[Troll]

Originally Posted by Goldfinger

Troll, I guess those PowerMacs that were used by in those benches had their 2 CPUs enabled..

Yeah, I think you're right, but then I'd heard that the gain you got from dual Pentium 4's wasn't as great as that you got from dual G5's so I wouldn't expect a dual Pentium to go at double the speed of a single proc Pentium. Barefeats has a comparison between the PowerMac G5 and the iMac G5 and there they disabled a processor. If the Photoshop CS2 figures are comparable with Photoshop 7 figures, then it looks like the P4 is still slower than a PowerMac with one processor tied behind its back ... and it's slower than a 2GHz iMac albeit only slightly. I realise that we're supposed to be looking further down the line. All I'm saying is that it'll be easier to peddle entry level Intel Macs than PowerMacs in the beginning.


http://www.barefeats.com/imacg52.html

[dan johnson]

Originally Posted by Troll

I have a few questions for those in the know:

1) I was quite looking forward to having a 64-bit OS running on a 64-bit processor. What 64-bit processors does Intel make and are they likely to find themselves in Macs?

There is a very good article at Anandtech about this.

http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2439

From page 2 of the article:

So what Intel CPUs will Apple be using?

Steve Jobs stated that they'd be shipping Intel based Macs by June 2006, so let's consult the handy Intel roadmaps and see what will be available by June 2006.

On the desktop side, two new 65nm cores will be introduced in Q1 2006 - well before Apple's June 2006 deadline: the dual core Presler and the single core Cedar Mill processors.

We saw Presler running at last year's Fall IDF, albeit only at 2.0GHz. When Presler makes its debut early next year it will be clocked at 2.8GHz at the low end and 3.4 - 3.6GHz at the high end. The chip will also feature a 2MB L2 cache per core and we're guessing a number of architectural enhancements that didn't make their way into Prescott. As is the case with the current Pentium D, Presler will not have Hyper Threading enabled by default although the Extreme Edition based on Presler may have HT enabled.

Cedar Mill is essentially a single core version of Presler, and we'd expect Apple to be using that core as well. Note that both cores support EM64T, meaning that Apple will still support 64-bit memory addressing and execution on their Intel platforms. Both chips are also LGA-775 CPUs and will be supported by the existing 945 and 955X chipsets.

We would expect Apple to use a combination of both cores, Cedar Mill for their entry level Powermacs, Presler for their high end SKUs and potentially even a HT enabled Extreme Edition for their highest end Powermac.

...

But let's not get caught up in the next year alone; clearly Apple is interested in the long haul, as you don't make this sort of a commitment without looking at the 5, 10 and 15 year futures for your partner. Presler and Cedar Mill weren't the cores that won Apple over, it is Intel's Platform 2015 vision, the NetBurst successor and their ability to learn from their mistakes with the Pentium 4 that are what won Apple over.

Why not AMD? Much of Apple's success is due to marketing and branding, not necessarily technological leadership. That should sound a lot like Intel these days, whose processors essentially lag behind AMD in terms of technology, but outsell AMD by huge margins thanks to strong marketing and branding. The Intel brand is much stronger than AMD's, and that is the sort of partner that Apple is interested in.

The ability to supply Apple's volumes isn't a huge deal, as many have pointed out, AMD could most definitely handle Apple's volumes. Intel's pricing to Apple is most likely far more attractive than anything AMD could put together however, and when existing as a premium PC manufacturer is already quite difficult, any breaks on CPU pricing you can get are definitely worth it.

...

Intel needs a partner like Apple; for the longest time Intel has been promising usage models and concept PCs that we all wanted but would never surface. PC vendors focused on producing the cheapest system possible, while dealing with backwards compatibility and standards compliance with a huge install base - effectively making change difficult. Look at how long it has taken us to transition away from the Parallel and Serial ports on PC motherboards or the move to SATA drives. With Apple, Intel finally has a partner that is willing to adapt to change at a much more rapid pace and one that can implement new technologies extremely quickly thanks to a small, agile user base.

[Mrjinglesusa]

Originally Posted by moki

I dare say that folks who are planning to abandon MacOS X for Linux will be in for a rather rude awakening in fairly short order. Longhorn (Windows) would be a better choice than Linux for the vast majority of people in the world.

