What if there were a way to design a Velocity engine that had several different specialized cores in it. One for H264, another for gaming physics, another for HDTV bluray, another for DNA sequencing stuff. In sort a few cores that are very fast at what they do and add great value to Apple machines.
This is the opposite of what they should do. Putting in extremely specialized hardware means any given piece of hardware is only used when that task is being performed. Your physics hardware would be inert while you watched a movie, for example. Plus you would only be faster at things you provided accelerators for. Sorry, bad idea.
The more likely approach (and this is inevitably going to happen in the computing world in general... just look at how GPUs are evolving) is to add "general purpose vector processors". This may sound like an oxymoron, but its not. Most processors are inherently "scalar" in nature -- they are optimized for doing one operation on one data value at a time, and doing them sequentially as fast as possible. Most modern scalar processors have some SIMD (i.e. vector) capabilities tacked on the side, and under the hood they speed up their scalar processing using things like pipelining, caching, etc. A general purpose vector processor moves the SIMD capabilities front-and-center, and optimizes for highly regularized calculations on long streams of data. This kind of array processing underpins video encoding/decoding, image processing, audio processing, 3D graphics, physics, supercomputing, DNA sequencing, so on and so forth. A gang of general purpose vector processors (like the Cell contains) can do extremely impressive amounts of calculation of this type.
The big problem is usually that they are painful to program using normal programming tools. A few years ago, however, a new way to program certain common specialized vector processors was introduced... shader languages (Cg, HLSL, GLSL) in the OpenGL and Direct3D APIs give developers an easy way to write highly concurrent programs for very specialized vector hardware (GPUs). This has led to a revolution in 3D graphics. More recently nVidia introduced CUDA which is an attempt to give non-graphics developers a way to more easily write code for their GPUs. Unfortunately it is still fairly low level and rather specific to nVidia's hardware. Very recently Apple announced OpenCL as their initiative to introduce a standardized way for developers to write programs that will run on any processors. The developer writes in OpenCL and when the program is run it is compiled for the hardware on which it has been run (likely, and I'm speculating here, using LLVM). If there is no programmable GPU and only a conventional x86, then it runs relatively slowly. If there is an 8 core AVX equipped x86-64 CPU, then it runs much faster. If there is a programmable GPU then it runs even faster. And (just maybe) if there is a pool of "wicked fast" custom Apple vector processors in the memory controller, then it runs faster than a speeding bullet.
And even if a given developer doesn't use OpenCL, Apple will. Apple's OpenGL, CoreAudio, QuickTime, CoreAnimation, etc. will very likely be reimplemented using OpenCL and thus will automatically take advantage of whatever processing horsepower you might have in your machine. Sure it might not be as fast as if some developer had written their code specifically for a particular piece of hardware, but it will be dramatically faster than C/C++ code and it will automatically adapt to whatever your machine happens to have in it.
I'm clueless in the area of chips and chip pricing, but would a chip designed by the P.A. Semi people actually decrease gross margins from 34% to 31% over the next 18 months?
Yes because Apple won't have Intel's volume. And depending on what they are actually doing, they might get lower yields or fewer chips-per-wafer. It could also be that they are targeting an aggressive process (imagine a 45nm north/southbridge chip!). Then there is the development cost to amortize.
Anyhow, its a whole lot more likely than a mere 3-6% price drop. People claiming that the margin decrease means a MBP price drop clearly haven't done the math, and are ignoring the CFO's other words.
Certainly they could go with the approach taken with the SPU's but I'd hope that they would address some of the weaknesses there also. Especially with respect to memory accessible by the SPU's, the SPU's independence and access to system resources.
