AMD chief says Apple will eventually use AMD chips

123578

Comments

  • Reply 81 of 159
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,510member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sunilraman


    Simple. Think about our new buzzwords for this year: Performance-per-watt. And performance-per-watt-per-dollar.



    Intel has 'spec-ed the Yonah, Merom, Conroe, Allendale, Woodcrest all within specified thermal envelopes. They've settled on working to CPU multipliers off the base 266mhz bus speed -- so they've got these bunch of CPUs with their clock speed specified for their performance-per-watt-dominating quality.



    It happens, we are lucky that in the Core2 Conroe/Allendale the headroom at 65nm and the general nature of the CPU is huge overclockability. The thing is that Intel can't clock the existing lineup higher as it is because once you increase the CPU frequency, clearly, the power consumption goes up.







    Higher clocked versions, or more powerful in benchmarks, at same or lower thermal envelopes. It's the performance-per-watt game...



    The power goes up rapidly on all chips when the freq. is raised. The voltage has to be raised, and the current rises faster. Can't help that.



    But, watch, Intel will raise the clock when AMD comes out with their 65nm versions near the end of the year.
  • Reply 82 of 159
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sunilraman


    PPFT. English schoolboys are brats, plain and simple. And they don't grow up until their 40+. I'm just biased about the Brits. But I need to make a journey to the MotherLand one day. God save da Queen yo.



    Well, being over here myself I reckon you're just about right.



    If you do make the trip someday, expect to pay twice as much for everything (because we're all dolts and just do without complaint) and keep the Ali G impression for the most absurd possible moment. That stuff gets a lot of laughs around here, what with the high population of grown up schoolboys.
  • Reply 83 of 159
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sunilraman


    Just to throw in a bit of the PC Gamer perspective (I know, they're a small market segment) they're all wetting themselves looking to get Intel Conroes on solid overclockable, stable motherboards. PC Gamers are definitely in strong transition now from AMD to Intel. Only the die hard AMD fanboys are holding fast to the AMD FX's.



    Good point. Something I've always wondered is which is larger: the pc gamer segment or the Mac market?



    Gamers by and large spend a lot on software (games) and hardware (mobos, cpus and gpus) to keep their gamer karma in good stead.



    Mac users tend to spend a fair bit on software (Mac apps sell quite strongly compared to their Windows equivalents as many Mac devs know) and hardware (all ourcredit card are belong to Apple, plus the odd penny for Crucial etc.) to ... maintain our Mac karma and more to the point get our work done too!



    Both are minorities, for sure. But both are well catered for because hardware conscious gamers and the sort of alpha Mac users like us who attend such sites as these, simply spend more per head than the average consumers out there and actually take an interest in our machines.



    My conclusion is that both segments are piling into Intel now. The former from AMD and the Athlon 64, the latter from PPC. Intel deserves some cred for offering the best option for both groups simultaneously. (Super clocking for gamers and sweet, sweet silence for us on the Mac.) I'm sure Otellini is lying back behind his super villian spread of Cinema Displays stroking a cat and plotting with a grin on his face.



    I wish all the best for AMD in the long term. As their competition with Intel is what has led the x86 platform far beyond IBM and Moto's lacklustre stewardship of PPC, which in theory should have been the leader given good care. Competition is what will carry our Macs along with the rest of the industry forward. So don't write AMD off. At least, I guess, until the present roadmaps have panned out and Intel hits some snag with its currently amazing architecture... AMD have the power to design great chips from the ground up. They really need to do that again now to handle the Core family going into the future.



    PS: Apple would have some rebranding to do re: AMD chips. In the murky future, they're going to have to stop calling x86 "Intel" all the damn time. Unless AMD pull out a trademark and we all decide it's become generic. If Creative invented the iPod, I can't see the problem with this.
  • Reply 84 of 159
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by melgross


    The power goes up rapidly on all chips when the freq. is raised. The voltage has to be raised, and the current rises faster. Can't help that.



    But, watch, Intel will raise the clock when AMD comes out with their 65nm versions near the end of the year.



    Yup, exactly. It seems that they had specific performance targets within thermal envelope targets. It happens that there's all these enormous headroom if you're not obsessed about power draw, and decibels.



