Intel at 4 GHz??? Come on Motorola...
I will admit - I am still stuck in the WinTel world with my aging and utterly useless 133 MHz Dell until I can scrape up the cash to get a new Imac.
The only think that makes we wonder about Apple, is Motorola. Why in the world are they lagging so badly in the MHz area? I now that is only one measure of speed, but it took Motorola nearly 2 1/2 years to go from 500 MHz to 1 GHz. And within the next year Intel will boost their speeds up to 4 GHz.
Here is the article:
<a href="http://www.msnbc.com/news/716875.asp?0dm=C12RT" target="_blank">http://www.msnbc.com/news/716875.asp?0dm=C12RT</a>
Apple has the computing experience down pat - that I know. But when are they going to be the ones to be at the top of the MHz chart or at least in the same area? With Motorola laying off people and slowly increasing clock speed by incremental amounts every so often, is Apple doomed to always be 1/2 the clock speed or less? This used to not be the case.
Regardless, I will still buy a Mac when I get my next computer. Would be nice though to have a 1.5 GHz iMac sitting on my desk - 800 MHz will do for now...
The only think that makes we wonder about Apple, is Motorola. Why in the world are they lagging so badly in the MHz area? I now that is only one measure of speed, but it took Motorola nearly 2 1/2 years to go from 500 MHz to 1 GHz. And within the next year Intel will boost their speeds up to 4 GHz.
Here is the article:
<a href="http://www.msnbc.com/news/716875.asp?0dm=C12RT" target="_blank">http://www.msnbc.com/news/716875.asp?0dm=C12RT</a>
Apple has the computing experience down pat - that I know. But when are they going to be the ones to be at the top of the MHz chart or at least in the same area? With Motorola laying off people and slowly increasing clock speed by incremental amounts every so often, is Apple doomed to always be 1/2 the clock speed or less? This used to not be the case.
Regardless, I will still buy a Mac when I get my next computer. Would be nice though to have a 1.5 GHz iMac sitting on my desk - 800 MHz will do for now...
Comments
G-News
2. It wasn't running anything but a Frequency tester.
3. AMD's Clawhammer and Sledgehammer look more impressive as they will ship this year <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1591" target="_blank">http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1591</a>
4. Motorola tends to keep quiet about their product announcements. They really don't have as much competition as AMD vs Intel generates.
We'll probably have one more G4 revision before the G5 supermachine is released. I would imagine (based on some reasonable rumors) that the G5 @ 3GHz will out perform a 4GHz pentium 4 in all categorys, and decimate it in Photoshop, and all the usual Altivec applications, and then some. The Velocity Engine is catching on.
Everybody wants some. I want some too! EVH, AVH, MA, DLR.
Apple's cash reserve - Approximately 4.5 billion.
If Apple buys AMD, Apple gains it's resources and technology. The fact that AMD is taken out of the equation in the x86 world also benefits Apple; Intel's competition is dramatically reduced.
Everybody wants some. I want some too! EVH, AVH, MA, DLR.[/QB]<hr></blockquote>
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VH Rulez.
<strong>AMD's market cap - $4.367 billion
Apple's cash reserve - Approximately 4.5 billion.
If Apple buys AMD, Apple gains it's resources and technology. The fact that AMD is taken out of the equation in the x86 world also benefits Apple; Intel's competition is dramatically reduced.</strong><hr></blockquote>
If your figures for AMD market cap are correct, then that's a very interesting idea. Apple would probably not purchase them outright though, since that would greatly compromise their reserve, and Apple is said to only make a profit in recent quarters due to that reserve. But, Apple could procure enough shares to make a partnership between the two companies stable. Then the AIM alliance could switch over to the AAI alliance.
[ 02-27-2002: Message edited by: Big Mac ]</p>
<strong>1. The Intel 4Ghz was water cooled.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
<a href="http://www.hitachi.com" target="_blank">hitachi</a> doesn't seem to think theres anything wrong with a <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,86363,00.asp" target="_blank">water cooled notebook.</a>
I find it highly unlikely that Motorola will release anything that will be a discrete jump in performance. The semi-conductor world seldom has seen such breakthroughs. Can you even think of the last time anything has been a revolution rather than an evolution?
The benchmarks for the initial release of the P4 were rather underwhelming. From an IPC standpoint or rather a performance/frequency standpoint the P4 looked rather miserable. However, bear in mind that from the initial debut of the P4 (with a top speed of 1.5GHz? Feel free to correct me if I'm off). Since that initial release, the P4 has scaled rather nicely and currently sits at 2.2GHz. Furthermore, postulating what the performance of a 4GHz P3 would be is rather pointless--Is there any reason to believe that Intel could have possibly scaled the P3 fast enough to keep it competitive with AMD much less to 4GHz? I don't think so. Finally, while that 4GHz chip was water-cooled, Intel did demo an air-cooled 3GHz P4.