As a long time Mac user and developer, I'm slightly surprised that I don't particularly care about this transition one way or the other. The processor that's running under the hood is largely irrelevant IMHO.

Porting applications to run on the Intel variant of OS X is certainly an issue. Older programs that were never updated to be MacOS X native will likely be gone for good. However if you wrote your application in XCode, getting it working on Intel really isn't that big of a deal for the vast majority of applications out there.

Frankly, as a developer, I'm extremely impressed with the core technologies that Apple has developed: CoreVideo, Quartz Extreme 2D, CoreAudio, CoreImage, and a myriad of other technologies -- there's some exceedingly cool stuff there, and I think you're going to see lots of developers leveraging what is offered in MacOS X.

Is the move risky? Certainly. But I think some of the reactions here have been a bit over the top. For every person who abandons the platform because they prefer the processor (a small minority to be sure... most don't even know what the processor is), you will likely have many more who will be more interested in buying a machine from Apple that's less expensive, and has the ability to boot into Windows as well as MacOS X... a nice safety net for some people.

What should Apple have done? Suffer through more years of processor roadmaps that don't pass muster? The processor is irrelevant folks; the OS is what matters. They could swap in a MIPS chip for all I care, as long as the processor architecture has a future, and runs MacOS X fast, I'm there.

Another interesting thing to note is that there's a transition coming up for the Windows world as well, the transition to Longhorn that dovetails nicely with the MacOS X transition to Intel. Will some folks ditch Windows for MacOS X when they are faced with the prospect of an upgrade anyway? I think some will -- many people are extremely fed up with spyware, viruses, and other nonsense that the Windows world offers.

You also get an incredible bundle of excellent, easy to use "digital lifestyle" software out of the box, and MacOS X is still the premier OS for the creative market, DTP, video editing, audio processing, and other product categories. None of that changes when the chip in the machine changes.

People buy Macs because they run MacOS X. MacOS X is now better than it has ever been, and offers an amazing platform for killer applications. Does what's under the hood really matter? Not to me.

7+ pages and this was the only post worth reading. Bottom line - it doesn't matter what chip is in the Mac. Nice post Moki.

[Mithras]

I wonder if this guarantees two years without Mac vs PC ``Photoshop bake-offs"? Or indeed, is it the death knell of the bake-off, since one would no longer have any reason to expect a Mac to particularly faster -- or slower -- than a PC with the same CPU?

[ebuddy]

Originally Posted by Mithras

I wonder if this guarantees two years without Mac vs PC ``Photoshop bake-offs"? Or indeed, is it the death knell of the bake-off, since one would no longer have any reason to expect a Mac to particularly faster -- or slower -- than a PC with the same CPU?

I'm a completely ignorant schlep in all this. I'm lobbying for an "implications" thread, but I don't even have enough knowledge to start one. It seems to me on the surface to remain a "it's all in the OS" argument right? Or wrong? Please visit my questions on the support group thread. I have no clue what to think because I don't know enough about all this and there is so much conflicting data surrounding all this.

[Judge_Fire]

I think we'll be hearing a lot of 'amazing' marketshare and sales number news from Apple in the following year.

They'll need to project an image of a growing base of potential customers to motivate the developers. This includes persuading the 'just run windows to play my game' devs of the fact that most people won't run Windows on the side.

If there are enough buyers, catering to them should come naturally.

IMHO, this is a great time to do this, thanks in part to Microsoft's inability to ship Longhorn. Hopefully the Tiger under-the-hood hotness, great apps and huge marketing momentum will keep the marketshare/sales figures going, even if a number of pro users get all skeptical about buying that new tower/powerbook. (Don't we always?)

Apple's in the Spotlight (ha) and it has a window of opportunity. Let's watch those numbers.

J

[budster101]

What is Thurrott's take on it? Going to go check it now.

Where is Longhorn again?

[typoon]

Originally Posted by budster101

What is Thurrott's take on it? Going to go check it now.

Where is Longhorn again?

What's LongHorn?

The next 2 years are going to VERY interesting to say the very least. I'm going ready my credit card, sit back and see what comes out. Now that this news has settled in a bit I'm actually excited about what Apple will have in store for us the next 2 years.

My G4's are getting a little long in the teeth so I might end up picking up a G5 or iMac G5 in the interim.