    Agreed, when AMD brings out their 65nm stuff Intel will have higher clocked but within low-thermal envelope gear. I can't imagine clock speeds going DOWN from this point onwards, I really think the next stage (Core 3 say) will be 3ghz and upwards. But maybe I'm still locked into the MHZ race. Especially due to influence from visiting all those overclocking websites.
  • Reply 85 of 159
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by fuyutsuki


    Good point. Something I've always wondered is which is larger: the pc gamer segment or the Mac market?



    Heh 8) Very interesting. I think the PC gamer market is somewhat bigger, say 6-8% out of our Macintosh's 4.x %.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by fuyutsuki


    ...My conclusion is that both segments [Gamers and Mac] are piling into Intel now. The former from AMD and the Athlon 64, the latter from PPC. Intel deserves some cred for offering the best option for both groups simultaneously. (Super clocking for gamers and sweet, sweet silence for us on the Mac.) I'm sure Otellini is lying back behind his super villian spread of Cinema Displays stroking a cat and plotting with a grin on his face.



    Heh... great imagery re: super villain spread of CinemaDisplays ... Like the super bad guy in Inspector Gadget... with the cat. Muahha hahhaha h a.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by fuyutsuki


    I wish all the best for AMD in the long term. As their competition with Intel is what has led the x86 platform far beyond IBM and Moto's lacklustre stewardship of PPC, which in theory should have been the leader given good care. Competition is what will carry our Macs along with the rest of the industry forward. So don't write AMD off. At least, I guess, until the present roadmaps have panned out and Intel hits some snag with its currently amazing architecture... AMD have the power to design great chips from the ground up. They really need to do that again now to handle the Core family going into the future.



    Despite my burning desire to get a Conroe and overclock the f*k out of it, I still acknowledge and admire what AMD has done up to this point. Certainly they're on the back foot for a year or more going forward, but is that not when sometimes come-from-behind-victories happen? Heh.



    The key to Intel's success in regaining the CPU crown is going down to 65nm and 45nm. That gave them the jump on everyone. "Hitting the wall at 90nm" was a pretty catastrophic scenario in CPU-land. IBM/Moto couldn't hack it, AMD managed to, and still do, produce some nice stuff at 90nm with decent clocks and thermal envelopes in their current range.



    It was clear for a few years IBM/Freescale would not be able to pull 65nm in any reasonable amount of time to save Apple.



    Aside from the Core Microarchitecture and other chip designer-y stuff, is it not that they said that the way to keep Moore's Law going is to go down to 65nm and onwards to 45nm.



    Beyond 45nm, I wonder what's on the horizon. And WTF happened to the promise of optical computing? Shuffling photons around could be much cooler (literally and figuratively).



    [Side Geek Note] Apparently in Star Trek: Next Gen somewhere in there they talk about the computers, where imagine instead of electrons flying about you have photons or subatomic particles or something moving about, not only in real space (not fast enough), it moves in "subspace" (standard term for anything faster-than-light in the Star Trek universe).
  • Reply 86 of 159
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,951member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by melgross


    AMD had some pretty bad chips out there for years. They weren't shunned simply Intel didn't want anyone using them.



    I'm not sure what you mean. Some of the older Athlons ran pretty hot, but my understanding is that that was nothing in comparison to Prescot & Nocona. K6II and K6III were pokey but they weren't unreliable. I even had a 386 AMDs that worked fine. All the problems I had with AMDs were when they were mated to boards with VIA or SIS chipsets. Granted, I haven't owned many AMDs, since '98 I've been mostly using second hand or refurbished workstations, be they Alpha, Xeon or PMG5.
  • Reply 87 of 159
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by melgross


    IF, and that is a big if, Apple ever moves to four socket, or higher, servers, it might be worth considering. But Apple has shown no inclination to do so.



    Didn't Tulsa beat those 8xx Opterons pretty good? Granted, most of it seems to be thanks to the 64 MB cache on the IBM chipset but still. What could these chips do with HT and the integrated memory controller... Netburst must have been severly handicapped by latencies and bandwidth.
  • Reply 88 of 159
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by fuyutsuki


    Well, being over here myself I reckon you're just about right.