BTW, I disagree strongly with your position on the SPUs. What you call a weakness I call a strength. The SPUs do have main memory access, but they do it through their DMA controller... which works much better than a cache for the kinds of things the SPU is intended to do. By not having the cache hardware the SPU is kept smaller (or conversely you can imagine that the local memory it has is larger than if it had a cache instead). Plus as an SPU programmer you don't have to worry about other processors stomping on your local memory. The problem with the SPUs is not the hardware, but instead that they are programmed with C/C++. OpenCL can solve that problem, by allowing the compiler to manage the local memory much more effectively than a hardware cache can operate.
I like Programmer's theory! It would explain a lot. Everybody says it's too soon to see anything from Apple's acquisition of PA Semi, and as far as specialized chips for the iPod and iPhone, go, that's true. But PA Semi designs PPC chips; they know everything there is to know about designing the AltiVec "rendering engine" that's been on PPCs since the G4. They could have been working on a chip that was all rendering engine--a much, much more sophisticated version of AltiVec--for years before the Apple buy-out. Apple wouldn't have bought them until they knew they had something, and it was something they had to have an exclusive on. And that's the "technology the competition can't match." They would have to lower their profit margin by including this new technology without raising their prices.
Damn, I'm going to have to wait to see what's coming now before I buy a new computer. I don't care about these incremental upgrades that come along periodically; if I can get the old model at a discount, that's great. But this new tech could really change the playing field. (I would love to rub some of these "Macs are no good for games" twerps noses in it!)
Like Many said. If Apple were to make a special chipset then it would properly be a single chipset.
There would be no Floppy port, no parallel port, no IDE Port, no Serial Port, or PCI lane.
Simply just PCI- Express , SATA, USB, Firewire, FSB.
It would be legacy free, but it wouldn't save much cost. Since the die area used by those are pretty small.
It would use less pin, i guess they could have less PCI Express lane then industry standard. So they save cost with less pin again and therefore less layer for Motherbroad.
Except for a few PCI slots through the southbridge, there already aren't any of those things on Intel's chipsets. No floppy controller. No IDE controller. No parallel or serial. If you see those things on a motherboard, they are provided by separate chips, and have been for quite some time.
[QUOTE=Mac-sochist;1286283]I like Programmer's theory! It would explain a lot. Everybody says it's too soon to see anything from Apple's acquisition of PA Semi, and as far as specialized chips for the iPod and iPhone, go, that's true.
[\\quote]
If we take Apples comments literially PA was acquired to produce iPhone/Touch chips. Of course that could be the Reality Distortion Field at work.
In any event I think you are mistaken that it would be to soon for Touch/iPhone specific chips. If PA was picked up for such chips and what I've heard is true then the PA designed hardware could be in new devices very soon. This is based on the idea that PA was picked up to finish off a project for Apple that was aost complete.
Frankly the way the whole transaction was handled has me believing that PA was in danger of colapse. The thought that Apple came to the rescue to secure it's investment in tech PA was developing for them seems to make sense.
The big question of course is just whst is that tech?
[quote]
But PA Semi designs PPC chips; they know everything there is to know about designing the AltiVec "rendering engine" that's been on PPCs since the G4. They could have been working on a chip that was all rendering engine--a much, much more sophisticated version of AltiVec--for years before the Apple buy-out. Apple wouldn't have bought them until they knew they had something, and it was something they had to have an exclusive on. And that's the "technology the competition can't match." They would have to lower their profit margin by including this new technology without raising their prices.
[\\quote]
I just need to point out that PA designs more than just PPC chops. Further the staff there can be likened to a who's who list of chip desgners. I think it would fair to say that PA had the staff to design just about anything. This is one of the reasons it is so hard to guess a what PA is up to. They could literially be designing just about anything for Apple.
Quote:
Damn, I'm going to have to wait to see what's coming now before I buy a new computer. I don't care about these incremental upgrades that come along periodically; if I can get the old model at a discount, that's great. But this new tech could really change the playing field. (I would love to rub some of these "Macs are no good for games" twerps noses in it!)