[pliny]

Originally Posted by BasketofPuppies

No. One rigged test of a single function in a single program is not the same as a real world performance advantage. Intel and AMD's processors have been significantly faster than IBM and Freescale/Motorola's for years.

Dynamic recompilation and unoptimized native code will slow down Mac software on Apple Celeron/Pentium/Xeon systems for a while, but that will be temporary.

This is a test of 45 filters--not one "function.".

And you say it's rigged.

Proof?

You also mention significantly faster performance--if there has been an Intel advantage in some benchmarks it has been in the range of low percentage points, and even this has been true when the clock speeds of the G5's have been quite below the clocked speeds of the Intels.

The G5's are excellent chips, there's just not enough of them and IBM is not scaling them very well at all.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by pliny

This is a test of 45 filters--not one "function.".

And you say it's rigged.

Proof?

You also mention significantly faster performance--if there has been an Intel advantage in some benchmarks it has been in the range of low percentage points, and even this has been true when the clock speeds of the G5's have been quite below the clocked speeds of the Intels.

The G5's are excellent chips, there's just not enough of them and IBM is not scaling them very well at all.

Maybe Apple is hedging their bets on future Intel chips?

[osxisfun]

read this thread NOW:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthre...hreadid=130894

if true, this will silence the ppc 4-var crowd IMO.

[Shaddim]

Originally Posted by osxisfun

read this thread NOW:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthre...hreadid=130894

if true, this will silence the ppc 4-var crowd IMO.

My problem isn't with x86, it's with Intel. If they had chosen AMD, I'd be happy as a clam.

[osxisfun]

i think if AMD has intel marketing and co-op dollars, and soon to be released laptop line like the yonah chips, AMD would have been in the running..

but i would bet donuts that after the first desktops appear apple will offer an amd line depending on their needs.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by MacNStein

My problem isn't with x86, it's with Intel. If they had chosen AMD, I'd be happy as a clam.

I've read stuff stating that AMD would have problems supplying Apple with enough processors, and we'd be back to where we started.

Have you heard anything to the contrary?

Is AMD basically a x86 variant? Are the two relatively interchangable?

[greenamp]

Like several have said already here, the choice to go with Intel over AMD was most likely motivated to some extent by marketing potential.

I have no doubts that once the transition to x86 is complete and smoothed over, we will see BTO options including AMD chips. Competition amongst suppliers is good for business.

[greenamp]

Originally Posted by besson3c

I've read stuff stating that AMD would have problems supplying Apple with enough processors, and we'd be back to where we started.

Have you heard anything to the contrary?

Is AMD basically a x86 variant? Are the two relatively interchangable?

Yes, in PCs you can swap between both Intel and AMD cpus no problem, as long as the specified CPU fits within the technical constraints of the motherboard, ie socket type, cpu speed, etc.

[anthology123]

Basically I think this is personal move for Steve Jobs.
He has managed to phase out so many of the technologies that have appeared during his absence from Apple (the Sculley- Amelio years). Many are gone, a few are still with us:
Newton
Printers (inkjet and laser)
OS9 system
on-board SCSI
Scanners
PowerPC
anything else?

What's left? Firewire, Quicktime

notice the things that Jobs back in 1985 created that are still with us:
Tiny keyboards
one button mouse
all-in one systems

[osxisfun]

I don't agree at all.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthre...hreadid=130894

[misc]

Originally Posted by anthology123

Basically I think this is personal move for Steve Jobs.
He has managed to phase out so many of the technologies that have appeared during his absence from Apple (the Sculley- Amelio years). Many are gone, a few are still with us:
Newton
Printers (inkjet and laser)
OS9 system
on-board SCSI
Scanners
PowerPC
anything else?

What's left? Firewire, Quicktime

Are you kidding me? Apple (and it just so happens to be Jobs) killed those because they were losing money. Printers should be left to a printer company, scanners to a scanner company.


Why does everyone here care what proc. Apple uses? Unless you are a developer and have to change around your code to correct your programs (Moki: Scared?), who cares?

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by MacNStein

My problem isn't with x86, it's with Intel. If they had chosen AMD, I'd be happy as a clam.

