Apple Hedges Its Bet on New Intel Chips

Corrado writes "The Mercury News is reporting that Apple is still planning to use PowerPC chips well into 2008 for its low end and portable systems. Does this increase the "warm fuzzes" for the Intel move? More information from TheStreet and lots more links from Google News."

Support?

[Oculus Habent (562837)]

Has anyone ever heard of support? Apple may need the occasional extra lot of processors for years to come to support their existing support contracts.

killjoy.

[tubbtubb (781286)]

Of course, but you're missing the point.

This is a perfect opportunity to blather on with uninformed speculation, rumors, pipe dreams of dual core Antaries laptops, etc. . .

Re:Support?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Of course I know what "support" is. After all, my company pays a whole lot of money to have Microsoft tell us to call Dell, and Dell tell us to call Microsoft...

Re:Support?

[Saven Marek (739395)]

> Has anyone ever heard of support? Apple may need the
> occasional extra lot of processors for years to come to support
> their existing support contracts.

That is one possibility. What is annoying is that the slashdot summary says this:

The Mercury News is reporting that Apple is still planning to use PowerPC chips well into 2008 for its low end and portable systems.

when the article actually says this:

Freescale agreed to supply PowerPC microprocessors for orders placed through Dec. 31, 2008 -- a year beyond Apple's planned transition to the Intel chips.

and from apple & freescale itself:

"Freescale (is) to fill any orders Apple places over the next three years. Apple is under no obligation to purchase Freescale microprocessors other than work in progress that was in place at the time the agreement was executed."

So suddenly "freescale is bound to fill any orders apple may or may not need to place over the next 3 years" becomes "Apple will be making G4 laptops until 2008"

Rubbish as spculation gets piled on top of speculation. It stinks something bad when basic reporting gets errors confounded one upon top of another

Re:Support?

[Elbereth (58257)]

Don't worry. They'll correct the summary when the dupe is posted later tonight.

no need to panic...

[boomerny (670029)]

Apple is just covering their bases. This is merely a safeguard, not an indication that the move is behind schedule.

Warranty

[Rainbird98 (186939)]

This has nothing to do with the change over to Intel. Apple needs to support the warranty its existing base of G4 Macs for at least three years.

Developer perspective on Apple porting strategy...

[bstarrfield (761726)]

Entirely outside the ADC NDA...

If you take a look at Apple's developer tools [apple.com] - specifically, XCode 2.1 and above, you'll find that building binaries for both platforms is fairly easy. I think that Apple not only wanted to allow developers to build binaries for Intel and PPC, but to allow itself some time for the transition. Apple hasn't locked itself into a position where it must switch to Intel on a certain date. This is a good thing.

Really, if we can consider Mac OS X as simply OpenStep 4 (or whatever), then the CPU - to a very large extant - becomes just another part of the machine. With the exception of low level hardware driver experts, do you really care what bridge / Firewire / USB chip is used? Think the same way about the CPU, and you have Apple's apparent perspective on using Intel chips - the OS is fairly independant from the CPU, the developer tools can target multiple platforms, and consumers really won't have too much to worry about.

Really?

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

I've not R'd TFA (reg required, and all that), but this sounds a lot like the news on Think Secret [thinksecret.com] a few days ago. In short, they have signed a deal whereby FreeScale are required to supply PowerPC chips to Apple until 2008, but Apple are not required to buy them.

Apple have stated that the low end will switch to Intel first, so I don't really know what the basis for this `story' is. It seems much more likely that, if they are extending their purchasing options for G4s to 2008, they will stop selling G4s at the end of this year. This would then give them a supply of G4s to use in replacements until the end of the 3-year AppleCare period for the last G4 units sold.

Good, because

[by Anonymous Coward]

Good, because I just plain don't want an Intel chip. I don't care if it's the future of Apple's support, I want to keep buying PPC as long as I possibly can. I don't care if you think I'm crazy or stupid. Personally I just have a whole bunch of personal Altivec code and I don't want to have to rewrite it.

Posted as AC because every time I express that I do not want to be forced to use Intel chips in order to continue using OS X, I get screamed at for being a "zealot". I find it a bit funny that disagreeing with Apple gets you branded as an Apple Zealot now, but there it is.

This is not news

[MouseR (3264)]

Apple did say the transition would take a couple of years.

It's obvious that after the Intel bomb shell they dropped that they now need to secure supplies of current processors until the entire line has moved onto Intel.

This is common sense. (But you don't have to expect this from news sites that report, even, that Apple might be back-tracking on the Intel switch.)

