“Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life. There have been rumors to this effect… We’ve had teams working on the ‘just in case’ scenario.” said Steve Jobs. Apple will ship a Mac with Intel processors by June 6th, 2006, as reports said. It should be complete by June 2007. Says that Intel offers a better roadmap for the markets that Apple services. Jobs talked about IBM missing the 3 GHz mark for the G5 and not being able to put one in a PowerBook. Today’s WWDC demonstration has been done entirely on an Intel Mac Xeon-P4. Developers applauded Steve when he said that both processors would be supported for a long time and the core to this will be universal binaries. ‘Rosetta’ will allow PowerPC compiled apps to work on an Intel Mac. UPDATE: After Jobs’ presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. “That doesn’t preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will,” he said. “We won’t do anything to preclude that.” However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers’ hardware. “We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac.“
CONFIRMED: Apple to use Intel Chips – *updated*
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Eugenia Loli
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Oh noes! A different cpu! What will we do….
Hang on, it doesnt ACTUALLY matter.
Apple has always been about quality computers and a unique OS. How has/will that change/d?
I couldnt care less if they were running on wind-up hamsters as long as they do what they are supposed to do.
Many of you seem so up in arms about the choice of Intel over AMD. I understand that the top of the line opterons pretty much blow away most of the top of the line intel chips…. however,.. a lot can happen in a year or 2 and I don’t think these machines will be necesseraly running on p4’s and xeon’s… I’m going to speculate they will in fact be running on dual core 64bit Pentium M cpu’s….(yes i know they do not exist yet) the new pentium M cpu’s are very impressive performers, low power consumption, and all the laptop technology will already be there for their ibook and powerbook lines
Pentium M would be a good choice (i don’t know when the M will have 64 bit support but i’m sure it will very soon)
another thing….. I think this has been in the works for years… everything Jobs has done he has made sure it can easily be ported to x86 and now x86_64
You tell me what I should need.
Advice is your specialty.
But could I ever need enough
For you to set me free?
I’m afraid to make decisions,
That’s where you come in.
In the case of chance collisions,
I look at you as my friend.
Where would I be without my pc?
Where would I be without mtv?
Where would I be without cnn?
Where would I be — without ibm?
Where would I be without all my toys?
Where would I be without sampled noise?
Where would I be without seeing you again?
Where would I be — without ibm?
“And NOW, NOW that Osx will run natively on x86 you want me
to believe your bullshit that Apple somehow is going to make
it impossible for it to run on every pc in existence ? ”
That’s pretty much what I was getting at. That it wouldn’t make sense for them to tell people they can’t run OS X on anything but their machines. They don’t have to support all hardware, they just shouldn’t try and restrict it. If it’s such a big deal, they should have stayed on PPC.
http://img292.echo.cx/img292/6458/p4364qx.jpg
Apple’s market share was small, but growing for the first time in years. Apple on power, made Power popular, and made Linux on Power viable. Last time I looked the G5 was the cheapest way into the Power line.
The Will to Win seems to be gone at IBM.
So they won a game contract on a stripped PoserPc.
Microsoft will be sure to re-negotiate that contract to rip the profit out of it soon enough.
So, I guess I’m Mourning the passing of a once great company.
2 gig of ram.
Nice.
“15 years as a Mac user, today marks the end of my happiness and support of Apple ” where will you go now? M$? MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA <Gasp> <cough> <cough> <cough>
Anybody working with either the xBSD’s or Linux knows how open the x86 architecture can be in the current incarnation. So how, exactly, can Schiller state that, “We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac,” when the platform is generally open?
Given that Apple under Steve has ALWAYS maintained as much control over its hardware as possible, it is easy to deduce that this move to Intel substantially involves Intel DRM: a synergy between OS X and hardware DRM to keep non-Apple hardware from hosting OS X.
Given how Steve has guided Apple along a media-oriented course recently, plus how demanding the media corporations are about DRM, it is easy to deduce that this move to Intel substantially involves Intel DRM: access to hardware DRM provided by OS X to media-related applications that will keep the media concerns content.
Whether or not Apple directly supports Windows is immaterial. If these new Apple on Intel computers can also host Windows (which has never supported Apple hardware) then a standard BIOS is part of the motherboard. If so, then it is easy to deduce that this move to Intel substantially involves Intel DRM: something both Apple’s and Microsoft’s operating systems can use as a common denominator.
As Microsoft does not directly control the hardware on which Windows will run in the same fashion as Apple has always controlled the hardware on which OS X will run, it now seems possible that it will be Apple which realizes the sort of overarching DRM that Microsoft is routinely criticized about developing.
Apple customers will have to trust Apple’s DRM implementation absolutely to stick with the brand as the Intel platform becomes their only purchasing option.
Despite that how the DRM is used will be discovered and hacks to circumvent it will be programmed, it causes one to pause and reflect on the decision to purchase one the new Apple computers. Certainly, they may be faster, but at what point does DRM-enabled lock-in become a reason NOT to purchase? Looks like Apple will be the first to find out.