Someone just L U V E S the underdogs

-t

[anthology123]

Originally Posted by misc

Are you kidding me? Apple (and it just so happens to be Jobs) killed those because they were losing money. Printers should be left to a printer company, scanners to a scanner company.


Why does everyone here care what proc. Apple uses? Unless you are a developer and have to change around your code to correct your programs (Moki: Scared?), who cares?

Hmmm, I agree with your assessment of those technologies, but you didn't address those things that Steve Jobs kept that were under HIS watch,
The one button mouse, the tiny keyboards and the all-in-one unit desktops.

I assume you thought those were great ideas, but I think those stand improvements,too which you quietly neglected to mention, why didn't you defend those things?

[MacTiger2006]

Here are my questions, they may have been answered so if so, send me to the post that answers it, or just tell me anyways.

1.) Can I just go build my own Intel PC and put Mac OSX on it now? SJ said they had an intel machine humming nicely with Tiger, so I'm guessing that's a yes. but when can I do it with no software hang ups etc. The thing is I've never had a problem with Intel / AMD its always been Windows.

2.)Will this make Mac games easier to release along side their PC counterpart?

3.) Does this mean that Mac's will now have inflated clockspeed rates like PC's. I know for a fact my Mac G3 900 iBook does circles around my AMD 1.35, and I've done everything for the AMD machine possible.

I'll have more Q's I'm sure. Thanks to whoever answers them.

[osxisfun]

>1.) Can I just go build my own Intel PC and put Mac OSX on it now? SJ said they had an intel machine humming nicely with Tiger, so I'm guessing that's a yes. but when can I do it with no software hang ups etc. The thing is I've never had a problem with Intel / AMD its always been Windows.

nope.

>2.)Will this make Mac games easier to release along side their PC counterpart?

nope. (its more of an api thing (directx) ) but i do expect a healthy game market as more techie buy x86 mac

>3.) Does this mean that Mac's will now have inflated clockspeed rates like PC's. I know for a fact my Mac G3 900 iBook does circles around my AMD 1.35, and I've done everything for the AMD machine possible.

??? unknown.

[undotwa]

10 or so years of indoctrination of the PowerPC's superiority now betrayed.

Oh well... I'll still be buying Macs. But I'll never be able to look at one in the same way again. Intel has something 'icky' about them. Although I have no idea about anything to do with processors, PowerPCs just had some clean look to it especially the way Apple explained them to me.

[ebuddy]

Originally Posted by undotwa

10 or so years of indoctrination of the PowerPC's superiority now betrayed.
Oh well... I'll still be buying Macs. But I'll never be able to look at one in the same way again. Intel has something 'icky' about them. Although I have no idea about anything to do with processors, PowerPCs just had some clean look to it especially the way Apple explained them to me.

I totally feel ya undotwa. In fact, I emailed a friend of mine to give him the news (proud owner of a 500 mhz graphite iMac ) and the way I explained it was basically; "I feel like I've lost my last bastion of non-conformity." I remember the first couple of dumba$$ debates I had with my brother regarding the advantage of RISC over CISC chips years ago. Funny thing is I'm almost as ignorant now as I was then. It's just that the articles I read were positive in affirming my love for not having the same machine as him. And just about everyone else. He used to love taking his apart, I enjoyed recording music with mine. The panel was almost always off of his tower and I never really had a tower to worry about. I fix my own cars, but generally don't fix my own computers and thankfully I really haven't had to. (aside from the $#!&$$!!! hinges on my 500mhz Tibook which I won't go into here). Apple made a decision I truly believe Apple had to make.
- faster chips and more frequently produced.
- less likelihood of delayed products
- less expensive/more predictable and projectable overall
- guaranteed growth for the necessary period of time
I also think (which is probably completely ignorant) that at some point there will be a monstrous hybrid chip of sorts between Apple and Intel that could shake the tree a great deal. Oh well, here's to hoping.

[typoon]

Originally Posted by anthology123

Basically I think this is personal move for Steve Jobs.
He has managed to phase out so many of the technologies that have appeared during his absence from Apple (the Sculley- Amelio years). Many are gone, a few are still with us:
Newton
Printers (inkjet and laser)
OS9 system
on-board SCSI
Scanners
PowerPC
anything else?

