonah has put to rest any AMD Questions we might have for first half of 2006
and if intel starts sampling 45nm before the end of 2006, well, lets say 2006 and 2007 will be non-AMD years for apple...
PS.
<total sidetrack>anybody tried 64bit Source: Lost Coast yet?</total sidetrack>
Great news! Apple can definitely compete at the high end, high volume purchase of CPU's from Intel (lower costs versus the likes of Boxx, VooDooPC, et. al.), lower MB R & D and MB HW costs. Price a Boxx or a BYOB using a high end MB (Tyan) and 2 Opteron 285's, plus the rest of the system, compare this to a Quad G5, guess who wins?
Of course it will run Vista, of course it'll have some kind of Apple proprietary IC's (Intel designed).
How it boots, I don't care, how it looks, I don't care! It'll still be a Mac, inside AND outside!
But I would like it to look more like this,
than this,
Memo from Apple to Intel:
Reply from Intel to Apple:
Memo from Jobs to Gates:
Reply from Gates to Jobs:
Big Show (nee Gates) versus Mysterio (nee Jobs), winner TBD!
Originally posted by sunilraman
holy f**** i want what you are smoking mate
Just havin' a LITTLE fun with the image button, that's all!
Originally posted by zunx
Great news:
- Cheap Mactels.
- Mactels with great PC features like double DVD drives & more VRAM.
- Quiet Mactels.
- Frontal connectors.
- Virtualization to switch from Mac to Linux to Windows. Wow! That alone will sell many Mactels and boost market share!!!
As for the Intel sticker, it does not matter at all. It is absolutely irrelevant to me. A want a great OS inside a great cheap feature-rich hardware.
Hmmm, there isn't a single thing in that list you tout as 'great' that I actually want.
I don't want 'Cheap' anything. I want quality.
Double DVD drives - wtf for? Pirating software?
Frontal connectors - so I have to look at ugly connectors and cabling all day? No thanks.
Virtualization - no thanks. I'll have VirtualPC instead thanks so the systems work together instead of being completely isolated from each other.
Intel sticker - see frontal connectors.