I go way back with Apple (early Macintosh) so the thought of Apple products becoming a DRM-laced nightmare is very disheartening. My hope was that Steve would be announcing the rebirth of Newton running on XScale.
An Athlon FX (Dual core)/Athlon X2 and Opteron (dual core) would be even nicer – it would run rings around any Intel based machine with all other things being equal.
Tomshardware:
“Here Comes The King: Athlon 64 X2 Reviewed”
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050509/index.html
Anandtech : http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2419&p=5
“AMD’s current dual core architecture is vastly superior to Intel’s. The more than twice as fast cache-to-cache communication does not pay off in all multithreaded applications, but it should give AMD a scaling advantage in OLTP and some rendering and HPC applications. It will be very easy for AMD to make communications between the cores even faster, by attaching a shared L2-cache to the SRQ. AMD can also leverage their knowledge and experiences with the on die northbridge to lower the latency and increase the bandwidth of the memory subsystem. ”
I’d buy a desktop straight away if it was a dual core AMD but an Intel machine unless within the next year they (Intel) introduce a CPU that is better.
On another note, I wasn’t too suprised that Apple had developed an x86 version of OSX only the timing to dump PPC. It would have been silly not too develop OSXx86 esp. as NextStep/OpenStep was ported from x86 to PPC for OSX.
Anon
Conclusion from Tomshardware review on Single or Dual core Intel or AMD:
“Here’s the bottom line. If we had to recommend a single core processor, the choice would depend greatly on the type of applications in use. But in the dual core arena, though, there is not much that speaks for Intel: go with the Athlon 64 X2.”
Now that says it all.
Anon
I might buy a Mac now. I hope they will discount the price of the OS since I wont be needing it. I’ll just go and install Windows XP.
I think any chance linux might have had to gain a significant number of users on the desktop just got flushed by this surprise announcement. it will be much easier to port linux applications to osx now that apple is running on intel x86, so why would the average joe use linux, which, as good as it is, is still complicated, when he can use osx, an os that is based on unix yet super easy to use?
Since the transition from 68000 to powerPC was the birth of the PowerMac, one wonders what they’ll call these new Intel macs.
Oh, and by the by. From a business standpoint it’s always good to have *two* companies that make your CPUs. Apple can switch from Intel to AMD if there’s a compelling business reason to do so essentially painlessly. This, if memory serves, is how AMD got licensed to make 8088s and 8086s in the first place – because IBM wasn’t willing to go with a single source microprocessor. There’s a certain irony in Apple making the same decision.
As for me, I’m a little annoyed that my G5 won’t have it’s full 8-10 year life-span (support will erode sooner, probably) but come on. They’re not introducing these new machines (in theory) until 2006, and won’t finish transitioning the whole product line until 2007. It also puts on hold any thought of me buying a laptop until after they transition (I expect them to be the first to go, they use fewer applications and will benefit from the lower heat/power consumption and greater performance more). More concerning is my parents’ first gen imacs are getting very old and poorly supported, and I really can’t recommend buying a new mac until after the transition.
I’m concerned for Apple, though, I think they’ve Osborned themselves. (For those too young to remember, the Osborne computer company killed itself by announcing its new machine long before it was available. People stopped buying the old machine, and Osborne didn’t have the capital to MAKE the new machines. In this, Apple’s other products (ipod) and their large cash reserves should help them greatly.
Something I’ve learned about the world of computing. Don’t fall in love with anything, because *everything* in computing is awfully ephemeral. Learned that the hard way. I was a BeOS user before I bought my first mac.
Because an average joe can’t hack his version to run on his existing computer? “Average Joe” is in the same situation he always was — buy an expensive Apple computer or a cheap Wintel computer. That situation hasn’t really changed.
As for Linux adoption, remember, it’s not “average Joes” using Linux on the desktop. “Average Joes” are completely irrelevent to the Linux desktop market, now and for the forseeable future. Where Linux is getting is in the enterprise desktop (office workers, etc). I don’t see any particular reason to believe that OS X on Intel will be any more palatable to these folks than OS X on PPC was, especially if Apple retains its existing pricing structure.
At this point, an aside: There is this impression on OSNews that “home users” somehow matter. They don’t, not in the least. They are a huge market, but have almost no market clout. The industry is driven by the enterprise market, because people buy for their home what they are used to at work. That’s why how we got to the Wintel situation in the first place. Apple machines were quite popular in the home market, because Apple was one of the first companies to target the home market. However, the reason IBM machines won out was because businesses bought them, and people eventually just bought what they used at work. This is the same reason Microsoft Office won out. Eventually, big businesses standardized on Office, and home users switched accordingly.
They will call them McIntel of course…
I think this is a defining moment in Apple’s history, I will be a switcher, not just a switcher but also a developer…
I think any chance linux might have had to gain a significant number of users on the desktop just got flushed by this surprise announcement. it will be much easier to port linux applications to osx now that apple is running on intel x86, so why would the average joe use linux, which, as good as it is, is still complicated, when he can use osx, an os that is based on unix yet super easy to use?