What's left? Firewire, Quicktime

notice the things that Jobs back in 1985 created that are still with us:
Tiny keyboards
one button mouse
all-in one systems

Hate to break it to you but Jobs was also the one to first put Firewire on Macs. So I doubt he will be taking that away. OS 9 was dying anyway. Apple needed something NEW. Now that I've been on OS X for so long I would hate to spend time on an OS 9 box.

I'm glad that with the switch to Intel chips that OS9 as we know it may finally be dead and buried.

[justinkim]

Anandtech just posted a look at Intel's processor roadmap http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=2445

[osxisfun]

Originally Posted by justinkim

Anandtech just posted a look at Intel's processor roadmap http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=2445

looks like a nice spring next year for all new intel macs...

and if apple had not switched 2006 would have left the mac cpus in the dust.... megahrtz myth would have turned into megahrtz FACT.

[driven]

It's a shame the Intel can't get the FSB up on those chips. That's one place the G5 had (and still has) an advantage.

[justinkim]

Yeah, but sometimes you have to loose something (FSB) to get something (raw processor power, a future for the platform).

[driven]

No argument .... I'm just citing what I see as the one disadvantage that Intel had, has, and seems to continue having.

Of course, as you pointed out .... there are many more advantages than downsides. Bugger.

[Cadaver]

Originally Posted by driven

It's a shame the Intel can't get the FSB up on those chips. That's one place the G5 had (and still has) an advantage.

Intel has some Extreme Edition chips that run a 1.066GHz bus, and they don't have any significant speed advantage over their 800MHz bus-speed equivalents. I'd prefer to see faster DDR2 RAM, hyperthreading on the dual-core chips, and larger L2 caches than a small bump in bus speed; RAM speeds are still significantly slower than the bus.

[resuna]

Sigh.

All the beable about the low-power G5, and never a word about the high-speed G4. What's wrong with the e600 roadmap? I'd take a 1.5 GHz G4 with two independent 667 MHz memory busses and two independent PCI-X ports over a 2 GHz Pentium M that's trying to cram everything through a single 533 MHz FSB.

[osxisfun]

What are there shipping timeframes though. By the time they ship Yonah (dual core .65 size) and Mermon will eat them for lunch... + we get intel dual core desktops + we get intel wimax and future centrino combos + we get intel name brand with the it folks + +

they may be good chips... but intel looks be providing so much more than freescale or IBM...

[Todd Madson]

I posted this over at the macrumors forum and will comment further after I paraphrase:

I've had some thoughts on this since Jobs dropped the bomb and I've also
thought a lot since I got my dual G5 that this is what happened:

-IBM had some great ideas with the architecture, they had planned (or so
I'm told) that they would be at 5 ghz or more by now.

-The ideas were sound, but the execution of getting those ideas achieved
fell thru or were much harder to achieve than they originally planned.

-Remember Jobs said the entire industry hit the wall at 90 nanometer, the
focus wasn't going to be on pure speed but multiple cores and multiple CPUs.

-Still, prior to this, Jobs said "believe me, this architecture has legs" and I
really think that both he and IBM thought they KNEW exactly what to do to
make the architecture fly.

-Something happened - either the transfer to 90 nanometer or
something along those lines (could even have been a simple
communications breakdown or a key engineer being transferred
to another project or a key portion of the design becoming an
unsurmountable barrier) changed everything and it must have
happened a while ago.

-When the original systems came out and the dual 2.5 came out after,
I thought "great machine, but something is wrong". When the refresh
came and 2.7 was as high as they could must I thought "okay, now
something is really wrong or we're going to do another migration of
sorts". Sure enough.

-So, interesting that MacBidoulle indicating some of the duals were
overclocked after a fashion. Not surprising since my G5 2.5 has
reached temperatures of over 213 degrees farenheit under heavy
load (memory controller heatsink). I've overclocked computers
before but that's asking for some kind of major failure down the
road.

-So, I wonder what the next PPC machines coming out will be? They
will likely make 3 ghz with the next iteration but how much more can
they push the CPUs before they ease the Intel systems in?

Very interesting thread.

[Spliff]

Originally Posted by Todd Madson

I posted this over at the macrumors forum and will comment further after I paraphrase:

Can you post the link to the Macrumors thread? Thanks.

[Todd Madson]

It's here:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthre...hreadid=130894