Apple using Intel processors

  • Thread starter Thread starter Yousuf Khan
  • Start date Start date
Gack, snore, snooze, mumbling in his sleep. What's that he's saying?
Itanium? Nah, never. You can safely bet that Intel has had Power
emulation for Itanium scoped for a long time.

RM
 
Here's a rumour that's as old as the hills rivalling the "Dell will use
AMD" rumours in longevity. The latest: "Apple will use Intel" rumour.
This time the Wall Street Journal is propagating the rumour.

Apple to explore Intel chips for Macs
http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/050523/tech_apple_intel.html?.v=3

Yousuf Khan
Click to expand...


Recently, Apple was unable to fulfil a promise to have 3GHz G5 chips
within a year of the unveiling of the G5-based Power Mac.

Apple denies eyeing Intel chips
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/73057/apple-denies-eyeing-intel-chips.html


Wasn't Apple saying "MHz doesn't matter" just a couple years ago? The
MAC is/was all about features and ease of use, not MHz?
Ed
 
Here's a rumour that's as old as the hills rivalling the "Dell will use
AMD" rumours in longevity. The latest: "Apple will use Intel" rumour.
This time the Wall Street Journal is propagating the rumour.

Apple to explore Intel chips for Macs
http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/050523/tech_apple_intel.html?.v=3

Yousuf Khan
Click to expand...

well if most of osx is bsd based i doubt it would be that hard to port and
with the success of the ipod they have a substantial consumer base willing
to try a new os which hasnt been designed by a pack of middle managers
trying to extend their monopoly as far as possible but rather an os that
actualy works.
 
Here's a rumour that's as old as the hills rivalling the "Dell will use
AMD" rumours in longevity. The latest: "Apple will use Intel" rumour.
This time the Wall Street Journal is propagating the rumour.

Apple to explore Intel chips for Macs
http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/050523/tech_apple_intel.html?.v=3

Yousuf Khan
Click to expand...

_IF_ (and it's a huge IF) Steve Jobs decides to recompile Mac OS for
Pentium, it should be able to run on any generic PC (including
AMD-based). They may try to artificially prevent it from running on
anything but Apple-branded systems, but almost surely there soon will
be a hack or two to circumvent it. Unless Apple is eyeing Itanic,
which will keep Macs highly proprietary and obscenely overpriced.
 
_IF_ (and it's a huge IF) Steve Jobs decides to recompile Mac OS for
Pentium, it should be able to run on any generic PC (including
AMD-based). They may try to artificially prevent it from running on
anything but Apple-branded systems, but almost surely there soon will
be a hack or two to circumvent it. Unless Apple is eyeing Itanic,
which will keep Macs highly proprietary and obscenely overpriced.
Click to expand...

Plus, it's highly doubtful that Itanium would help Apple obtain
low-power mobile parts for its laptops. The low-powered versions of
PowerPC seems to be what's at the heart of the bad blood between Apple
and IBM.

Apple likes to lock its users into proprietary computer systems, so it
has no problems taking on proprietary processors from single sources. So
I don't see why it would even bother to try to obtain price concessions
from IBM, it really wouldn't matter to its fanatical userbase -- they'll
pay anything to get it anyways. Dell on the other hand has to extract
every last drop out of Intel.

Yousuf Khan
 
epaton said:
well if most of osx is bsd based i doubt it would be that hard to port and
with the success of the ipod they have a substantial consumer base willing
to try a new os which hasnt been designed by a pack of middle managers
trying to extend their monopoly as far as possible but rather an os that
actualy works.
Click to expand...

Apple suffers from the exact same curse and blessing that Microsoft
suffers from -- it has locked its users into a proprietary operating
system, and the applications are therefore also proprietary. It's a
blessing because it allows it to charge huge amounts to its userbase.
It's a curse because you're stuck on one platform forever.

In theory, OS X is portable, in reality it is not. Similarly, Windows NT
and its offspring are also theoretically portable. Windows was ported to
everything from Alpha to Itanium, but in the end the only architecture
that it's going to evolve with is x86-64. OS X can similarly be ported
to many architectures, but in the end it's only the PowerPC that's going
to matter to it. The reason being that nobody bothers to port to the
other architectures. Just having a ballfield there doesn't mean that
players will come.

