Pentium-Based Macs The Future of Apple? 817
seek3r writes "Found this interesting article on BusinessWeek.com regarding Apple's potential switch to Intel chips. I wonder what the implications this might have for Apple with regards to market share and software support. Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Intel?"
You get your tech news from business week? (Score:1, Informative)
APPLE & IBM 64-bit PPC Article (Score:5, Informative)
I think this is more a more reasonable plan than Apple making the "Switch" to Intel processors.
Do you mean the G5??? (Score:4, Informative)
...Or am I missing something? the G4 chip has been around for a long time...
Here it is ... (Score:2, Informative)
Personally until something materializes everything is FUD. I will use what works now and change later when the change happens. There are too many things to get stressed about in life, so just accept that things don't always turn out as you wish, or as someone else says.
Re:OSX on our PCs, of course! (Score:5, Informative)
Not AGAIN! (Score:3, Informative)
Intel vs Moto (Score:1, Informative)
The short answer is no.
A while back while I was making the argument for the switch to Intel (Pentium or Itanium) I went back and plotted the performance ratio between Moto and Intel and it has held steady around 2x Mhz since 1989.
I rather not have Intel. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I rather not have Intel. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OSX on our PCs, of course! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:OSX on our PCs, of course! (Score:2, Informative)
ROFLOL
name one. and no, the 500$+ AmigaOne mobo (G3 @ 600Mhz) isn't it.
Re:Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Inte (Score:5, Informative)
Definitely. PC manufacturers love to compete on Mhz, but a fast CPU is useless if it's starved of useful work by bottlenecks in I/O, memory bandwidth, etc. It's not unusual for a sub 1Ghz PC with good SCSI disks to handily outperform a 2Ghz+ machine with mere IDE.
Sun, SGI et al realized this years ago. Serious computing is limited not by clock speed of the CPU but by bus and memory bandwidth. That's why Sun sell systems with 300-400Mhz processors and gigaplane XB crossbar active backplanes. Nowadays with the increasing sophistication of consumer software (like the latest games), the same issues are recurring.
If you're buying a system in the near future, drop 500-1000 Mhz in CPU speed and buy faster disks or more memory with the money you saved.
Maybe this is redundant, (Score:4, Informative)
From the article:
No.
I don't want a laptop that blows hot air like hair drier or desktops that have three fans. As people realizing (as another poster mentioned) the CPUs are fast enough, I don't see much point in abandoning the PowerPCs that are small, consume little energy, and hence run so much cooler. For me, computers that are quiet and cool are much preferable to the opposite.
Another thing the author of the column seems to forget is that PowerPC is not a chip solely from Motorola. The point that IBM is also a partner and develops PowerPC chips is completely missing.
Welcome to the new millenium (Score:3, Informative)
Ugh--Please stop posting this story every week (Score:5, Informative)
Such a move on Apple's part would complicate matters significantly. Consider that if hardware devices would STILL need mac specific drivers to meet whatever "hardware security" apple uses to make their machines proprietary--Meaning much hardware STILL won't function with OS X, whether it's on top of Intel or a PowerPC proc from Motorola or IBM.
My favorite uninformed reader was this guy:
This guy doesn't understand the term "switch." If he starts off running an Intel PC, and buys an "Intel mac" what has he really changed? Still using the same ancient hardware architecture kludged on top of a 32-bit chip sucking more juice that an a electric battleship.
The G4 myth (Score:5, Informative)
The only real advantage of the PPC at the moment is that it lacks a lot of backwards compatibility cruft and, because of its RISC design, consumes less power and spreads less heat. It is a fine notebook CPU (and Apple is a fine notebook manufacturer). But Apple seems to have had no other chance but giving up this advantage by selling its newest line of desktop G4 Macs with dual CPUs, keeping up with Intel at least halfway with such a "hack".
Re:OSX on our PCs, of course! (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.mai.com/products/teron%20cx.htm
oh yea, that cost $4000 dollars.
