On Jan 2, 2006, at 2:07 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
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.
This has been being said for a long long time. While theoretically
true, it hasn't materialized in the Real World.
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.
That's a gross misstatement.
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.
Yeah, and IBM's charging a gazillion dollars for them. Apple can't
survive selling $10-15k workstations. And IBM's ALWAYS had this stuff
"in the pipeline".
...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.
According to the latest figures, notebook sales across the industry
outpaced desktop sales by a sizeable portion last year, and the trend
is expected to continue. Nothing IBM was making was good for
notebooks, this is a giant chunk of Apple's revenue.
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.
This wasn't a temper fit. The caricature you're presenting of Steve
Jobs may make for good opera, but in real life he's a pretty savvy
businessman who has to account to the Board of Directors and
shareholders. This decision was not made capriciously.
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...
Again. No one will buy a $10K workstation from Apple. And this
permanently embeds a dual-platform hitch in the
--
Bruce Johnson
This is the sig who says 'Ni!'
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