    If you do make the trip someday, expect to pay twice as much for everything (because we're all dolts and just do without complaint) and keep the Ali G impression for the most absurd possible moment. That stuff gets a lot of laughs around here, what with the high population of grown up schoolboys.



    Heh. I'll keep it in mind for when I eventually if ever, make the trip to the UK. 8)
  • Reply 89 of 159
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by melgross


    Heh. What we don't know, we don't, well, you know.



    I was aware of every bit of it. Inaccurate statements are the source of many truly false claims.
  • Reply 90 of 159
    auxioauxio Posts: 2,717member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by gregmightdothat


    How so?



    Let's recap...



    When Windows 95 came out, it was miles ahead of Mac OS (System 7.1 at the time). Protected memory and cooperative multitasking [edit: should be preemptive multitasking] to name a couple important features lacking in Mac OS at the time. I won't try to argue about which one was more stable (that's like comparing rotten apples to rotten oranges -- they both make you sick).



    Over on the hardware side, PCs were offering much more for much less than the price of a Mac. Hence the reason why Apple toyed with the idea of "clones" briefly (since it had worked so well on the IBM PC side).



    Apple didn't have anything in the pipeline (at the time) which would bring them back on par with the Wintel world (very much like the position AMD is in now). If it weren't for the deep coffers built up in the 80s, they'd have been dead in the water.



    Of course, we all know how the next chapter of the story has turned out for Apple, which is why I'd never count out AMD.
  • Reply 91 of 159
    chuckerchucker Posts: 5,089member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by auxio


    Let's recap...



    When Windows 95 came out, it was miles ahead of Mac OS (System 7.1 at the time).



    Windows 95 came out in late 1995; System 7.5 came out in late 1994.



    Quote:

    Protected memory and cooperative multitasking to name a couple important features lacking in Mac OS at the time.



    You mean preemptive multitasking. Mac OS had cooperative multitasking.



    This is somewhat true, but the implementation in Windows wasn't exactly too great, and Microsoft wanted to move to NT to make it better. They failed multiple times. It wasn't until XP that they succeeded to merge the consumer and NT lines.



    Quote:

    Over on the hardware side, PCs were offering much more for much less than the price of a Mac.



    That's a pointless assertion. You can't prove it either way.
  • Reply 92 of 159
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by auxio


    Let's recap...



    When Windows 95 came out, it was miles ahead of Mac OS (System 7.1 at the time). Protected memory and cooperative multitasking to name a couple important features lacking in Mac OS at the time. I won't try to argue about which one was more stable (that's like comparing rotten apples to rotten oranges -- they both make you sick).



    Over on the hardware side, PCs were offering much more for much less than the price of a Mac. Hence the reason why Apple toyed with the idea of "clones" briefly (since it had worked so well on the IBM PC side).



    Apple didn't have anything in the pipeline (at the time) which would bring them back on par with the Wintel world (very much like the position AMD is in now). If it weren't for the deep coffers built up in the 80s, they'd have been dead in the water.



    Of course, we all know how the next chapter of the story has turned out for Apple, which is why I'd never count out AMD.



    Oh ok, I had no idea where you were going with that analogy at first :P
  • Reply 93 of 159
    auxioauxio Posts: 2,717member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sunilraman


    Oh, and Paul Otellini is so in Steve's pocket -- Paul's virtually giving Intel chips away to Apple. Paul's like, here, take it man, take it alll..... Frack those Euro bastards* AMD..!!!



    *AMD is European right? Or worse, now, European-Canadian with AMD-ATI



    And Otellini is such an American sounding last name. Comes to mind right beside Smith and Jones...



    And I can't remember where Intel CPUs are fabbed again... could you check yours for me?
  • Reply 94 of 159
    auxioauxio Posts: 2,717member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Chucker


    Windows 95 came out in late 1995; System 7.5 came out in late 1994.



    I guess the timeline on Wikipedia is wrong then... maybe you should submit a correction to the article. I wasn't using a Mac at the time, so I don't know the exact dates. Regardless, Mac OS was still a historical footnote in any operating systems textbook at the time.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Chucker


    You mean preemptive multitasking. Mac OS had cooperative multitasking.