It is not significantly easier to port a large majority of Linux applications to OSX.
An average Joe does not even know or care what GNU/Linux is and thinks Macs are for girls and queers.
what is wrong with you people?!
“Now Apple is just another Alienware or Falcon Northwest-style boutique PC builder”
your an idiot. that alienware and falcon operating system is nothing compared to OSX. i repeat, you are an idiot.
do you like OSX?
-yes? this is good, cheaper macs, hacks to run OSX on commodity hardware.
-no? shut up, this doesn’t involve you, your just trying to agrivate fans.
for me, this is a good move. PowerPC G5 are good chips, but they don’t scale, and eat up a lot of juice for a PC. Intel has their act together. They continually push their performance up and they have a genuine competitor to keep them in check(AMD), if Intel ever stumbles, Apple can go to AMD, in part or full. PC hardware also gets new tech faster than PowerPC lines. New memory and storage system come to PC first. Now Apple can leverage that without reingineering anything.
Anybody have that demonstration recorded and torrented?
Really would like to see this.
Thanks,
-Fish
works for me
I agree with jjbianchine, this smells of a DRM nightmare scenarios to me. We should all know by now, how DRM-anal Apple have become through our iPod/iTunes experience, so much so even Hilary Rosen (of RIAA fame) blogged about the insanity of not even being able to “share” her music with herself!
This is a step closer to audio/video lock-down, which is what’s to be expected – giving a movie exec charge of a technology company, who’s dumb idea was that?
iPod has proven it can be done, next step is to apply the same kind of technology to the computer industry. Enjoy your freedom whilst you have it, I know I will.
I happen to like the PPC, for me it WAS part of the “experience” and “thinking different” appealed to my love of innovation and technology. Call me a zealot if you will though, a “zealot” is simply a “fanatically committed person”, so I really don’t mind. Much like my fellow zealots, it strikes me as odd to say the least, that Apple are willing to throw away years of investment and marketing in favour of simply becoming another x86 also-ran.
This decision goes beyond architecture, in my opinion, into realms of something far more insideous and shady.
As for the comments about why not AMD’s? Well, AMD haven’t invested heavily in Apple, AMD don’t have the same level of interests in the movie industries and AMD aren’t quite so DRM entangled, yet.
The next computing revolution will not be about speed, architecture and the amount of RAM we buy – it’ll be about DRM, what we’re allowed to watch and hear, and how far we’re willing to rebel, to claw back our once-granted freedoms.
I agree 100% that the AMD X2 series of chips is right now, at this very moment, superior to Intel’s offering. However, if you think this will be the case a year from now then you are either forgetful, short-sighted, or very young. Remember when the Athlon XP first came out? Wow, what a chip… and it would absolutely murder the P4 at 1.8 GHz or so. Then the Northwood core came, and AMD was sucking Intel’s dust for a year or so until Clawhammer. Remember, these two are always one-upping each other, and if you think Intel’s upcoming Pentium-M inspired, dual-core low-power using 64-bit monster is going to be 2nd best to AMD, you are wrong. Just my $.02…
Assuming Apple in the long run will open up to accept all X86, then this is a great move. They will never support all X86 hardware, but I think they would let third party hardware to incorporate drivers to mac in the long run. If they can produce the same quality of OS, they would certainly give MS a big blow in the OS market. I see a bright future for the computer industry as a whole with this move. Competition always brings quality. This will make all OS company to deliver safe and quality OS.
people are going to have a choice of OS’s not just stupid windows (if everything works out right)
Okay, here is the deal
I have couple of OSX apps.
So. AMD 64+ Linux + MacOnLinux + wine is done deal.
Go Linux. Wins forever.
The keynote shows the Tiger running on a Pentium 4 3.4Ghz maybe it’s a Xeon but a x86 for sure no unique type.
Virtualization PearPC hear we go
.
Im in shock.
However this move will be more positive than it will be negative on Apple and OSX.
One thing is for sure – I’ll still be a Mac user
I t is not worth the change because they are going to loose a lot of money and the reason are:
1) the apple store will loose a lot of money not selling any MAC hardware
2) what if IBM reduces the allocation of chips for Apple and/or asking for higher price per chip + Apple has to lower the prices of the Power Mac to try to sell something
3) no more money from big corporation buing G5 server because they proved to be unreliable
4) forget about Mac oS server for th epoint number 3 + the Mac OS server is inferior to Linux according to ArsTechnica
5) Apple is losing the advantage with Microsoft just loosing time in the transition
6) Jobs just showed how bad is a close architecture because you depend on theur crazy decisions + MAc hardware on Intel won’t be more pen than it is now
Let’s bet how much they are loosing in the next quarters: 0.2 $ per share?
…well I’ve seen a lot of posts about people thinking the hardware will be much cheaper now. I think you are all crazy. Apple’s hardware is going to continue to be elegant and “different” and costly. Just because they are adopting an intel cpu does not mean they are buying entry level boards and components from Asus in mass quantities or something… No, their pricing will not change. They will just be able to offer computers whose ghz clock speeds will exceed 3.0.