Do realize that this whole thread is based on hearsay. It might not be worthwhile to put to much faith into what has been reported. Sure the upside potential is great but that assumes that the fantasies expressed become true. I want to believe in some of this certainly, want however does not make for product.
Ok - i didn't read all 146 posts so please excuse me if I'm repeating something mentioned earlier.
Via (also renowned for the purchase of CYRIX in the 90's) produces an architecture known as EPIC which for those in the know allows pretty much excessively sick minature motherboards to be created featuring a large number of possible options.
Now, per the EPIC architecture, there has been (in most cases) a CYRIX derived processor on board. Bare with me where i am going pls
One of the key aspects on CYRIX was the adoption of the Intel Pentium chipset without the legacy 80x6 processor stack. This enabled CYRIX to build cheaper and faster processors but in the end lost out due to distribution and not enough supporters. VIA then purchased CYRIX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix).
IF VIA produced a new EPIC board for the Intel Centrino 2, (and im thinking they have since the footprint is pretty much reduced with the macbook air), VIA could position themselves as the new chipset manufacturer.
Ok - i didn't read all 146 posts so please excuse me if I'm repeating something mentioned earlier.
Via (also renowned for the purchase of CYRIX in the 90's) produces an architecture known as EPIC which for those in the know allows pretty much excessively sick minature motherboards to be created featuring a large number of possible options.
Now, per the EPIC architecture, there has been (in most cases) a CYRIX derived processor on board. Bare with me where i am going pls
One of the key aspects on CYRIX was the adoption of the Intel Pentium chipset without the legacy 80x6 processor stack. This enabled CYRIX to build cheaper and faster processors but in the end lost out due to distribution and not enough supporters. VIA then purchased CYRIX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix).
IF VIA produced a new EPIC board for the Intel Centrino 2, (and im thinking they have since the footprint is pretty much reduced with the macbook air), VIA could position themselves as the new chipset manufacturer.
Except for a few PCI slots through the southbridge, there already aren't any of those things on Intel's chipsets. No floppy controller. No IDE controller. No parallel or serial. If you see those things on a motherboard, they are provided by separate chips, and have been for quite some time.
Yeah i forgot i about that. 4x Series are nearly legacy free.
So I suppose apart from the use of PowerVR i dont think there are any reason to make a chipset for themself.
Yes because Apple won't have Intel's volume. And depending on what they are actually doing, they might get lower yields or fewer chips-per-wafer. It could also be that they are targeting an aggressive process (imagine a 45nm north/southbridge chip!). Then there is the development cost to amortize.
Anyhow, its a whole lot more likely than a mere 3-6% price drop. People claiming that the margin decrease means a MBP price drop clearly haven't done the math, and are ignoring the CFO's other words.
Programmer
Thanks for the reply. After reading this thread, I was leaning more toward Apple introducing computers with both flash memory and harddrives competatively priced. This would differentiate Apple computers and certainly reduce margins. Now, with all this talk about adding chips I don't know. Apple always seems to make things interesting.
Thanks for the reply. After reading this thread, I was leaning more toward Apple introducing computers with both flash memory and harddrives competatively priced. This would differentiate Apple computers and certainly reduce margins. Now, with all this talk about adding chips I don't know. Apple always seems to make things interesting.
Flash memory and SSD drives (or better priced HDD) don't explain most of the CFO quote... it doesn't shut anybody out, and it doesn't provide key technological advances. The use of the term "transition" tends to imply that some existing component is being replaced with something else, and in doing so it is worth far more to Apple than a couple percent of their gross margin. I have yet to see another idea that carries as much merit as the new chip idea. When Apple switched to Intel and used the Intel chipsets it was said that this was a temporary measure to expedite the transition. Now its time to transition back to an ecosystem where Apple controls more of its own destiny. The great thing is that the CFO gave us a timeframe in which to look for this change.
The last time I got worked up over something that was supposed to revolutionary, they gave us....