    Right, sorry, you got me. That's what happens when I skim through a Wikipedia article and post too fast....



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Chucker


    This is somewhat true, but the implementation in Windows wasn't exactly too great, and Microsoft wanted to move to NT to make it better. They failed multiple times. It wasn't until XP that they succeeded to merge the consumer and NT lines.



    Sure. But at least it was there and working to some extent (ie. running more than one major app at a time wasn't quite as much of a gamble on the PC side).



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Chucker


    That's a pointless assertion. You can't prove it either way.



    I remember shopping for a computer at the time and I found that Macs were at least $1000 more than an equivalent PC. Sure you can't directly compare the Motorola CPUs to the Intel CPUs (the slippery argument Apple fanboys love to use), but you also can't argue that the PC I got for $1000 cheaper would do everything I needed to do at the time as well as the Mac. Sure it wouldn't play Marathon, but it did play Leisure Suit Larry pretty well.
  • Reply 95 of 159
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,951member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by auxio


    re: preemptive vs cooperative multitasking:

    Sure. But at least it was there and working to some extent.



    I think Windows 95 worked better in this regard, but I still switched to NT before too long.



    I remember going to a Mac user's home around that time. When the computer was dialing in to the Internet, he told me not to click anywhere else or else the dialing might fail. That didn't leave a good impression on me.
  • Reply 96 of 159
    auxioauxio Posts: 2,717member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by JeffDM


    I think Windows 95 worked better in this regard, but I still switched to NT before too long.



    Sure, but how many games could you play under NT at the time?



    If you want to move out of the realm of consumer OSes, then Linux also had a very good preemptive multitasking implementation at the time. As did many other UNIX-based OSes (NT was based on the Mach microkernel, which had been used in flavors of BSD UNIX since the late 80s).



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by JeffDM


    I remember going to a Mac user's home around that time. When the computer was dialing in to the Internet, he told me not to click anywhere else or else the dialing might fail. That didn't leave a good impression on me.



    I helped my wife (girlfriend at the time) set up her Mac around 1997. After experiencing a lot of crashes, we finally learned that running too many programs at once was simply a no-no, and that you had to actually set the maximum amount of memory large applications could use (either that or buy ludicrous amounts of RAM). And remember to "rebuild your desktop" every so often -- oh, and if all else fails, try "zapping the PRAM".
  • Reply 97 of 159
    chuckerchucker Posts: 5,089member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by auxio


    I guess the timeline on Wikipedia is wrong then... maybe you should submit a correction to the article. I wasn't using a Mac at the time, so I don't know the exact dates. Regardless, Mac OS was still a historical footnote in any operating systems textbook at the time.



    The System 7 version history section on Wikipedia says that 7.1.2P was released in July 1994, and 7.5.1 in March 1995. That puts 7.5 somewhere in between; IIRC, it was released in late '94, but maybe it slipped until January or something. For whatever reason, Wikipedia does not give a date, or even a month, for it.



    Wikipedia's Windows 95 page gives August 24, 1995, which sounds right to me. That definitely puts it after 7.5.



    Quote:

    Sure. But at least it was there and working to some extent (ie. running more than one major app at a time wasn't quite as much of a gamble on the PC side).



    Yes, that's true, but in my experience, BSoDs were a much larger problem on the Windows side than system crashes were on the Mac side.



    YMMV, of course.



    Neither OS's foundation was particularly future-proof. Neither company was happy with the architecture. Apple tampered with A/UX, NuKernel, Copland, Pink and other projects at the time, and Microsoft with NT, and Apple even briefly considered moving to NT as well.



    Quote:

    I remember shopping for a computer at the time and I found that Macs were at least $1000 more than an equivalent PC.



    What does "equivalent" even mean?



    Quote:

    Sure you can't directly compare the Motorola CPUs to the Intel CPUs (the slippery argument Apple fanboys love to use), but you also can't argue that the PC I got for $1000 cheaper would do everything I needed to do at the time as well as the Mac. Sure it wouldn't play Marathon, but it did play Leisure Suit Larry pretty well.



    But a $100 computer can also "do everything you needed to do at the time". The difference is whether it's comfortable to work with.
  • Reply 98 of 159
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,951member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by auxio


    Sure, but how many games could you play under NT at the time?