Anyway, I am very excited about this and cannot WAIT for next June to get my hands on one! I don’t know what I’ll do waiting the whole year. It will drive me crazy.
For those worried about Mac OS X performance, don’t. Apple is not foolhardy. They are no doubt working their rear ends off optimizing the OS, which includes (as they ARE aware of it) the resource/thread issues between the BSD-like layer and the Mach microkernel. It’s not like they are standing still and hoping that using a new CPU is going to garner them another 7% of the PC market.
@marcoc: they can weather some loss before the next fiscal year (2007, that is). I agree that this announcement could be risky for sales, but I think they will pull out of it just fine. And when the new, snazzy looking powerbooks come out with a pentium M chip inside, no one is going to give a rats potato about the CPU, just the fact that their super sleek and shiny powerbook is running at 3ghz with some new ati graphics chip that kicks but as well.
think you are all crazy. Apple’s hardware is going to continue to be elegant and “different” and costly.
You can say “different” until you’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t change the fact that the parts are the exact same things you’ll find in your Dell.
Just because they are adopting an intel cpu does not mean they are buying entry level boards and components from Asus in mass quantities or something… No, their pricing will not change.[/i]
They’d be stupid not to. The only reason they bother making their own chipsets/motherboards is because they have no choice. Moving to Intel would mean they could use Intel’s motherboards, which are ungodly stable. At that point, there is really nothing differentiating them from the Dell? Same cheapo commodity hard drive, same NVIDIA/ATI graphics cards, same everything. Just nicer plastic around it all.
Absolutely no matter what anyone says, the computing industry just got dealt a terrible blow.
The past 7 years in processors has been similar to what happened in the American auto consolidation of the 50’s and 60’s, where GM and Ford kill everyone else.
Casualties:
Alpha
PA-RISC
MIPS
Crusoe and Efficeon.
Sun moving its focus from Spark to x86-64
and now desktop PPC.
We are now really seeing the era of choice come to an end.
Even if the choices where small we still had choice.
I knew that Jobs (whom unlike most ardent Mac fans I have always taken with a grain of salt) would someday do something like this, but I hoped it would be later in my 50s when I accepted that corporations are totally crap and most executive no matter how exalted are generally imbeciles.
Sure many of you feel this is great because “x86” is ubiquitous therefore “better”; the problem is that this statement is false and will always be false.
This is one of biggest dilemmas of capitalism and most modern industry generally reflects this.
The most popular/ubiquitous products/designs are almost never the most efficient, intelligent or powerful, but generally the most marketed and F.U.D ed.
They are usually good enough. But that is it.(until the next big thing, VHS vs Betamax, now Cable Broadband vs DSL vs Satellite vs vs vs).
(Man I need to get rid of my iPod now, there are probably dozens of better DAPs out there.)
There is almost invariably a more efficient, more effective design to any product which is killed because some egomaniacal executive with no real attachment to what they are selling making the decisions. (Scully from Pepsi selling Apple, wtf)
Once these executives make ‘their’ decision they use aggressive Alpha male dumb ass tactics to destroy anything that gets in their way or competes with them. (isn’t it amazing how many of them AH’s seem to float between competitors, saying horrible thing about competing products and then moving over and saying horrible things about their old products.)
The thing is all you x86 lovers should be very upset right now, because your engine designers really don’t have to be challenged to do anything better anymore.
I mean look at what happened with American Car design in the 70’s and 80’s.
Almost 25 years of super crap.
Legendarily gas guzzling inefficient, designed by committee, really really horrible crap.
Man
Oh man we are sooooooooo in trouble.
I love how everyone is so excited about the cost savings.
WTF
What costs savings.
Intel chips and AMD chips are generally in the same ball park as each other, and PPC chips are generally cheaper.
(Why the hell do you think MS, Nintendo, and Sony are using them –and no you can’t find IBM to Apple prices online, DMCA will get you if you expose them)
Further more as far as economy of scales most of the expensive components of computers are shared between Macs and PCs.
RAM, same for pc and mac.
HD, same
Optical, same
Graphics, same
Audio,USB, Firewire, wi-fi, Gig NIC, SAME chips or similar by the same exact Taiwanese manufacturers.
IO chips (PCI-X, AGP) SAME or similar from the same manufacturers who make pc parts. (why do you think we had to replace iBook mobo’s in 2003, at the same time as a bunch of PC makers replacing their mobos for the exact same reasons?)
Furthermore Apple uses Hypertransport tech too.
So what do you actually pay for on an Apple product, much much better design and components integration; and further integration with the OS and that is not going to change.
(According to Phil Schiller)
So why do you all keep insisting the price is going to change????
Man this sucks.
So now we are getting a Ford engine for our BMW.
Man this sucks.
Sure Ford engines in mustangs are faster then the ones in BMWs.
Yup you are right they are.
But they are also lesser designs, with a focus on mass production, and brute force.
Not efficiency, fuel economy/performance ratio, and that elusive ELEGANCE in engineering.