MACBOOK AIR
And now there are two more companies that have come out with MBA clones using the same chipsets and processors but oddly costing a little more than the MBA. Because a machine doesn't work for you doesn't mean it's not viable for others.
As programmer noted above the use of the word transition and the rest of the phrasing leads on to Apple specialization of a chip set or two. The question is which ones and where.
Now frankly I'm all for Apple making great strides in its desktop lines but the more I think about the business aspects of this "transition" the more I think we will see vast changes to the iPod line up. These changes and the associated cost reductions will come from an application specific chip. The goal being no more than three chips in an iPod while delivering more features. By the way one of those chips would be your flash storage.
Let's face it Apple has both the volume and marketing advantages to leverage the investment. Plus this tech allows for more room for flash chips. We could easily sees a 16 or maybe a 32GB Nano in a very small package and still maintain a useful battery life.
PS: Ironically, there is no substantial evidence to support lemmings jumping off a cliff, unless you mean the Disney made video of them chasing them off a cliff.
I just need to point out that PA designs more than just PPC chops. Further the staff there can be likened to a who's who list of chip desgners. I think it would fair to say that PA had the staff to design just about anything. This is one of the reasons it is so hard to guess a what PA is up to. They could literially be designing just about anything for Apple.
Oh, agreed! It's going to be fascinating to see what they come up with in the future. My only point is that this vector processor is something they could plausibly have been working on beforehand, and thus would be the first thing to hit the market. (Maybe in origin it was a PPC processor with an enormously more sophisticated AltiVec section with game consoles in mind?)
A couple of people have mentioned looking forward to 3D and specifically games performance as a result of this rumored tech. How exactly will the theorised technology improve game performance on the upcoming notebooks if it is indeed implemented?
Damn, I'm going to have to wait to see what's coming now before I buy a new computer. I don't care about these incremental upgrades that come along periodically; if I can get the old model at a discount, that's great. But this new tech could really change the playing field. (I would love to rub some of these "Macs are no good for games" twerps noses in it!)
Small upgrades are just that, small. What I'm seeing on the 6-12 month horizon is much more than the usual. I'm expecting huge performance gains that will get me off the fence and into the Apple Store.
As for rubbing gamers noses in anything, you're going to be very disappointed. On the software side Direct X wipes the floor with OpenGL. Games coded for Windows are simply better and faster than those for any other platform. On the hardware side you're up against some huge barriers. Gamers need to have the latest and greatest, preferably machines they assembled themselves. Macs don't lend themselves to upgrading single components even basic ones like video cards. Even worse, Mac video cards and drivers are a complete joke. The stock video in most Macs is either two year old integrated video from Intel or re-branded two year old junk from ATI. The only build to order upgrade for a Mac is the NVIDIA 8800 which is two generations old and has such terrible Core Image drivers that even the lowly stock ATI video runs circles around it.
Unless Apple finds a way to sell more Macs than all the Windows PC makers put together, you're never going to see any serious gaming on a Mac.
Small upgrades are just that, small. What I'm seeing on the 6-12 month horizon is much more than the usual. I'm expecting huge performance gains that will get me off the fence and into the Apple Store.
That's my opinion, too. Whatever this is, I think it's going to be big, and would leave me bellyaching if I had just bought a previous-generation machine. The small upgrades, I couldn't care less.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bregalad
As for rubbing gamers noses in anything, you're going to be very disappointed.....Even worse, Mac video cards and drivers are a complete joke. The stock video in most Macs is either two year old integrated video from Intel or re-branded two year old junk from ATI. The only build to order upgrade for a Mac is the NVIDIA 8800 which is two generations old and has such terrible Core Image drivers that even the lowly stock ATI video runs circles around it.
That was really just a joke: I couldn't give less of a damn about games no matter how hard I tried. But...this general-purpose vector processor we've been talking about could revolutionize the situation in graphics. Of course, that's about all they've been used for in the past, but there's at least the possibility that it could help out in a lot of areas of computing. Just speculation, but I think it's going to be really interesting in the next year or so.