Solaris is finding a similar situation. It's finding that it's installed
base of Solaris for Sparc aren't all that interested in Solaris on x86.

Yousuf Khan
 
Yousuf Khan said:
Plus, it's highly doubtful that Itanium would help Apple obtain low-power
mobile parts for its laptops. The low-powered versions of PowerPC seems to
be what's at the heart of the bad blood between Apple and IBM.

Apple likes to lock its users into proprietary computer systems, so it has
no problems taking on proprietary processors from single sources. So I
don't see why it would even bother to try to obtain price concessions from
IBM, it really wouldn't matter to its fanatical userbase -- they'll pay
anything to get it anyways. Dell on the other hand has to extract every
last drop out of Intel.

Yousuf Khan
Click to expand...

Care to explain how an Itanium isn't a "proprietary processor from a single
source"? Hell, a Pentium is too for all practical purposes. What a dough
head.

del cecchi
 
Del said:
Care to explain how an Itanium isn't a "proprietary processor from a single
source"? Hell, a Pentium is too for all practical purposes. What a dough
head.
Click to expand...

Well, I was saying that the Itanium was also exactly the same as a
PowerPC from IBM.

Yousuf Khan
 
According to Robert Myers said:
I don't think the IBM/Apple relationship has been a happy one.
Click to expand...

Perhaps, with high volume customers in the game console market lining up,
IBM needs the MHz-demanding (and thus research-resource-demanding, high
cost) Apple less and less. Apple is just looking at other options in case
they get dumped?

Just speculation.
 
Plus, it's highly doubtful that Itanium would help Apple obtain
low-power mobile parts for its laptops. The low-powered versions of
PowerPC seems to be what's at the heart of the bad blood between Apple
and IBM.
Click to expand...
The whole story sounds wildly implausible. The only reason Itanium
seems like a possibility is that I gather it would be much more easy
to make Itanium look like Power than it would be to make x86 look like
Power, and it's hard to imagine a Mac that wouldn't run existing
software. Who knows what Intel may have been doing with power
management in Itanium; it has to be something they're worried about
even for server applications.

Given what Intel has sunk into Itanium, I can't imagine that the price
at which they would sell the chip to Apple would be an issue. It
would probably be worth it to them as a marketing stunt.

It all still sounds wildly implausible, with or without Itanium.

RM
 
Solaris is finding a similar situation. It's finding that it's installed
base of Solaris for Sparc aren't all that interested in Solaris on x86.

Yousuf Khan
Click to expand...

having installed a beta of solaris10 on x86 i can say theres probaly other
reasons as well, it was missing some crucial drivers like for a creative
labs sound card and even a 3com network card.

also the solaris install is horrible, in stead of asking you all the
questions up front it makes you wait an hour in front of the pc.

that said now solaris is opening up i recon somebody could make a decent
distro out it, portaris (gentoo portage on solaris) is meant to be pretty
good and im sure theres plenty of other gentoo tweekers who like the idea
of multiple kernels and it would avoid a lot of the porting probs since
users would be doing it themselves.
 
Robert said:
The whole story sounds wildly implausible. The only reason Itanium
seems like a possibility is that I gather it would be much more easy
to make Itanium look like Power than it would be to make x86 look like
Power, and it's hard to imagine a Mac that wouldn't run existing
software. Who knows what Intel may have been doing with power
management in Itanium; it has to be something they're worried about
even for server applications.
Click to expand...

Actually none of the articles about this story have mentioned anything
about Itanium, I think most people assume x86. It's only this and other
forums which are speculating on Itanium.

I don't think it's got anything to do with how well Itanium can emulate
Power, because it's quite obvious that Itanium can't emulate anything
well. Witness its x86 emulation, the most emulated architecture in the
world, even Intel the inventor of x86 could not get Itanium to emulate
it well; also, x86 and Power are much closer to each other than Itanium
is, since CISC and RISC are much closer to each other than they are to
EPIC.