Man this sucks.
I think I will become a Chef now and give computing a rest until true competition returns.
Ironically Mr. Jobs now refers to Macs as “personal computers.” I remember it was a big deal that Macs were not considered “Personal Computers”, which usually implied IBM compatibility and now Mr. Jobs even says it.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html
If I were CEO of Apple I would try and keep the rebel spirit and any uniqueness it may retain by going with the currently superior, elegent, and efficient AMD processors. Then they can argue their performance superiority.
Part of the reasons for using a Mac was enviromental issues, this is hard to argue since top of the line pentium4s require a lot of power and disipate much of heat.
Apple won’t allow the OS X to run on anything but Apple PCs (sounds like an oxymoron, eh?) so what about the homegrown systems. Or systems already purchased. When Intel OS X finally comes out, what about the huge market of people already with a PC that wanna switch?
Aldo Ferro…
should jobs bring back the clones? power computing anyone remember?
yeah I know, but it had to be said.
I just bought my iMac G5 about 5 months ago and now when I look at it I think: “You just have 2 more years of existance.”
Who’s going to write new software for the G5s????? Nobody. Now everything is about Intel. My G5 is already dead.
I am keeping my cellphone.
-2501
Buried in an overlooked paragraph of this announcement is news that George Steinbrenner will become a Red Sox fan at the end of second quarter 2006.
I think you missed the point of the Universal Binaries. Developers will not forget about the already installed base of the PowerPC users.
Now we’ll never have to have a pointless debate about whether Macs are faster than PCs ever again. Imagine all the free time that fills up. Now for instance, we can turn to the much more important topic of which system has prettier icons!
As one banal argument ends, another can begin. 😀
Linux is now just a server OS
I get the impression that a lot of people don’t live in the real world: the average Apple user hardly knows, even less cares, what processor it runs on. So long as it looks sleek, it runs Photoshop and looks good in the living room, they’ll buy it. Hell, knowing that it might run Windows (which I need to run CAD and engineering software) even I’ll buy one! Techies (0.01% of Mac buyers) will use it as dual boot, all the other customers will look at things the more technically minded don’t give a damn about, and Macs still have a definite edge there.
Well, I’m with 2501, what a bloody waste it was to by this Mac – I should have purchased those Opteron components and built my own machine rather than giving those hard earned dollars to Steves ego. Put it this way, Apples profits will nose dive. Customers now know there is no future for the PowerPC Macs, and now there will be a mass exodus. Why the hell should I or any new customer go out and purchase a Mac, now that we know our investment will be useless in a year?
The move to Intel is completely and utter pointless to the n-th degree. The WHOLE point of moving to Intel would be to allow users to purchase their hardware from a cheap vendor and simply install MacOS X – thats what there is a big bitchfeast from Windows fanboys – not because its a better processor, its because then they can be a Johnny Cheapskate, buy a Dell then install MacOS X on it.
We’ll have the same problem yet again, and why aren’t I surprised. Again, this was an absolute waste 🙁
“Linux is now just a server OS” Who says LINUX can even survive in thee server room now?
IBM is screwed. Sure, AAPL was a small part of their business but: 1) PPC was the ONLY exciting thing this big, lumbering company had going 2) this will greatly raise thee cost of doing the XBOX, so they will try to pass along the cost to MSFT, and there will be one BIG catfight– ending with lower margins for IBM.
AAPL will either swipe MSFT across the floor over the next ten years, or will stay a niche. There will always be a market for computers that are relatively pain-free, because “creatives” and technical people like to push their machines to the limits and need to be sure of their gear. Windows is not an optimal choice for anyone doing anything harder than Email, unless you have a big support staff, or a lot of fix-it-yourself time available.
I don’t understand all this fuss about computers becoming obsolete: they all do, and quickly too, regardless of any change of platform. A computer is normally obsolete after 2 years. A savvy user can squeeze out another year of useful life before dumping it in the bin. All those 10 year old Macs out there have lived so long because their users are only concerned about reading email and wordprocessing with a nicely coloured user interface. Seriously: how many Apple users ever did any software upgrade? How many of them would have without a marketing push?
Now that he’s done this, why not OSX on white boxes????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Does wanna take on MS? Are they secret lovers? Is MS paying him not to do it?
Doesnt make sense…
With the iPod and such how many people would buy an OSX PC????
You’re just plain sttuborn Mr Stevie Wonder…. And plain stupid too….
I don’t like the kludgy powerPC architecture.
Are you insane? Compared to what? An x86 design? My sides are splitting!
All the mac fanboys who say theyre ditching macs now because of this will be drooling over the new (x86) mac, and line up to buy it.
And all the idiots who say they will definitely be buying one now will bitch and moan about the cost of apples shiny new machine, cos it costs more than some piece of shit they can whack together themselves with parts from the corner computer store.
In short, nothing will change
You can be damn sure Jobs didn’t decide this after a night OD’ing on Peach juice from his ex’s orchard.
If he decides to switch it is because there were compelling reasons to. These people are in the business of making money.