I did some searching and found several other PPC motherboards, but they were all above $2000, if you want PPC for running linux, your must better off buying and apple, and ripping out the hardware. So no I wouldn't call these boards commodity, but they do exist.
Re:Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Inte (Score:5, Informative)
If you said "a clustered array of RAID5 15,000 RPM drives versus a 5400RPM single drive", then that would have made sense, but to use SCSI versus IDE as the big differentiation is just silly: The intrinsic SCSI advantage has been disproven countless times.
Sun sell systems with 300-400Mhz processors and gigaplane XB crossbar active backplanes
That's pretty disingenuous: Sun sells systems with tens or hundreds of those "300-400Mhz" processors, disproving your "CPU power doesn't matter" BS. I guarantee you that if Sun weren't sliding behind in the CPU game (it's hard to compete with AMD and Intel with such a small niche market) they'd sell much more powerful CPUs. Instead they compensate by clustering dozens of them together.
If you're buying a system in the near future, drop 500-1000 Mhz in CPU speed and buy faster disks or more memory with the money you saved.
You'd save next to nothing. An Athlon 2200+ costs $220 Canadian here, and puts you in the upper realm of CPUs. Considering that most power PCs have 512MB of RAM (which is virtually never exhausted. Despite having several development tools open, and SQL Server running, and several different browsers, I currently have 370MB free. Adding more memory will merely increase the capacitive load of my PC). Secondly, adding a faster disk only matters if you do tasks which are heavily disk I/O intensive, which the overwhelming majority are not (especially because people have so much memory, and hence disk cache). It's like saying you'll get better video encoding performance by equipping your PC with a faster CD-ROM drive.
This BS "CPUs are faster than we'll ever need" nonsense is as tired of an argument as it was a decade ago when contrarians were assuring us that a 386 was more power than any reasonable man would ever need. History has shown their claims to be absurd, yet as they say: History repeats itself. Take a man who claims that his Pentium 667 is "faster than I'll ever need" and give him a P4 2.2 to use for a week. Put him back on his 667. 9 times out of 10 he'll be on the phone to Dell to upgrade his PC. Most people who claim that they don't need better say so because they've never SEEN better.
Additionally, try doing some video editing on your PC. While the hard drive is a factor (because massive amounts of data are read and written), the processor is massively more an influence: An Athlon 2200+ will perform the task that much quicker than a Athlon 1500+, again thoroughly reputing your claims that processors are overpowered. That's especially telling as video processing is one of the most disk and memory bound activities.
Re:The G4 myth (Score:2, Informative)
Re:APPLE & IBM 64-bit PPC Article (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Do you mean the G5??? (Score:4, Informative)
There's also been rumors of Apple showing interest in AMD's native 64 bit mode of the Hammer/Operton line, which wouldn't be a terribly stupid move if they're going to up and move. Going to Pentium (x86) would be a step backward, into a braindead and inefficient architecture, and probably cause a riot among developers. This would only make sense if Apple wanted to completely be out of making hardware, because they'd be aiming OSX at commodity hardware, and that's just too hideous to imagine, particularly if you start thinking about supporting drivers for everything. Probably better, to maintain their slim marketshare, to keep a firm hand on hardware options.
Re:Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Inte (Score:3, Informative)
This highly depends on the application. A single SCSI drive against a single IDE drive performing a single task may show the same performance. However, when you add multiple tasks and a lot of disk access , SCSI beats IDE hands down. As you add drives (don't even bring up RAID yet), tag command queing and parallel data paths blows away IDE no question. Now, add RAID into the equation, especially looking a the huge caching controllers available for SCSI with no IDE counterpart and you see that SCSI is certainly the way to go. Computer manufactures aren't idiots; IDE is cheaper and if it were on equal footing with SCSI no one would offer SCSI solutions. That having been said, no high-performance workstations or servers use IDE.
