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June 08, 2005

Apple vs Intel (III)

Previous articles in this series are here and here.

I want to set a few rumours to rest and expand on the earlier theme. I have carefully watched the broadcast (twice) and read all of the publicly available material from Apple. I have not read any of the NDA material (yet).

No Dell hardware ...
1. This announcement does not mean that you can run MacOS X on Dell hardware. Apple makes it very clear that MacOS X will only run on Mac boxes (presumably not called PowerMacs). The inverse situation was played down but not rejected outright in discussions - in other words it *may* be possible to run Windows (Longhorn) on a Mac. This may not be a good thing. Think OS/2 or BeOS where the software vendors relied on *emulation* rather than porting...

No immediate changes ...
2. There is no immediate end to the PowerMac line. In fact, Apple went so far as to suggest that the standard computer life-cycle (two years) meant that a drop in purchases would not happen for some time yet. (I would tend to disagree on the life-cycle - most of my computers are older than two years.) Apple also clearly indicated that Powerbook G5 was simply not going to happen but there would be additional PowerPC products rolling out during the transition. I take this to suggest that there may be another iteration of the PowerMac tower and/or the Xserve.

Not everything converts ...
3. The new machines (PentMacs?) will be quite different to existing systems. The boot-prom code (which is the same as what Sun use) will not be present (at least in it's current form). There are some code specifics which will not port in Xcode, nor be emulated in Rosetta. At least some of this code relates to the vector processor in the G5. In fact the stuff that won't port looks suspiciously like the very things that distinguish the Apple PowerPC from the IBM Power4 family - but that may be a simplification.

It is still the wrong decision ...
4. Steve made it very clear that he is doing this because of the "future" roadmap provided by Intel. This is very poor reasoning given that the move is throwing away AltiVec and the other "power" features that Apple has been promoting. If Apple are seriously prepared to give up those features, then the debate is not one of PowerPC vs Pentium - instead, Apple should be looking at the roadmaps for Pentium, Power4, UltraSparc, and whatever AMD are pushing. Once you reject the special features of the existing G5, then all bets are off and it seems pretty unlikely that Intel, with such a poor record with Itanium and it's failure to meet Moores law with the Pentium, could seriously have the best roadmap.

Where does that leave us? Apple is still making a daft decision and it is possible that between now and 2007, things will change. Perhaps as Intel fails to meet yet another roadmap (what happened to the Itanium roadmap), Apple will pull away or consider other alternatives. Having created a multi-platfom distribution mechanism, it seems pretty unlikely that adding more architectures would cause that much problem :-)

Posted by Ozguru at June 8, 2005 12:00 AM

Comments

Posted by: Rofl at June 10, 2005 12:29 AM