At 10:50 AM -0700 01/02/2006, Mike Kauspedas wrote:
IMO switching to x86 is the stupidist move Jobs has ever made.
Just curious why?
hum. Potential to spin out of the control because it's a religious
argument, but here's my POV:
The Power architecture is fundamentally FAR superior to x86. That
means it can more easily and *more reliably* be scaled bigger better
faster wider. Given quality implementation from the software, it
will blow the doors of x86 processors.
In Intel's pipeline: Fixing bugs in their current processors.
Announcing that processors will be late to ship. Canceling attempted
updates of the x86 mess. Shipping a few cute revs of existing
processors.
In IBM's pipeline: Faster Power5 processors and the bigger wafer'd
processors. These are large palm-sized wafers (chips) that contain 4
(and more) processors and their caches. Each processor is
multithreaded; the single "chip" functions like a 8 or 16 or 32 or
64-way multiprocessor.
...IOW, Apple is moving to a lower-performance architecture.
Jobs' beef: IMF (IBM/Motorola/FreeScale) weren't cranking out
lower-power PPC chips for Apple's laptops. Nor were they cranking
out faster PPC chips for the G5 line. This is because they were busy
working on the full Power line. So,,, instead of going to full Power
processors, Jobs decided to throw a temper fit and get in bed with
Intel. Not AMD. Intel.
...IOW, Apple has chosen the lower-performance provider of that
lower-performance product line.
Now gander the developer community: Where are the sophisticated
highly -optimized tools necessary to develop good multi-threaded
vector code for OS X? Apple seems to have taken time out from
developing them, in order to come up with ppc/x86 compatibility tools
and RTLs. How can an OS X developer sell product if their code runs
slower than like-code on slower Windows machines?
Business community: Who buys Macs? Cheaper x86 laptops and iMacs
are cute. But can Apple survive being just a household product? The
only big businesses considering sticking with Apple right now are the
ones that Apple personally schmoozes. The rest are out getting
competitive quotes from Dell...
Ok. So what should Apple have done?
1. Work with IMF to get those lower-power processors sooner.
1.1 Gotta go x86? Ok. Give the market a clear statement that this
is just for the low-end Macs, and at least talk about the faster AMD
products. People need to be reassured that this "move" won't destroy
the professional uses for Macs.
2. Fix OS X's lame slow threading and put more effort into better
developer tools. That way the "photoshop benchmarks" and such, that
should blow the doors off the cheaper x86 machines, actually *can*.
3. Go big on the high end. Move to full Power processors so they're
ready for that big wafer.
Note #2. It's the real biggie. No hardware required. 20%+ of our
computer power is wasted because of OS X's poor threading
performance. All they gotta do is fix it...
FWIW,
*duck*
- Dan.
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