All the promises of chip makers in the past notwithstanding, none has ever truly delivered as promised.
Motorola couldn’t get past the 500 MHz limit in the G4s for what, 18 months?
IBM was supposed to deliver the 3 GHz chip a year ago or more, it didn’t happen.
What would you have Apple do? Sit on its ass and watch the walls come down? It is not realistic.
I’ve been driving a Mac for over 10 years and this news frankly makes me more than a little queasy, but is there really any other way? We’ve all known that OS X would run on Intel but I thought that was just a theoretical possibility. I didn’t know Apple had been working on this for the last 5 years and can in fact run the system on an Intel machine today.
Since it’s there already, they might as well make the most of it. Imagine if Apple increased its marketshare threefold, that would definitely put them back on the map. Good for all users, good for Apple.
As for putting OS X on your cardboard box with custom chips: good luck. None of it supported, the lack of drivers and the weird behavior of the thing is going to make you cry like a baby, or you’re going to be spending so much money and time to get it right, you might as well have bought a Mac from the start. If you go ahead, you’re in for the kind of life in pain that is usually preferred by people who appreciate the finer qualities of leather, whips and chains and tight, tight bondage. And don’t whine about lack of support and don’t ask Apple to help you out because they will be flipping you the bird in 3-D, sugar.
This will either be a very good thing for Apple or it will break it. Any way you slice it, the fact that they’re doing it means they had no choice. They need to look down the road and see that there is development in the processor roadmap to go ahead with development. If there is no roadmap, do you stop and whine about how bad the world is, or do you find a different solution?
I think Apple is making another insanely bold move and I very much hope they’re going to make it.
The alternative is driving a cow. Linux… it’s a nice try fellas, and you deserve all the kudos for working very hard and making extremely clever software, but it’s not there yet by a few years and I seriously need to get my work done.
Christ, who’da thunk…
This pretty much kills hardware sales for the next 18 months and should that the stuff in the channel is going to be extremely cheap. I -can- be tempted to get myself the last real Mac [and of course, that’s not so, but it certainly does feel like it].
Just changing 20 lines of code for Mathematica ? Just 2 hours to switch over ?
These myths can be told to people that know nothing about OSes and programming languages but they are just myths and nothing more than that.
It can be true IF AND ONLY IF the UML C/C++ project (or any other OOP based project) already contains all the objects code for OS X or Win32 or any other platform you have to switch over.
Casualties:
Alpha
PA-RISC
MIPS
Crusoe and Efficeon.
Sun moving its focus from Spark to x86-64
and now desktop PPC.
We are now really seeing the era of choice come to an end.
That list is missing the one architecture that could have put up a decent fight: the good old 68000. It had a much cleaner and more powerful instruction set than x86. Because it was designed as a 32-bit processor from the start it didn’t have to support legacy crap like “Real Mode” or 286-style segmenting. It had a big and diverse install base. It could have been extended to 64 bit much more easily and cleanly than AMD64.
Yet Motorola and Apple killed it off for the RISC hype.
“Let’s have less powerful instructions, so that we need more of them, and oh yeah, let’s give them a bigger encoding as well, so that we’re really wasting some expensive memory bandwidth.”
Why did anyone ever think that was a good idea?
Even worse: how could anyone consider a “Very Large Instruction Word” architecture as in the Itanium a selling point? It may make some sense as an internal representation like in the Transmeta, but it’s cache-busting performance-killing lunacy for program binaries.
My suport for Apple finishes today.
I will intall linux ppc and in the future i will buy a generic x86 box.
RIP Apple.
That list is missing the one architecture that could have put up a decent fight: the good old 68000. It had a much cleaner and more powerful instruction set than x86.
That list is missing another architecture that could really put up the decent fight: Motorola 88000 – now that was an elegant pure breed RISC. Cool features too, like using a pair of its 32 32-bit registers as one 64-bit on (but they must be consequent, like R2-R3) enabling 64bit arithmetics without wasting upper bits on zeros most of the time. Allegedly Motorola used some of the low-level 88K stuff in its PPC designs, though…
oops, consequent = consecutive, adjacent, whatever…
And Mac OSX on Cell processor ? A dream also ? This one reach 3.2 GHz :/
Kochise
And Mac OSX on Cell processor ? A dream also ? This one reach 3.2 GHz :/
The cell processor’s central “PowerPC processing element” is an in-order design with around 20 pipeline stages and not much in the way of branch prediction.
This means that specially scheduled, linear code will perform very well, due to the high clock frequency that a long pipeline facilitates.
Your usual desktop programs on the other hand, which haven’t been compiled for the Cell’s in-order pipeline and contain lots of branches and indirect jumps (virtual method calls), will perform much worse than on a G5, because they’re gonna cause lots of costly pipeline stalls.
And the Cell’s slave processors wouldn’t be used at all unless applications were expensively rewritten.
So no, you wouldn’t really want of those in your Mac.
That list is missing another architecture that could really put up the decent fight: Motorola 88000 – now that was an elegant pure breed RISC.
