Apple & Intel Are Merging? Well some think so ....

[BJ_M]

Apple's Decision to Use Intel Processors Is Nothing Less Than an Attempt to Dethrone Microsoft. Really.


Also some rumors of nvidia and sun and redhat and sgi ....



The crowd this week in San Francisco at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference seemed mildly excited by the prospect of its favorite computer company turning to Intel processors. The CEO of Adobe asked why it had taken Apple so long to make the switch? Analysts on Wall Street were generally positive, with a couple exceptions. WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE!? Are these people drunk on Flav-r-Ade? Yes. It is the legendary Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field at work. And this time, what's behind the announcement is so baffling and staggering that it isn't surprising that nobody has yet figured it out until now.

Apple and Intel are merging.

Let's take a revisionist look at the Apple news, asking a few key questions. The company has on its web site a video of the speech, itself, which is well worth watching. It's among this week's links.

Question 1: What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel?

This is the Altivec Factor -- PowerPC's dedicated vector processor in the G4 and G5 chips that make them so fast at running applications like Adobe Photoshop and doing that vaunted H.264 video compression. Apple loved to pull Phil Schiller onstage to do side-by-side speed tests showing how much faster in real life the G4s and G5s were than their Pentium equivalents. Was that so much BS? Did Apple not really mean it? And why was the question totally ignored in this week's presentation?

Question 2: What happened to Apple's 64-bit operating system?

OS X 10.4 -- Tiger -- is a 64-bit OS, remember, yet Intel's 64-bit chips -- Xeon and Itanium -- are high buck items aimed at servers, not iMacs. So is Intel going to do a cheaper Itanium for Apple or is Apple going to pretend that 64-bit never existed? Yes to both is my guess, which explains why the word "Pentium" was hardly used in the Jobs presentation. Certainly, he never said WHICH Intel chip they'd be using, just mentioning an unnamed 3.6-Ghz development system -- a system which apparently doesn't benchmark very well, either (it's in the links).

So is 64-bit really nothing to Apple? And why did they make such a big deal about it in their earlier marketing?

Question 3: Where the heck is AMD?

If Apple is willing to embrace the Intel architecture because of its performance and low power consumption, then why not go with AMD, which equals Intel's power specs, EXCEEDS Intel's performance specs AND does so at a lower price point across the board? Apple and AMD makes far more sense than Apple and Intel any day.

Question 4: Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?

This is the biggest question of all, suggesting Steve Jobs has completely forgotten about Adam Osborne. For those who don't remember him, Osborne was the charismatic founder of Osborne Computer, makers of the world's first luggable computer, the Osborne 1. The company failed in spectacular fashion when Adam pre-announced his next model, the Osborne Executive, several months before it would actually ship. People who would have bought Osborne 1s decided to wait for the Executive, which cost only $200 more and was twice the computer. Osborne sales crashed and the company folded. So why would Steve Jobs -- who knew Adam Osborne and even shared a hot tub with him (Steve's longtime girlfriend back in the day worked as an engineer for Osborne) -- pre-announce this chip change that undercuts not only his present product line but most of the machines he'll be introducing in the next 12 to 18 months?

Is the guy really going to stand up at some future MacWorld and tout a new Mac as being the world's most advanced obsolete computer?

This announcement has to cost Apple billions in lost sales as customers inevitably decide to wait for Intel boxes.

Apple's stated reason for pre-announcing the shift by a year is to allow third-party developers that amount of time to port their apps to Intel. But this makes no sense. For one thing, Apple went out of its way to show how easy the port could be with its Mathematica demonstration, so why give it a year? And companies typically make such announcements to their partners in private under NDA and get away with it. There was no need to make this a public announcement despite News.com's scoop, which only happened because of the approaching Jobs speech. Apple could have kept it quiet if they had chosen to, with the result that not so many sales would have been lost.

This means that there must have been some overriding reason why Apple HAD to make this public announcement, why it was worth the loss of billions in sales.

Question 5: Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?

People "in the know" love this idea, that Hollywood moguls are forcing Apple to switch to Intel because Intel processors have built-in DRM features that will keep us from pirating music and movies. Yes, Intel processors have such features, based primarily on the idea of a CPU ID that we all hated when it was announced years ago so Intel just stopped talking about it. The CPU ID is still in there, of course, and could be used to tie certain content to the specific chip in your computer.