Comments
also some on board stuff needs the pci bus.
as for lock down apple can't do much as there older systems don't have the lock out chip.
What if there were a way to design a Velocity engine that had several different specialized cores in it. One for H264, another for gaming physics, another for HDTV bluray, another for DNA sequencing stuff. In sort a few cores that are very fast at what they do and add great value to Apple machines.
This is the opposite of what they should do. Putting in extremely specialized hardware means any given piece of hardware is only used when that task is being performed. Your physics hardware would be inert while you watched a movie, for example. Plus you would only be faster at things you provided accelerators for. Sorry, bad idea.
The more likely approach (and this is inevitably going to happen in the computing world in general... just look at how GPUs are evolving) is to add "general purpose vector processors". This may sound like an oxymoron, but its not. Most processors are inherently "scalar" in nature -- they are optimized for doing one operation on one data value at a time, and doing them sequentially as fast as possible. Most modern scalar processors have some SIMD (i.e. vector) capabilities tacked on the side, and under the hood they speed up their scalar processing using things like pipelining, caching, etc. A general purpose vector processor moves the SIMD capabilities front-and-center, and optimizes for highly regularized calculations on long streams of data. This kind of array processing underpins video encoding/decoding, image processing, audio processing, 3D graphics, physics, supercomputing, DNA sequencing, so on and so forth. A gang of general purpose vector processors (like the Cell contains) can do extremely impressive amounts of calculation of this type.
The big problem is usually that they are painful to program using normal programming tools. A few years ago, however, a new way to program certain common specialized vector processors was introduced... shader languages (Cg, HLSL, GLSL) in the OpenGL and Direct3D APIs give developers an easy way to write highly concurrent programs for very specialized vector hardware (GPUs). This has led to a revolution in 3D graphics. More recently nVidia introduced CUDA which is an attempt to give non-graphics developers a way to more easily write code for their GPUs. Unfortunately it is still fairly low level and rather specific to nVidia's hardware. Very recently Apple announced OpenCL as their initiative to introduce a standardized way for developers to write programs that will run on any processors. The developer writes in OpenCL and when the program is run it is compiled for the hardware on which it has been run (likely, and I'm speculating here, using LLVM). If there is no programmable GPU and only a conventional x86, then it runs relatively slowly. If there is an 8 core AVX equipped x86-64 CPU, then it runs much faster. If there is a programmable GPU then it runs even faster. And (just maybe) if there is a pool of "wicked fast" custom Apple vector processors in the memory controller, then it runs faster than a speeding bullet.
And even if a given developer doesn't use OpenCL, Apple will. Apple's OpenGL, CoreAudio, QuickTime, CoreAnimation, etc. will very likely be reimplemented using OpenCL and thus will automatically take advantage of whatever processing horsepower you might have in your machine. Sure it might not be as fast as if some developer had written their code specifically for a particular piece of hardware, but it will be dramatically faster than C/C++ code and it will automatically adapt to whatever your machine happens to have in it.
I'm clueless in the area of chips and chip pricing, but would a chip designed by the P.A. Semi people actually decrease gross margins from 34% to 31% over the next 18 months?
Yes because Apple won't have Intel's volume. And depending on what they are actually doing, they might get lower yields or fewer chips-per-wafer. It could also be that they are targeting an aggressive process (imagine a 45nm north/southbridge chip!). Then there is the development cost to amortize.
Anyhow, its a whole lot more likely than a mere 3-6% price drop. People claiming that the margin decrease means a MBP price drop clearly haven't done the math, and are ignoring the CFO's other words.
Certainly they could go with the approach taken with the SPU's but I'd hope that they would address some of the weaknesses there also. Especially with respect to memory accessible by the SPU's, the SPU's independence and access to system resources.