Sun, HP, etc., have for years sold small MHz machines that outperform the GHz machines available mainly because they use RISC technology and aligned instructions. Clustering has not been a large part of Sun's business -- ever! And, as far as multiple CPU's in a single box, yes, all these systems offer and endorse this, but then so does Intel if you read their journals. Intel ran themselves into needing GHz clocking because of poor chip design (backward compatible to x86). Sun and others don't design chips in those ranges because of the cooling requirements and heat failure rates. It is far easier for them to make lower MHz machines with multiple processors because they run OS's and software that can work UMP or SMP, where Intel has issues in the common market environment (example: Windows 95/98 unable to work SMP).
Re:Never happen (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, it's true that you see Solaris on "beige boxes", but Solaris x86 is a very specialized product; it's designed for certain kinds of jobs only (servers, specialized workstations). Mac OS X is more of a desktop OS, where it can be used for any kind of job (software devel, graphics, games, music, tv, etc).
So, I think that given Apple's obsession with perfection, and the difficulty of supporting more than one architecture of an OS, and the difficulty in maintaining drivers for all possible hardware combinations, it's probably a dangerous idea for Apple to support Mac OS X on clones. Whether or not the financial return would offset the cost and risk is another question.
Re:Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Inte (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. There have been several, yet oddly enough, those points in history were among the worst for Apple's profits and market share. When the G4 tower first came out, it had mosterous $ for ! compared to similarilly equipped Windows towers.
This was especially true in the Laptop arena, where Apple occationally had products out that didn't even have an x86 equivalent, because they were so much faster than any Windows laptop. For example, when the Powerbook 3500 came out, and when the first Powerbook G4 came out. In both cases, they were the world's fasted consumer laptops at the time.
I had just bought P4@1.6Ghz pc laptop for $2400
And I would not even consider trading my 700 MHz G3 iBook for your Dell, even though I have a slower CPU and spent a fraction of what you did. Six hours on one battery, baby!
Re:Do you mean the G5??? (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, but then you say:
Going to Pentium (x86) would be a step backward, into a braindead and inefficient architecture, and probably cause a riot among developers
Um, you do realize, right, that AMD's 64bit architecture is basically just an extension to x86 in the same way Intel's 32bit architecture introduced with 386 was an extension of the 16 x86 from before (from the 8086, 8088, 80286, etc)
I don't see how you can call moving to a 64bit extension of x86 a good idea while calling x86 itself "braindead and inefficient". Unless, of course, you don't know what you're talking about.
Anyway, while you can certanly say that x86 code is backwards (it's big endian and all!), I don't see how you can call a chip that run code faster then what apple currently uses 'inefficient'.
It will never happen (Score:3, Informative)
Will Apple Put Intel Inside?
August 9, 2002
Rumors are buzzing that Apple computers may one day be stamped "Intel Inside." It won't happen.
http://www.forbes.com/2002/08/09/0809apple.html
Re:Have Motorola's chips really lagged behind Inte (Score:1, Informative)
My main machine is a 1GHz Athlon, with 512MB of PC133 cas2 RAM. My other machine is a 233Mhz PII, with 144MB of PC66 cas3 RAM. For email and web surfing, they are about equal. I really don't care about the difference, when I notice it.
For doing big simulations, or for big symbolic math problems, the slower machine is too slow. That's mainly because the smaller RAM get it started swapping too soon. On symbolic math, the faster machine is about three times quicker than the slower, for problems which don't get into swap on either machine. I suspect that has as much to do with the speed of the RAM as it does with the CPU speed.
>>If you're buying a system in the near future, drop 500-1000 Mhz in CPU speed and buy faster disks or more memory with the money you saved.
This is almost good advice. Buy the slowest CPU which will run the fastest front side bus available, and use the money you save by not getting the highest clockspeed CPU to buy the fastest RAM available. Buy enough of it that you will never have to swap. For most folks purposes, the difference between 1GHz and 2GHz is no more significant than the difference between cas2 and cas3. The 233MHz machine will look FAST if the 2.3GHz machine has too little RAM and is swapping.