I think the speculation has arisen simply for marketing factors that
line up between the two products. Apple likes proprietary hardware to
maintain its proprietary systems franchise: Itanium is the most
proprietary processor in the world, by design. Apple will only need a
small number of processors equivalent to maybe 2% of the desktop market
at present -- chump change in the x86 world, but could be quite
significant for Itanium.
Given what Intel has sunk into Itanium, I can't imagine that the price
at which they would sell the chip to Apple would be an issue. It
would probably be worth it to them as a marketing stunt.
Click to expand...

Probably. They could also cheapen the cost of Itanium enough for Apple
if they bring out a small-cache version for desktops.

Yousuf Khan
 
Yea, we've heard it before but WSJ missed the boat by nearly a month this
time:

<http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/46175/46175.html?Ad=1>
(not too far down; search page for "bizarre") Unfortunately, no
attribution of which sandwich's owner said this.
Click to expand...

You mean M$ really does err, sandwiches for "lunch"... or do you have to
pay for your own?

The next para, after "bizarre", is an interesting one too, especially for
these NGs: 25 x64 servers to replace 250 32-bit ones - something for the
x64 Luddites to gnaw on!:-) Jeez I wonder if the new MSN servers are all
AMD x64s??
 
The whole story sounds wildly implausible. The only reason Itanium
seems like a possibility is that I gather it would be much more easy
to make Itanium look like Power than it would be to make x86 look like
Power, and it's hard to imagine a Mac that wouldn't run existing
software.
Click to expand...

Uhh, it's a HELL of a lot easier to make Power look like Power than to
make Itanium look like Power though. And that's the real key. It
would be completely moronic for Apple to consider Itanium! They would
lose compatible for the sake of getting a slower, more expensive and
more power hungry processor; a lose-lose-lose situation!
Who knows what Intel may have been doing with power
management in Itanium; it has to be something they're worried about
even for server applications.
Click to expand...

Ohh, I'm quite sure that Intel HAS been working on this, they MUST be.
I've mentioned it many times before, performance/watt is quickly
becoming a much more important measure of performance for server
processors than raw performance alone. With dual-core chips we're now
looking at being able to cram 8 processor cores in a 1U server, IFF
the power consumption is in the right ballpark.
Given what Intel has sunk into Itanium, I can't imagine that the price
at which they would sell the chip to Apple would be an issue. It
would probably be worth it to them as a marketing stunt.
Click to expand...

The question is how bad of a performance hit the chip would take to
meet a break even (just on per-unit costs) price point? In most
situations a PowerPC chip with 512KB of cache will beat out an Itanium
with 1.5MB of cache with ease, and that's WITHOUT having to emulate
PowerPC instructions for all the applications out there!
It all still sounds wildly implausible, with or without Itanium.
Click to expand...

Apple ditching PPC for x86 is wildly implausible. Apple ditching PPC
for IA-64 is completely absurd! At least with x86 they would have
high performance, low powered processors that are incompatible. With
Itanium they would have lower performance, higher powered processors
that are incompatible.

Ohh, and it doesn't even solve the basic rumor that started all this
nonsense; that Apple is not happy with only having a single supplier
for their processors.
 
Robert Myers said:
The whole story sounds wildly implausible. The only reason Itanium
seems like a possibility is that I gather it would be much more easy
to make Itanium look like Power than it would be to make x86 look like
Power, and it's hard to imagine a Mac that wouldn't run existing
software. Who knows what Intel may have been doing with power
management in Itanium; it has to be something they're worried about
even for server applications.
Click to expand...

That's all just a question of how much high-level code is in OSX
compared to assembly code. Beyond that, making either Itanium or
x86 look like Power seems.... let's just hope there's lots of
high-level code in there.
Given what Intel has sunk into Itanium, I can't imagine that the price
at which they would sell the chip to Apple would be an issue. It
would probably be worth it to them as a marketing stunt.

It all still sounds wildly implausible, with or without Itanium.
Click to expand...

It seemsmuchmore likely with x86-64 than either x86 or Itanium.
 
Yousuf said:
Apple suffers from the exact same curse and blessing that Microsoft
suffers from -- it has locked its users into a proprietary operating
system, and the applications are therefore also proprietary. It's a
blessing because it allows it to charge huge amounts to its userbase.
It's a curse because you're stuck on one platform forever.
Click to expand...