Registration-Free Link to article

[autojive (560399)]

Google Link [google.com] and just click on the url that shows up on that page. Worked for me :)

That doesn't make intuitive sense...

[soft_guy (534437)]

Intel has made their whole company strategy around low power high performance chips. That was the stated reason for moving to Intel. Therefore, I would think that Portables would be the first thing to move. For example, there is no G5 portable and we've been waiting a long time for a portable with a better chip than the G4. My powerBook is getting long in the tooth, but I won't replace it with another G4 powerBook - what would be the point? - unless it quit working.

The G5 desktops are still very fast and I could see staying with PPC there for a while, but not on portables.

Realities of a Manufacturer

[standards (461431)]

When an auto manufacturer ships a new engine, they don't immediately halt production of the old ones that it is destined to supplant. A phased transition is simply a reality of the manufacturing business.

Apple doesn't have to rush out an entire new line of units in one big bang. Good engineering and facility planning take time.

Supply for support

[Novajo (177012)]

Apple has to support current computers with their Applecare program. Applesinsider has discussed that these go into 2008. So really, this is probably nothing more than the winding down period.

http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1248 [appleinsider.com]

Slightly OT

[TubeSteak (669689)]

But I'd like to give the /. ed's kudos for including a link to google news.

Its amazing how most news articles will not give you the full story, or worse, you get their slanted version of events.

Reading multiple articles (not something /.'ers are likely to do since we can't even get them to RTFA) lets you get all the facts so you can draw your own conclusions.

Just my 2 pennies

Re:All or nothing

[E-Lad (1262)]

The contract into 2008 is likely because Apple needs current and future PPC processors to fulfill support agreements.

You didn't actually think that Apple would cut off PPC users the moment that the last Mac model is moved to Intel, did you?

Re:All or nothing

[hunterx11 (778171)]

No, the point is "moo." You know, like a cow's opinion: it doesn't matter.

Re:Hello bloat

[hunterx11 (778171)]

Hard disk space is cheap. RAM is less cheap, but having twice as much code and then only loading half of it into RAM doesn't increase bloat at all.

Re:Hello bloat

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Here's one:

#!/bin/sh
ditto --arch i386 $1

That wasn't too hard, was it? Of course, fat binaries will only add a tiny bit to most programs, since the non-executable resources for most pieces of software are significantly larger than the executable portions.

Re:fat binaries forever . .

[remahl (698283)]

That is more than a rumor. That is exactly what the Xcode that was released on the day of the announcement back in July does.

Re:They won't change from PPC

[Dominatus (796241)]

Heat? What the hell

The number one reason you havent seen a G5 laptop is heat issues. I don't see any problems running newer and newer x86 CPUs in laptops.

Hell the G5 towers need to be *water* cooled.

Furthermore, while the CISC/RISC business is correct every single report Ive read about the dev OSX86 machines (which are just regular P4s) are that they boot faster, perform faster, and are overall considerably faster than a G5.

Drop the argument, even Apple realizes it's dead.

Re:They won't change from PPC

[altan (519377)]

The Pentium M [wikipedia.org] is lower voltage and has a lower power dissipation than the current line of mobile G4s [wikipedia.org]. I too wish the PowerPC would continue, because it seems like a really elegant architecture, but Intel currently has the PowerPC beat in terms of mobile efficiency.

Re:They won't change from PPC

[Junks Jerzey (54586)]

PPC is one of the best platforms ever for both sound, gfx and of course heat production.

Is this based on more than just personal feelings about the architecture? Honestly, I like the PPC. It's a great implementation of the classic RISC principles: lots of registers, simple and fast instructions, no hardware stack, etc. But, really, this is just geeky fawning over a pretty design. The x86 is certainly ugly in some ways, mostly in terms of the huge legacy instruction set, but it's not so bad overall. Having hardware stack support is very nice. The limited number of registers makes function call overhead very low. If you disassemble code for typical PPC applications, you may see dozens of instructions for entering and leaving a function. And with each of those instructions being 4 bytes, that's a big deal in terms of instruction cache usage. So it's not entirely clear that in the modern world a classic RISC architecture is better.

Re:Apple Finally Gets What's Funny About...

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

People may laugh when you say `Intel' and `Roadmap' together, but they don't laugh nearly as hard as when you say `Freescale' and `Roadmap' together. I remember these guys promising 3.6GHz+ G6 chips being ready by 2002 back in the late '90s. Next to them, Intel roadmaps look positively reliable...