But there are two problems with this argument. First, Apple is already in the music and video distribution businesses without this feature, which wouldn't be available across the whole product line for another two years and wouldn't be available across 90 percent of the installed base for probably another six years. Second, though nobody has ever mentioned it, I'm fairly sure that the PowerPC, too, has an individual CPU ID. Every high end microprocessor does, just as every network device has its unique MAC address.

So while DRM is nice, it probably isn't a driving force in this decision.

Then what is the driving force?

Microsoft.

Here is my analysis based on not much more than pondering the five questions, above, and speaking with a few old friends in the business. I won't say there is no insider information involved, but darned little.

The obvious questions about performance and 64-bit computing come down to marketing. At first, I thought that Steve Jobs was somehow taking up the challenge of making users believe war was peace and hate was love simply to show that he could do it. Steve is such a powerful communicator and so able to deceive people that for just a moment, I thought maybe he was doing this as a pure tour du force -- just because he could.

Nah. Not even Steve Jobs would try that.

The vaunted Intel roadmap is nice, but no nicer than the AMD roadmap, and nothing that IBM couldn't have matched. If Apple was willing to consider a processor switch, moving to the Cell Processor would have made much more sense than going to Intel or AMD, so I simply have to conclude that technology has nothing at all to do with this decision. This is simply about business -- BIG business.

Another clue comes from HP, where a rumor is going around that HP selling iPods could turn into HP becoming an Apple hardware partner for personal computers, too.

Microsoft comes into this because Intel hates Microsoft. It hasn't always been that way, but in recent years Microsoft has abused its relationship with Intel and used AMD as a cudgel against Intel. Even worse, from Intel's standpoint Microsoft doesn't work hard enough to challenge its hardware. For Intel to keep growing, people have to replace their PCs more often and Microsoft's bloatware strategy just isn't making that happen, especially if they keep delaying Longhorn.

Enter Apple. This isn't a story about Intel gaining another three percent market share at the expense of IBM, it is about Intel taking back control of the desktop from Microsoft.

Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.

So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin product with better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS. By the way, the new Apple OS for the Intel Architecture has a compatibility mode with Windows (I'm just guessing on this one).

This scenario works well for everyone except Microsoft. If Intel was able to own the Mac OS and make it available to all the OEMs, it could break the back of Microsoft. And if they tuned the OS to take advantage of unique features that only Intel had, they would put AMD back in the box, too. Apple could return Intel to its traditional role of being where all the value was in the PC world. And Apple/Intel could easily extend this to the consumer electronics world. How much would it cost Intel to buy Apple? Not much. And if they paid in stock it would cost nothing at all since investors would drive shares through the roof on a huge swell of user enthusiasm.

That's the story as I see it unfolding. Steve Jobs finally beats Bill Gates. And with the sale of Apple to Intel, Steve accepts the position of CEO of the Pixar/Disney/Sony Media Company.

Remember, you read it here first.

By Robert X. Cringely

[miksu]

Specs of dev. system are known. It's P4 660. Standard uATX mobo with Phoenix BIOS, GMA 900, etc. Specs can be read for example from XLR8YourMac or MacNN.

P4 won't make it's way into actual products, only dev. systems. Products are supposed to be Pentium M (singles&dualies). And 64-bit is going to be there, in desktops at least, propably high end laptops too. No Itanium, it would really mean need for PPC, x86 and Itanic code. Laptops are where the money is, same thing for Apple and other makers. You can't cram Itanium into laptop.

Beside the technology, it's also question about society and laws. What would SEC or FTC or whatever say in USA? How about EU in Europe?

[vitualis]

Well, we will see.

My guess that that the P4 will make it into the product (insofar as Netburst)... specifically, the 65nm version of the Pentium D/EE/Xeon into the desktop/tower version of the Mac.

Yonah won't have 64-bit extensions in its planned release so in the time frame Apple is planning on releasing these things, it will only be used in the Powerbook/Mac mini (i.e., as a G4 replacement).

When Intel finally assigns Netburst to the annals of history and uses the Pentium M architecture for all its mainstream CPUs (i.e., for desktop/portable/server market too), then Apple will officially abandon PPC (insofar they will stop releasing products with the G5 or dual-G5 in it).

Regards.

[MikieV]

Damn!