BTW, I disagree strongly with your position on the SPUs. What you call a weakness I call a strength. The SPUs do have main memory access, but they do it through their DMA controller... which works much better than a cache for the kinds of things the SPU is intended to do. By not having the cache hardware the SPU is kept smaller (or conversely you can imagine that the local memory it has is larger than if it had a cache instead). Plus as an SPU programmer you don't have to worry about other processors stomping on your local memory. The problem with the SPUs is not the hardware, but instead that they are programmed with C/C++. OpenCL can solve that problem, by allowing the compiler to manage the local memory much more effectively than a hardware cache can operate.
Damn, I'm going to have to wait to see what's coming now before I buy a new computer. I don't care about these incremental upgrades that come along periodically; if I can get the old model at a discount, that's great. But this new tech could really change the playing field. (I would love to rub some of these "Macs are no good for games" twerps noses in it!)
Like Many said. If Apple were to make a special chipset then it would properly be a single chipset.
There would be no Floppy port, no parallel port, no IDE Port, no Serial Port, or PCI lane.
Simply just PCI- Express , SATA, USB, Firewire, FSB.
It would be legacy free, but it wouldn't save much cost. Since the die area used by those are pretty small.
It would use less pin, i guess they could have less PCI Express lane then industry standard. So they save cost with less pin again and therefore less layer for Motherbroad.
Except for a few PCI slots through the southbridge, there already aren't any of those things on Intel's chipsets. No floppy controller. No IDE controller. No parallel or serial. If you see those things on a motherboard, they are provided by separate chips, and have been for quite some time.
[\\quote]
If we take Apples comments literially PA was acquired to produce iPhone/Touch chips. Of course that could be the Reality Distortion Field at work.
In any event I think you are mistaken that it would be to soon for Touch/iPhone specific chips. If PA was picked up for such chips and what I've heard is true then the PA designed hardware could be in new devices very soon. This is based on the idea that PA was picked up to finish off a project for Apple that was aost complete.
Frankly the way the whole transaction was handled has me believing that PA was in danger of colapse. The thought that Apple came to the rescue to secure it's investment in tech PA was developing for them seems to make sense.
The big question of course is just whst is that tech?
[quote]
But PA Semi designs PPC chips; they know everything there is to know about designing the AltiVec "rendering engine" that's been on PPCs since the G4. They could have been working on a chip that was all rendering engine--a much, much more sophisticated version of AltiVec--for years before the Apple buy-out. Apple wouldn't have bought them until they knew they had something, and it was something they had to have an exclusive on. And that's the "technology the competition can't match." They would have to lower their profit margin by including this new technology without raising their prices.
[\\quote]
I just need to point out that PA designs more than just PPC chops. Further the staff there can be likened to a who's who list of chip desgners. I think it would fair to say that PA had the staff to design just about anything. This is one of the reasons it is so hard to guess a what PA is up to. They could literially be designing just about anything for Apple.
Damn, I'm going to have to wait to see what's coming now before I buy a new computer. I don't care about these incremental upgrades that come along periodically; if I can get the old model at a discount, that's great. But this new tech could really change the playing field. (I would love to rub some of these "Macs are no good for games" twerps noses in it!)
Do realize that this whole thread is based on hearsay. It might not be worthwhile to put to much faith into what has been reported. Sure the upside potential is great but that assumes that the fantasies expressed become true. I want to believe in some of this certainly, want however does not make for product.
Dave
Ok - i didn't read all 146 posts so please excuse me if I'm repeating something mentioned earlier.
Via (also renowned for the purchase of CYRIX in the 90's) produces an architecture known as EPIC which for those in the know allows pretty much excessively sick minature motherboards to be created featuring a large number of possible options.
Now, per the EPIC architecture, there has been (in most cases) a CYRIX derived processor on board. Bare with me where i am going pls
One of the key aspects on CYRIX was the adoption of the Intel Pentium chipset without the legacy 80x6 processor stack. This enabled CYRIX to build cheaper and faster processors but in the end lost out due to distribution and not enough supporters. VIA then purchased CYRIX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix).