<a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1589&p=2" target="_blank">check this out</a>
Anyways, getting back on topic. Being a Mac' fan has been tough over the last couple of years. Motorola has been left in the dust by AMD and Intel. To think otherwise is utter denial of the current situation. Can Motorola pull off something incredible with the G5? It had better. Otherwise, they might as well just drop out of the business of making general purpose desktop CPU's.
Imagine, there was a time when Intel was nervous about falling behind the PPC...
btw...I'm not really new to these boards. I just don't post much.
agou9
[ 02-28-2002: Message edited by: onlooker ]</p>
Good night John Boy.
<strong>
How in the world would eliminating competition for Intel in any way benefit Apple?
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Intel shall be transformed into a monopoly in the x86 world. Their rate of increases in clockspeed shall decrease and prices shall increase. This benefits Apple and Motorola whose prices are comparatively high and rate of clockspeed increase low.
Intel aparently has made compiler optimisations that create benefit especially for SPEC.
SDRAM is a standard, with very strict guidelines and rules, yet there are companies that do not stick to it 100% and you'll see their RAM fail on certain controllers.
Bluetooth interferes with Airport and co, because it doesn't stick to rules.
Microsoft has failed to deliver secure software for 20 years because they give a **** about rules.
The computer industry is built from humans, and humans are known to abandon rules as soon as there's a way to over-advantage another.
As soon as something depensd on morals, it's no longer a viable benchmark.
That is my opinion.
G-news
<hr></blockquote>
AMD wouldn't go willingly into this arrangement. If they shut down x86 production, what are they gonna do, sell most of their fab space in this market and make ppc's with the rest? Actually they are expanding their capacity and their product lines with server products(hammer) and low-power embedded processors when they bought Alchemy. In a year or two they'll be able to produce 50% of the world's cpu's and actually be a viable alternative for a customer as big as dell. They don't want to use part of their cpu resources when they get into a period of real growth.
I definitely don't see stevie adopting x86 either.
<strong>
AMD wouldn't go willingly into this arrangement. If they shut down x86 production, what are they gonna do, sell most of their fab space in this market and make ppc's with the rest? Actually they are expanding their capacity and their product lines with server products(hammer) and low-power embedded processors when they bought Alchemy. In a year or two they'll be able to produce 50% of the world's cpu's and actually be a viable alternative for a customer as big as dell. They don't want to use part of their cpu resources when they get into a period of real growth.
I definitely don't see stevie adopting x86 either.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Who said anything about keeping AMD? And who cares if AMD is willing or not? As long as Apple has the cash, it can engauge in a hostile takeover.
I proposed that Apple buy AMD to kill it and eliminate the x86 competition Intel faces, not switch to x86. Sure, Apple would lose a few billion, but so what?
I'm sure Hammer's technology can incorporated into the G5 and other future PPC's.
Also Apple has no interest in
a: losing several billion
b: killing a company that does not directly compete
c: killing a company that does infact even help battle Intel
Last but not least, the figure of just about 4.38 billion dollar is certainly false, a company with that much market share on the CPU market (around 20% now I assume) is very unlikely to still have the same worth as it had with about 1% back in the K-5 days.
G-News
The german chip magazine c't apparently finally ran the spec cpu2000 tests on our performance champ 1Ghz PPC G4. Now we know why Motorola has been refraining from disclosing spec scores, or avoiding it rather.
[quote]SPECint_base2000: 306
SPECfp_base2000 : 187
compiled with OS X gcc 2.95.2, Absoft Pro Fortran 7.0<hr></blockquote>
The word "dismal" immediately comes to mind. The scores are on a level with a PIII 667 Mhz for integer and even worse for FPU.
Now, some people will go on and on about how real-world performance matters and spec is a synthetic benchmark that's worthless etc. I'd like to reminad those people that spec is the one and only benchmark that's brought up in every high-performance CPU presentation at events like the microprocessor forum. Not to mention the fact that the algorithms used in spec are in fact taken from real-world scientific applications that are used everyday in high-performance computing.
This means a few things.
a) The G4 is a piece of cr4p
b) PPC compilers that are available are completely useless
c) Apple has been squeezing more juice out of the G4 with their close hardware/software integration than we thought. It is a testament to Apple's good engineering that the PowerMacs are as fast as they currently are for most tasks.