BJ-M, I love that smoking baby!

But Cringely doesn't seem to get it, on this.

Question 1: What happened to the PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel?

It has been eroded by Apple's inability to get chips faster than 2.7-Ghz, while Intel has gone beyond 3-Ghz. And will be eroded even further if Intel can make their projected "roadmap".

Question 2: What happened to Apple's 64-bit operating system?

Still there, on the G5 (iMac, Powermac, Xserve) machines. But the G4 (iBook, PowerBook, Mini) machines don't support 64-bit, and will most likely be the first to convert to Intel chips - since there will be no "loss" of 64-bit computing on machines which never had it. The iMac & PowerMac will probably convert in 2007 - when Intel is supposed to have 64-bit support readily available.

Jobs mentioned that new PPC-based computers would be coming-out before the start of switching to Intel chips - so faster G5, 64-bit machines will be arriving to fill the gap until Intel gets 64-bit going.

Question 3: Where the heck is AMD?

Providing 64-bit chips on the desktop, but not making a dent against the Centrino chipset - and it is a lack of a faster PowerBook (currently stuck at G4) which is hurting Apple the most.

Question 4: Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers?

Right now, this is causing major angst. A year from now, it will be a non-event. More importantly, people can't say they were "blind-sided' by a shift that was kept secret from them - and Apple dodges the PR nightmare of people feeling they were "duped' into buying obsolete PPC-based computers [if they bought one just before the change-over].

What is Cringely smoking?

[stiltman]

Or you can look at it this way (my gut feeling)

Microsoft talks to IBM (which just sold off it's computer business to China for un specified reason), and asks them if they can build a great new chip. IBM says yep, we'll do the cell chip and it will blow away Intel's dual chip on on a single wafer. MS says OK we'll let you prove it by building a chip for our gaming machine (XBox 360) first. If it preforms as you suggest it will, we might build an OS for it.

2 years later
Intel buys Apple, and Apple sells ski rocket!!!

2 1/2 years later
MS announces that it's next OS, due in a few months, will be optomized around IBM's cell chip technology.

4 years later
Intel's sales are hitting rock bottom as MS's new OS will no long support Intel's chips. It will only support PPC and Cell chips

8 years later
IBM out sells Intel in processors
AMD is now cloning IBM's cell chips and is expected to come out with a new version on their own in 1 year

10 years later
Big Blue is now back to being the King
Intel now is only holding onto about 10% of the chip market. The Apple OS is noe porting back to the BSD users, and only sees about a 7% market share in OSs

Full circle in 10 years!

[lordsmurf]

I think Altivec was a lot of hoopla.

[dcsos]

Yup Altivec was a lot of hoopla
like
SSE PLUS or HYPER THREADING
gimme true SMP anyday!
so is apple dumping dualies with INTEL?

[vitualis]

I think Apple will use dual-core CPUs for its "dualies".

Regards.

[stiltman]

I think Apple will use dual-core CPUs for its "dualies".

Regards.

I'm sure that's what they are going for, but can Intel's dual core compete with IBM's cell?

[lordsmurf]

Yup Altivec was a lot of hoopla
like
SSE PLUS or HYPER THREADING
gimme true SMP anyday!
so is apple dumping dualies with INTEL?

SSE has many genuine uses, especially in video.
HT works ... when the software supports it.

Altivec, however, does nothing. It helped make the OS pretty.

[vitualis]

Have a look at some of the opinion pieces around. Although the Cell will be an awesome processor for specific tasks, it is unlikely to have good performance for general computing.

Regards.

[MikieV]

Altivec, however, does nothing. It helped make the OS pretty.

Yeah, right.

The problem is that even with altivec, the PPC-based Macs were/are losing the performance battle.

John Carmack has a good reply, on Slashdot, for a fan-boy's whining about support of PPC-based Macs. http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=152340&cid=12784181

We work with Apple, ATI, and Nvidia to make everything run as well as possible. Doom 3 had AltiVec code in it, and there were driver changes to make things work better. The bottom line is that the compiler / cpu / system / graphics card combinations available for macs has just never been as fast as the equivalent x86/windows systems. The performance gap is not a myth or the result of malicious developers trying to make your platform of choice look bad.

I'm sure Id wouldn't have bothered with altivec if it just "helped make the OS pretty".