    If you want to move out of the realm of consumer OSes, then Linux also had a very good preemptive multitasking implementation at the time. As did many other UNIX-based OSes (NT was based on the Mach microkernel, which had been used in flavors of BSD UNIX since the late 80s).



    Some games worked, some didn't. It really wasn't a concern. It helped me cut back on the time wasted playing games, and the money spent constantly upgrading to play them. I think the much-improved stability and reliability gained was more than worth the trade-off. The difference compared to the UNIX varients was that I could run all of my productivity software. Most of the standard programs didn't have an adequate counterpart on Linux/BSD/etc., and I really didn't think they were very good desktop OS. Other than games, NT made a fine desktop OS at the time, even if it was more of a server/workstation OS.
  • Reply 99 of 159
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by auxio


    Apple didn't have anything in the pipeline (at the time) which would bring them back on par with the Wintel world (very much like the position AMD is in now). If it weren't for the deep coffers built up in the 80s, they'd have been dead in the water.



    Of course, we all know how the next chapter of the story has turned out for Apple, which is why I'd never count out AMD.



    Nicely put. Back in the period in question I was an AMD fanboy through and through and that kind of tale certaingly pulls the heartstrings. The TEXAN chip maker (they're as German as Apple are Taiwanese) then finally pulled a tour de force with the Athlon at the end of the 90's and I still have my original one of those which I busted a good iMac's worth on alone at the time! So yes, Apple, AMD, and in fact every company worth its salt are good things for the competition they drive and the increase in the number of labs and engineers who craft tomorrow's finest mouthwatering new kit. That said, I'm still totally geared up for an Intel Mac once the financial gods remember me!



    Motorola G4 all the way until then. It's not that bad really.
  • Reply 100 of 159
    auxioauxio Posts: 2,717member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Chucker


    The System 7 version history section on Wikipedia says that 7.1.2P was released in July 1994, and 7.5.1 in March 1995. That puts 7.5 somewhere in between; IIRC, it was released in late '94, but maybe it slipped until January or something. For whatever reason, Wikipedia does not give a date, or even a month, for it.



    Wikipedia's Windows 95 page gives August 24, 1995, which sounds right to me. That definitely puts it after 7.5.



    And 7.5 somehow made Mac OS leap ahead into the current state of OS technology? That's what my real argument was. Mac OS was 1980's technology until Mac OS X came out. Windows 95 was still head and shoulders better in many ways, even if it was still pretty bad.





    Quote:

    Yes, that's true, but in my experience, BSoDs were a much larger problem on the Windows side than system crashes were on the Mac side.



    I can't remember how many times I saw the bomb/unhappy Mac on my wife's old Mac. It certainly felt like a lot more than I ever saw the BSoD when using Windows 95.



    Quote:

    Neither OS's foundation was particularly future-proof. Neither company was happy with the architecture. Apple tampered with A/UX, NuKernel, Copland, Pink and other projects at the time, and Microsoft with NT, and Apple even briefly considered moving to NT as well.



    At least NT was a reality -- and there were plans in the pipeline to combine it with 95 (which essentially happened with Windows 2000 -- which I used happily for a few years before XP finally came out). Apple had nothing but vaporware in it's pipeline at the time.



    Quote:

    But a $100 computer can also "do everything you needed to do at the time". The difference is whether it's comfortable to work with.



    It worked fine for me when I was using Linux on it to learn software development at the time. I'd flip over to Win 95 to edit reports and such with MS Word and play a couple of games.



    You can't argue that Macs were any easier to deal with. Maybe the GUI was a bit simpler to get the hang of, but you still had extension conflicts, rebuilding the desktop, zapping the PRAM, and other Applisms that users had to deal with (but had no idea what they were doing).



    Perhaps some of the components were better than PCs (like the audio system and the Apple monitors), but I didn't need that at the time. I needed a computer to learn software development, telnet into my computer labs, email, and write a couple of reports in Word with. The PC I bought happily filled those needs and I learned to use it pretty well. I learned all the quirks of Windows 95 and Linux rather than paying $1000 more and learning all of the quirks of Mac OS.
Sign In or Register to comment.