The 88000 may have been particularly elegant, but basically it wasn’t much different from PowerPC or most other RISC designs in that it had a load/store architecture and a fixed 32-bit instruction format, which turned out to be disadvantages. And of course it would have had to emulate 68000 code too.
Come to think of it, there really was no technical reason not to push the 68K further, just like it was done with x86 – it would have probably caused less headaches as it is quite “normal” compared to x86. Too bad Motorola could not keep up – I guess they were never much of a “CPU company”. Well what can you do …
Come to think of it, there really was no technical reason not to push the 68K further, just like it was done with x86 – it would have probably caused less headaches as it is quite “normal” compared to x86.
So true.
Too bad Motorola could not keep up – I guess they were never much of a “CPU company”.
Actually the 68060 was easily as good as the Pentium, in spite of the PowerPC distraction.
Motorola had great and far-sighted processor designers, but obviously their executives didn’t understand what a jewel the 68k was compared to both x86 and RISC.
So they killed the 68k and started competing with IBM on IBM’s Power territory. It would have made much more sense for Motorola (and Apple) to license out the 68k instruction set like Intel did with x86 and get a bit of second-source competition going.
linux_baby wrote:
“But when are we gonna get an Apple OS you can install on any whitebox, just like windows?”
Never. Apple will not allow it. You’ll be able to load Windows on an Intel-based Apple box, but you won’t be able to to buy OS X for Intel and load it on your “el-cheap-o” Dell box.
Now sales are going to drop and they wont have the money to act on it!!! I was going to buy a Mac soon, but now with the architecture change I will wait a year. After that, if Apple is still around I will buy one…
Both Intel and AMD have assimilated RISC principles for their X86 cores (since K5 and Pentium Pro).
>The thing is all you x86 lovers should be very upset >right now, because your engine designers really don’t >have to be challenged to do anything better anymore.
American auto manufactures doesn’t have a mindset similar to Moore’s Law(Intel) (setting the minimum technology pace) and “Only the Paranoid Survives”(Intel).
http://theinquirer.net/?article=23747
Another reason for at least having AMD as an option. Quad core Athlons/Opterons.
After announcement of Cell the future of PowerPC line was not clear.
I think IBM is interested in Power and Cell as high-performance and PowerPC as low-performance solution. So they doesn’t waste resources for extra high-perf 970 line just for such a limited market.
Perhaps custom Xbox/Nintendo cpu cores are similar to the PPE in Cell.
OS X is a chameleon in tiger clothing (pun intended). Secretive orgies of humping the cows at knight. Okay, that is enough double talk….
I, personally would use OS X over any other OS, even if it ran on a tin of beans, BUT one thing is for sure. I from switched from Windows to Mac two years because of the following (And I will not accept):
1. Daily virus, spy-ware and pop-up crap that impedes my productivity.
2. hookah diddle diddle zillion GHz hype evolution, at the expense of lava hot, liquid cooled, built in beer fridge on top of frying pan designs.
3. A mobile laptop with a hydrogen bomb battery that lasts 2 hours.
Quite frankly my iBook G4 14″ running panther does the job fine.
IBM, Freescale and Intel, amongst the list, are having the same natural problem. More GHz = More heat. I think it is time to look at a whole new design altogether! The current “evolution” is going nowhere “fast”!
Peace Out.
Well, we can disagree. I think you are wrong on both counts. They already ARE similar… but Apple does not use some commonly built mobo now (I do say this understanding that there are not very many PPC based machines out there now so I guess you have to take that with a grain of salt). I truly believe they will design their own, or have one designed for them, and that yes, it will use common components (for heaven’s sake, chips are chips – they all do the same things) but it will be THEIRS and they will NOT buy cheap boards. If you think that, well, let us wait and see this time next year. I believe I will be correct.
Second, a cpu is a cpu (another big, fat chip that takes input and provides modified output). Different types of CPUs simply require different connections and feeds, but what they heck? They all do the same things.
I dunno. Too much is being made of all this. Next June Apple will release their first intel-based computer. It will be at 3 levels of performance and the prices will begin at $1400, $1800 and $2200 (or something to that effect) and they will have different disks, and different graphic cards.
That’s it. I don’t know what all you people are expecting out of this???? THERE WILL BE NO CHANGE. Apple will continue to do what they are doing today, but now they will be able to say “Well, Dell’s PCs are running at 4.0 ghz running Windows… ours also run at 4.0ghz but OUR computers run MAC OS X!!”
I admit it is fun to speculate, but in the end the faster we go, the behinder we get.
It’s going to hit market sales a lot of Apple thinks that many users will pay a PC more just to install OS X without the ability to just assemble the PC they like.
They should just sell their software and forget about selling hardware unless they want to enter the console market like Microsoft did (although Microsoft and Apple are the same thing whatever you might think about it).
We could all flame & argue till we’re blue in the face about sales predictions & marketing strategies…but in the end we’re speculating.