What ARE yu talking about. Mac started running on a 68000 with an OS I
can't remember, then went to MacOS, then to Power CPUs, then to OS-X. It
may be proprietary, but it sure isn't "one playform" no matter how you
define it.
In theory, OS X is portable, in reality it is not. Similarly, Windows NT
and its offspring are also theoretically portable. Windows was ported to
everything from Alpha to Itanium, but in the end the only architecture
that it's going to evolve with is x86-64. OS X can similarly be ported
to many architectures, but in the end it's only the PowerPC that's going
to matter to it. The reason being that nobody bothers to port to the
other architectures. Just having a ballfield there doesn't mean that
players will come.
Click to expand...

AFAIK OS-X is open source, although the graphical manager isn't. It's
based on BSD, and I think it was ported to Sparc as a proof of concept
(by two students on a one week break if I recall). And you can run (at
least) freeBSD and Linux on Mac, although I've only seen it on a laptop.
Solaris is finding a similar situation. It's finding that it's installed
base of Solaris for Sparc aren't all that interested in Solaris on x86.
Click to expand...

If you buy hardware to be compatible it's okay, although the install was
painful last time I saw it. But Sun hardware has come down in price, why
bother?

Thought: Sun went to SPARC because they couldn't get Motorola to push
the 68k fast enough. I wonder if you could port OS-X to Sparc, which is
made by multiple vendors? How's that for a rumor starter?
 
Bill said:
What ARE yu talking about. Mac started running on a 68000 with an OS I
can't remember, then went to MacOS, then to Power CPUs, then to OS-X. It
may be proprietary, but it sure isn't "one playform" no matter how you
define it.
Click to expand...

Well, yes Apple has been a lot more successful at pushing its userbase
around than Microsoft has in the past. But back then, the installed
userbase of Macs was a lot smaller than it is now too: a few million vs.
about 25 million now. The last major change really was the switchover
from 68xxx to PowerPC -- that was a hardware switchover. The switchover
from MacOS to OS X is trivial by comparison -- it's just software. In
the hardware switchover, Apple had to come up with hardware emulators
and stuff, whereas in the OS software switch, the majority of
applications worked between the OSes, with a few odd men out.

Microsoft's userbase in the 100's of millions, possibly approaching the
billion mark. Microsoft's userbase was already in the 100's of millions
when Mac made the jump from 68xxx to PPC. So really the size of the
transition that you can force down your locked-in users' throats is
inversely proportional to the size of your userbase. Apple couldn't hope
to make the 68xxx to PPC transition today, with its userbase as large as
it is today.
AFAIK OS-X is open source, although the graphical manager isn't. It's
based on BSD, and I think it was ported to Sparc as a proof of concept
(by two students on a one week break if I recall). And you can run (at
least) freeBSD and Linux on Mac, although I've only seen it on a laptop.
Click to expand...

The reality is that Mac OS X is not portable, and it's got nothing to do
with what programming language it was written in, or if its close
relatives are running on other platforms. It's not portable, because its
userbase won't let it be ported. It's too entrenched. Everytime an OS
port is made, doesn't necessarily guarantee that the userbase will
follow into the new platform. HP-UX exists on PA-RISC and Itanium, the
PA-RISC crowd isn't easily following HP-UX into Itanium for HP. For Sun,
Solaris exists on Sparc and x86/x64, the Sparc crowd doesn't necessarily
adopt Solaris on x64 just because it's there.
If you buy hardware to be compatible it's okay, although the install was
painful last time I saw it. But Sun hardware has come down in price, why
bother?
Click to expand...

You're missing my point, it's not because of missing device drivers that
it hasn't picked up. It's because just having the same OS available on a
different platform is not enough. The OS by itself will not run all of
your application binaries on the other platform. You still have to wait
for applications to be ported too.
Thought: Sun went to SPARC because they couldn't get Motorola to push
the 68k fast enough. I wonder if you could port OS-X to Sparc, which is
made by multiple vendors? How's that for a rumor starter?
Click to expand...

Sparc is well on its way to becoming the next embedded processor core, a
a la MIPS, or ARM. The good old days of general purpose computing are
behind it.

Yousuf Khan
 
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