IF VIA produced a new EPIC board for the Intel Centrino 2, (and im thinking they have since the footprint is pretty much reduced with the macbook air), VIA could position themselves as the new chipset manufacturer.
As part of the EPIC infra at the moment, it just received extensive revision (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIC_Express#EPIC) to include PCIe.
One notable point re VIA is that it prefers NVidia rather than ATI. On most Intel chipsets, the graphics component is a ATI enhanced OEM module.
This would tie in with Apples support for GPU-Development work.
Regards
Samuel
All,
Ok - i didn't read all 146 posts so please excuse me if I'm repeating something mentioned earlier.
Via (also renowned for the purchase of CYRIX in the 90's) produces an architecture known as EPIC which for those in the know allows pretty much excessively sick minature motherboards to be created featuring a large number of possible options.
Now, per the EPIC architecture, there has been (in most cases) a CYRIX derived processor on board. Bare with me where i am going pls
One of the key aspects on CYRIX was the adoption of the Intel Pentium chipset without the legacy 80x6 processor stack. This enabled CYRIX to build cheaper and faster processors but in the end lost out due to distribution and not enough supporters. VIA then purchased CYRIX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix).
IF VIA produced a new EPIC board for the Intel Centrino 2, (and im thinking they have since the footprint is pretty much reduced with the macbook air), VIA could position themselves as the new chipset manufacturer.
As part of the EPIC infra at the moment, it just received extensive revision (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIC_Express#EPIC) to include PCIe.
One notable point re VIA is that it prefers NVidia rather than ATI. On most Intel chipsets, the graphics component is a ATI enhanced OEM module.
This would tie in with Apples support for GPU-Development work.
Regards
Samuel
Your post doesn't make much sense to me. So you are saying via making chipset for Apple?
No, because via do not hold a liscense to do so.
Except for a few PCI slots through the southbridge, there already aren't any of those things on Intel's chipsets. No floppy controller. No IDE controller. No parallel or serial. If you see those things on a motherboard, they are provided by separate chips, and have been for quite some time.
Yeah i forgot i about that. 4x Series are nearly legacy free.
So I suppose apart from the use of PowerVR i dont think there are any reason to make a chipset for themself.
Yes because Apple won't have Intel's volume. And depending on what they are actually doing, they might get lower yields or fewer chips-per-wafer. It could also be that they are targeting an aggressive process (imagine a 45nm north/southbridge chip!). Then there is the development cost to amortize.
Anyhow, its a whole lot more likely than a mere 3-6% price drop. People claiming that the margin decrease means a MBP price drop clearly haven't done the math, and are ignoring the CFO's other words.
Programmer
Thanks for the reply. After reading this thread, I was leaning more toward Apple introducing computers with both flash memory and harddrives competatively priced. This would differentiate Apple computers and certainly reduce margins. Now, with all this talk about adding chips I don't know. Apple always seems to make things interesting.
Programmer
Thanks for the reply. After reading this thread, I was leaning more toward Apple introducing computers with both flash memory and harddrives competatively priced. This would differentiate Apple computers and certainly reduce margins. Now, with all this talk about adding chips I don't know. Apple always seems to make things interesting.
Flash memory and SSD drives (or better priced HDD) don't explain most of the CFO quote... it doesn't shut anybody out, and it doesn't provide key technological advances. The use of the term "transition" tends to imply that some existing component is being replaced with something else, and in doing so it is worth far more to Apple than a couple percent of their gross margin. I have yet to see another idea that carries as much merit as the new chip idea. When Apple switched to Intel and used the Intel chipsets it was said that this was a temporary measure to expedite the transition. Now its time to transition back to an ecosystem where Apple controls more of its own destiny. The great thing is that the CFO gave us a timeframe in which to look for this change.