What I’m curious about is the performance. First of all, an emulator obviously adds some system overhead. Given OSX’s already RAM-greedy nature….the idea of adding yet another resource layer to the core of the operating system makes me nervous about system requirements & performance levels…
Secondly, there are certain architecture optimizations in place that will need to be re-configured/written/evaluated.
What are your thoughts? How many new iterations of the OS will it take until the PPC optimizations are removed and x86 optimization instructions added?
Finally, I think [read:opinion] that the overall move to the x86 architecture is a good one, albeit a larger one than Apple wants to make it. Apple is relishing in the increased publicity of this announcement, no doubt about that. People are talking-just look at this comments thread!
Also, it shows a boldness that I haven’t seen from Apple in some time. The switch to OSX was ballsy, but it was more out of necessity than anything (OS9 was just too antiquated). Apple could stay with IBM, but they claim the performance and production levels weren’t high enough…I am inclined to believe they are exaggerating things a bit. My guess is that Apple got a better price quote from Intel and realized that IBM was headed for the server market, not the desktop market – where Intel is still thriving (despite the awesome efforts by AMD). The transition shows the “forward thinking” mantra which has always been one of Apple’s strongest points.
I would love it if OSX ran on my home-grown vanilla box, but if it doesn’t….it won’t be the end of the world. I’ve had a pretty fair feeling for some time (with more than a little confirmation from undisclosed sources) that this announcement has been a possibility for several years…I say ‘Go For It, Apple!’ and let them see where this ride will take them.
When people say MacOSX won’t run on beige boxes, I just laugh. Look at the Mac on Linux project. It enabled you to run MacOSX on NON apple PPC hardware. Now do you think it would be hard not to do the same? Even if Apple uses some kind of special motherboard, it won’t be long before a hacker in Norway or wherever will create a patch to install OSX on beige boxes. Besides, it’s running a unix core, it couldn’t be that hard to work around.
It wasn’t a port from Win32 to OS X. It was a port of OS X/PPC Mathematica to OS X/Intel Mathematica. It was essentially a recompile + whatever differences were needed to account for the different CPU.
So Apple is moving over to an x86/x86_64 architecture… who cares?
Apple does what Apple does best. It changes nothing what processor Apple runs on, Their OS is a variant of FreeBSD, which has been running on PPC and x86 processors for years? The core functionality of Mac OS won’t change, nor will the ability to run legacy PPC apps!
The change is primarily to do with iBooks… Intel processors handle more MIPS/watt than the PPC. Plain and simple… Faster processor with less power consumption. Apple tried to get IBM to increase the MIPS, but IBM has been too busy with its CELL processor project with Sony/Toshiba.
Oh, and don’t feel sorry for IBM … PPC sales to Apple amount to only 1.8% of IBM’s PPC business.
To me, the plan makes sense. To have MacOS only run on genuine Apple computers makes perfect sense as well… and to do it with a hardware copyright protection scheme on the main board of their genuine Apple equipment is a good way of ensuring that.
I’d buy a Mac for what it does, not for what architecture it runs on. MacOS is classy, elegant and just plain easy to use.
Go Apple! Oh, and when the time is right and MacOS matures, don’t think that Jobs will ignore the idea of selling MacOS for your average clone … it’ll always run better on a genuine Mac platform
i think superh is elegant as it is very compact 16-bit ISA with RISC principles. worked well on the dreamcast
it’s too bad apple didn’t consider a multi-core superH processor design.
I just saw on “The Washington Times” site that the mini will be the first convert (according to Jobs). Looks like that Intel mini we saw last week just might be the prototype for the real thing!
Both Intel and AMD have assimilated RISC principles for their X86 cores (since K5 and Pentium Pro).
Depends what you actually mean by RISC principles.
The original RISC idea was to have an easily decoded wide instruction format and a simple and stupid pipeline that could be run at high clock rates. It was left to the compiler to schedule code for correct results and good performance.
Trouble was, the idea didn’t scale. As soon as you wanted to make any changes to the pipeline, like add more stages or parallel execution units, you had to recompile your software to schedule it for the new design, almost as if you’d switched architecture.
To deal with that, lots of ideas were added to the hardware: e.g. hazard detection, register renaming, out-of-order execution, branch prediction, … .
And suddenly the original principle of moving complexity into the compiler had been more or less forgotten. Furthermore, all these ideas were just as applicable to CISC instruction sets, they just needed more decoding to break up more complex instructions into simpler parts.
So what’s left of RISC? Well, the Reduced Instruction Set, which boils down to load/store architecture and fixed, mostly 32-bit instruction formats. Saves a bit of decoding hardware, costs a lot of memory bandwidth.
Quote from apple: (www.apple.com -> PowerMac g5)
” The dual 2.7GHz model packs so much power into tight quarters that Apple designed a liquid cooling system for it, resulting in a cool tower that runs Photoshop nearly two times faster than a Pentium 4-based system. In fact, for most creative endeavors, the Power Mac G5 simply has no competition in its class.”
😀
read this article….i think Apple is in the right track.
http://www.avrev.com/news/0605/7.apple.html
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I like the idea of a change