Apple to switch to Intel chips

[Neutron]

Apple has announced that they will be no longer using PowerPC chips and instead using Intel based chips for their Macs.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050606/ap_on_hi_te/apple_chips

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

This announcment was no big surprise there has been quite a buzz about it over the past few weeks.

I would love to see a dual boot OS, one with XP and one with OS X.

 

[LonghornXP]

Well I guess my contact with Apple was right and she did say that they would have very good emulation so that new intel macs can still run native PPC apps. Now the question is can current PCs run Mac OS X and my guess would be no that even the new mac hardware would have a special bios and that OS X for Intel would require that Bios present to install. But it would be interesting if Apple would license OS X to other computer makers and make their own computers because they would have no problem selling their own computer if both the design and price was good and I think now they can do this.

My contact said that as painfull as this move will be it was needed because she said that IBM has told Apple that they have to focus on their bigger partners which will be Microsoft for the Xbox among others and that Apple would most likely have to wait longer for their chips because the Microsoft type order will be done first. I think Apple had todo this because if they couldn't get IBM to supply the chips faster today think about what it will be when IBM is making millions more than now for other bigger partners.

Now the good thing about this switch is that Intel can keep up but Apple always has AMD at worst case and this wouldn't require another switch as far as OS X is concerned.

 

[Neutron]

Can an Intel chip, with emulation, run a PPC app at full speed?

I thought the PPC chip was much more powerful than the Intel counterpart?

 

[LonghornXP]

Can an Intel chip, with emulation, run a PPC app at full speed?

I thought the PPC chip was much more powerful than the Intel counterpart?

Well from what I saw it was pretty darn fast. I'll see if I can find a video of the keynote when Jobs was running Photoshop CS2 with all plugins on their box with Intel hardware using OS X for Intel. They use what Jobs called Rosetta which is a binary instruction translation which ran Photoshop CS2 without much performance loss from what I can tell. I thought for emulation it was very very fast and I truely believe that Photoshop type software will be the most demanding so that makes me think that those big name apps will get native ports so the apps that won't at all or for a while will be the less demanding apps which IMO means very little performance loss if any at all.

I was pretty amazed to say the least.

Oh just to make sure you got the info right.

This demo was using an Intel CPU with the x86 version of OS X. The Photoshop CS version is the current OS X PPC version which was being run under Rosetta which is the emulation layer to run PPC software on Intel hardware.

 

[Foxbat]

As far as the current performance of Intel vs. PowerPC, Apple's G5 comparisons seem to make the G5 to be about 45-100% faster than a P4/Xeon4 processor for a given clock speed.

The one thing I saw was Apple wanted a low-power G5 to put into the next generation of Powerbooks, but IBM wasn't developing it fast enough.

When I read this, all I could think of was, "One more thing about Life that now sucks."

 

[Neutron]

Well, it was more than that. Apple had said that IBM wouldn't give them the yield order of processors they needed because they didn't see Apple as a big customer. Remember the new consoles coming out are using IBM based CPUs. Microsoft and Sony are bigger players than Apple.

 

[LonghornXP]

As far as the current performance of Intel vs. PowerPC, Apple's G5 comparisons seem to make the G5 to be about 45-100% faster than a P4/Xeon4 processor for a given clock speed.

The one thing I saw was Apple wanted a low-power G5 to put into the next generation of Powerbooks, but IBM wasn't developing it fast enough.

When I read this, all I could think of was, "One more thing about Life that now sucks."

Don't read much into that because I've used a Windows XP PC a while ago that was much faster than my dual G5 powermac. Also keep in mind that the Intel chips that will be used in future mac products will be dual core chips with at least 1MB of L2 cache for each core.

My one and only contact is saying that the lower-end PowerMac that would be using Intel would be this below.

Single CPU that is a dual-core 3Ghz+ 64-bit/32-bit with each core having 2MB of L2 cache. Also they will have new video and multimedia enhancements similiar to Altivec.

The midrange powermac will have the same specs as the lower end Powermac but just add another identical CPU to it for a total of two CPUs.

Now the high end Powermac will also have two CPUs but will have a little more cache memory, about 200Mhz more clock speed per CPU and the chip will be an Extreme Edition chip.

Also I am hearing that the Mac Mini, iBook and iMac computers would be using sometype of Pentium M chip while the PowerBook would be using a much better newer Pentium M type chip. None of the Mac products will use either the Pentium 4 nor the Celeron line of chips. I'll have to look at Intels roadmap of CPUs and see what matches the info I was given.

 

[Neutron]

They'd have to use the Pentium4 line of CPUs since Intel has not announced any replacements, and the P4 dual cores that you mentioned are coming out, and have the EMT64 extentions.

 

[LonghornXP]

They'd have to use the Pentium4 line of CPUs since Intel has not announced any replacements, and the P4 dual cores that you mentioned are coming out, and have the EMT64 extentions.

I know but my contact said specifically that it won't be the Pentium4 and its that and that alone that has me wondering. We don't know if Intel will be moving their product brand to another name. They did so with the Pentium M so why wouldn't they within the next year change the name of the Pentium 4 to the Pentium 5. It might ring well with new buyers who know Pentium 4 so well that if they see a Mac with a Pentium 5 in thier mind it must be very new. This to me would seem the great time for Intel to introduce the Pentium 5. I think the Pentium 4 line has been around so long it needs to be killed to move forward.

 

[Neutron]

I agree with you there Longhorn.

I do wish that Intel would have moved to the P5 name for their 64-bit processors.

 

[Cascade]

Apples new tagline:

"Switch.
Then switch back."

I'd buy OSX Elephant or whatever it'll be called, as long as it installed on an EMT64 PC (Unlikely)

 

[OoTLink]

Rest assured, it won't. Why don't you go run Windows blackcow or whatever the hell it's called on your alienware wannabe?