MACBOOK AIR
The last time I got worked up over something that was supposed to revolutionary, they gave us....
MACBOOK AIR
And now there are two more companies that have come out with MBA clones using the same chipsets and processors but oddly costing a little more than the MBA. Because a machine doesn't work for you doesn't mean it's not viable for others.
Now frankly I'm all for Apple making great strides in its desktop lines but the more I think about the business aspects of this "transition" the more I think we will see vast changes to the iPod line up. These changes and the associated cost reductions will come from an application specific chip. The goal being no more than three chips in an iPod while delivering more features. By the way one of those chips would be your flash storage.
Let's face it Apple has both the volume and marketing advantages to leverage the investment. Plus this tech allows for more room for flash chips. We could easily sees a 16 or maybe a 32GB Nano in a very small package and still maintain a useful battery life.
Dave
...with no substantial evidence to support any comment. Lemmings anyone?
This patent is supports the glass touchpad. PS: Ironically, there is no substantial evidence to support lemmings jumping off a cliff, unless you mean the Disney made video of them chasing them off a cliff.
I just need to point out that PA designs more than just PPC chops. Further the staff there can be likened to a who's who list of chip desgners. I think it would fair to say that PA had the staff to design just about anything. This is one of the reasons it is so hard to guess a what PA is up to. They could literially be designing just about anything for Apple.
Oh, agreed! It's going to be fascinating to see what they come up with in the future. My only point is that this vector processor is something they could plausibly have been working on beforehand, and thus would be the first thing to hit the market. (Maybe in origin it was a PPC processor with an enormously more sophisticated AltiVec section with game consoles in mind?)
Damn, I'm going to have to wait to see what's coming now before I buy a new computer. I don't care about these incremental upgrades that come along periodically; if I can get the old model at a discount, that's great. But this new tech could really change the playing field. (I would love to rub some of these "Macs are no good for games" twerps noses in it!)
Small upgrades are just that, small. What I'm seeing on the 6-12 month horizon is much more than the usual. I'm expecting huge performance gains that will get me off the fence and into the Apple Store.
As for rubbing gamers noses in anything, you're going to be very disappointed. On the software side Direct X wipes the floor with OpenGL. Games coded for Windows are simply better and faster than those for any other platform. On the hardware side you're up against some huge barriers. Gamers need to have the latest and greatest, preferably machines they assembled themselves. Macs don't lend themselves to upgrading single components even basic ones like video cards. Even worse, Mac video cards and drivers are a complete joke. The stock video in most Macs is either two year old integrated video from Intel or re-branded two year old junk from ATI. The only build to order upgrade for a Mac is the NVIDIA 8800 which is two generations old and has such terrible Core Image drivers that even the lowly stock ATI video runs circles around it.
Unless Apple finds a way to sell more Macs than all the Windows PC makers put together, you're never going to see any serious gaming on a Mac.
Small upgrades are just that, small. What I'm seeing on the 6-12 month horizon is much more than the usual. I'm expecting huge performance gains that will get me off the fence and into the Apple Store.
That's my opinion, too. Whatever this is, I think it's going to be big, and would leave me bellyaching if I had just bought a previous-generation machine. The small upgrades, I couldn't care less.
As for rubbing gamers noses in anything, you're going to be very disappointed.....Even worse, Mac video cards and drivers are a complete joke. The stock video in most Macs is either two year old integrated video from Intel or re-branded two year old junk from ATI. The only build to order upgrade for a Mac is the NVIDIA 8800 which is two generations old and has such terrible Core Image drivers that even the lowly stock ATI video runs circles around it.
That was really just a joke: I couldn't give less of a damn about games no matter how hard I tried. But...this general-purpose vector processor we've been talking about could revolutionize the situation in graphics. Of course, that's about all they've been used for in the past, but there's at least the possibility that it could help out in a lot of areas of computing. Just speculation, but I think it's going to be really interesting in the next year or so.