The World’s Gone Crazy… again
5:53 PM - June 6th, 2005
The scary part about this decision is that it does make some business sense, given that Apple has laid the groundwork for transitioning current software to the new hardware. Let’s face it—the PowerPC 970 (aka G5) was slapped together. IBM didn’t devote the necessary resources then, why now? IBM is designing the CPUs for all three next-gen consoles. It has no need to deal with Apple anymore. Also, Apple could piggyback off of Intel’s motherboard designs. In this age where your GPU is as important as your CPU, wouldn’t it be nice to have PCI-Express?
Intel must have made the deal really sweet for Apple because it’s widely known that AMD CPUs are currently faster than Intel’s. I hope Apple doesn’t use the Pentium 4 or a CPU with a similar architecture. Among CS/EE academia, the Pentium 4 is the biggest joke.
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Edit: I’ve thought about it more. It makes a lot of business sense, actually. In the keynote, Jobs said that they have been maintaining an X86 port of Mac OS X for 5 years. 5 years ago, Motorola was struggling to improve the G4; now IBM is letting the G5 languish. These stalls in performance are definitely hurting Apple’s image.
June 7th, 2005 at 8:59 am
Ric Ford at MacInTouch is his typical lucid self, and this point jumped out at me as making perfect sense:
“We can see Jobs’s argument that the PowerPC architecture may be starting to “box in” the Macintosh, particularly in the critical and growing laptop market, and it’s obvious that Apple has very little clout with Freescale (nee Motorola) or IBM, because its market is so small in comparison to the WinTel monopoly. Developing new processors is extremely expensive, and Apple simply can’t fund that kind of development, even with billions of dollars in the bank. “Think different” isn’t an option in a game this big. If IBM and Freescale will no longer produce state-of-the-art, PowerPC-based laptop CPUs, Apple simply has no choice but to switch, and it’s lucky to have an operating system and code-translation technology that can facilitate that.”