>... "CPUs are faster than we'll ever need" nonsense is as tired of an argument as it was a decade ago when contrarians were assuring us that a 386 was more power than any reasonable man would ever need.
I also have a 486 which I use for email and web surfing. It is too slow, but again, the problem is largely too little RAM: it only has 12MB. Once the broweser (Dillo) is loaded, it can render a web page fast enough. Of course, Pine is lightning-fast on it. Here [purdue.edu] is some advice I have found useful about building a fast computer.
Processor speed (Score:1, Informative)
result.red = source.red * mask.red / scale
result.green = source.green * mask.green / scale
result.blue = source.blue * mask.blue / scale
result.alpha = source.alpha * mask.alpha / scale
On PCs, this takes a pile of instructions. On G4s, this takes ONE instruction. Not only that, but each composite value only takes one 128-bit register.
IDE performance (Score:3, Informative)
Most modern IDE drives have write caching enabled by default. However, under every OS I've tested this configuration can lose data, even with a journaling filesystem. The problem is that the filesystem thinks that the data is successfully written to disk, but it's actually in the drive's cache buffer. If you lose power at the wrong moment, you lose that data. I've reproduced this problem with Western Digital, Seagate, and Maxtor 7200rpm 4MB buffer 80GB IDE drives under both Linux 2.4.X kernels and Microsoft 98/2000/XP platforms.
I've written in to each of those drive manufacturers and they have confirmed that the cache buffer isn't backed by some battery or other type of power reserve, and that data can be lost when power is removed.
Apparently this isn't an issue in SCSI land because SCSI drives respect a flush command, while some IDE drives do not.
The bottom line is that if you want a reliable system with IDE drives you need to disable write caching, which drastically increases disk access latency and results in reduced throughput for many tasks.
I'd love it if a kernel hacker can provide some more details as to why journaling filesystems can't forceably flush the IDE disk's buffer... I've found many older threads on the issue on the linux kernel list but haven't found any definitive resolution or action items recently.
As the situation stands now, my iozone benchmarks show a 15k RPM 80GB SCSI drive performing 2x to 3x better across all tests than a 7.2k RPM 80GB IDE drive with write caching disabled, DMA turned on, and all other hdparm options optimized for maximal performance. That is a pretty large difference. Yes, I did verify that the hdparm tuning options were working correctly.
And yes, the 3ware IDE RAID controllers have the exact same problem. They have an on-board raid cache, but it's not battery backed, so it is not a good idea to enable write caching in most cases. The 3ware cards are great and cheap, but they don't perform as well as their scsi equivalents.
Before someone tries to flame me, yes I have heard of a UPS, but for the machines I'm trying to protect I can't trust that the UPS will be properly maintained, not overloaded, strong enough to survive a long outage, or that the customer won't hit the power button themselves out of ignorance when they think that the system has "hung".
Re:Apple ought to promote the Mac's energy efficie (Score:3, Informative)
For an 18" LCD vs a 19" CRT, I'd have to keep the LCD for something like 17 years before it paid for the price difference in power costs, compared to a CRT running 9 hours per day. (Home computer, where I'm at work or asleep most of the day and so the CRT is turned off or in powersave mode when I'm not in front of it.) $200 for the CRT, $600 for the LCD, and 7cents per kilowatt-hour. Don't remember where I got the power usage figures, I think it was from NEC CRT and LCD monitor spec sheets.
I did not include power costs for running the AC extra in the summer. Bear in mind, though, that you run the heater less in winter too, so it is possible that you will balance this out. I didn't look into this, but it may be a wash.
This let me know that power consumption/cost alone was not a reason to get an LCD monitor for a desktop computer.
You don't realize how little power really costs... An extra 50watts, used 24 hours per day, increases a power bill about $30 per year. Takes a long time to make up for $1000 difference in system price at $30 per year.