Hell freezing over? Apple in talks with Intel

[Wombat]

One of the worst things about Macs is the price of stuff becuase it's locked market and yes they do fail. Built in redunancy. Heck I need more space on my hard rive. Shit I can't upgrade it.

You're full of crap. You certainly can upgrade a Mac hard drive. You could even grab a Hitachi laptop drive and slam it into a Mac mini.

Not to mention that $500 for a Mac mini isn't bad.

Besides how often do you see intolerances in the PC market today. It's now fairly rare as the market has matured a lot.

You see it all the time. "This RAM doesn't work with that processor," "just adjust your timings," "That MB chipset doesn't work well with this sound card."

I don't own a Mac, but I'm certainly not going to deny that being a PC owner isn't tough sometimes.

[Jessterw]

Heck I need more space on my hard rive. Shit I can't upgrade it.

Why can't you upgrade it? There is and always has been a thriving third-party market for upgrades of all kinds. You can even upgrade the optical drive (CD/DVD whatever) in the Powerbooks and iBooks. True there are some components that there are no upgrade paths for, and that is a direct result of the hardware choices Apple has made in the designs.

Looks like Wombat clicked the shiny button before I

[xortam]

I was surprised when Apple started including a PCI bus on their computers. That was a major move for them towards opening up their HW.

[Claymonkey]

Closer to being official

http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+IBM,+switch+to+Intel+chips/2100-1006_3-5731398.html?tag=nefd.lede

[Jessterw]

Closer to being official

http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+I...?tag=nefd.lede

Interesting. Could amount to nothing, but definitely makes this coming Monday a day to watch.

I still think any move to a new processor will likely occur in places other than their main (computer) product lines. Thinking more along the lines of the tablet they have filed for design trademarks on; though, I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of it showing up in some of the lower-end models like the Mac mini.

[Kurt]

Bad idea for Apple to switch CPU. If they come over to the Intel world, they'll get utterly destroyed by the competition. they better stay in their cosy PPC world.

This article on Anand's just shows that the PPC is a GOOD CPU and it's really OSX that's the DOG.

http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436

If they switch over to x86, every other OS will run better on their hardware than OS X. I don't see that as an advantage

[Sasq]

Kurt, did you actually read the article - and err all of it?
lets see point 1, they compared nix to bsd, which is a different core system.
2) they pointed out that gcc isn't optimized as well as it could be for the PPC arch. now going to an x86 arch will do what? hmm?

[KeiFront]

My take on this, if they keep the platform closed it could work, it will give them the benefit of a steady supply of cheap CPU's. But it also has a lot of disavantages a lot of programs will need to get reworked, recompiled altough nowadays a lot less assembly code is used (if it's used a all anymore, only have programming experience for mac till OSX 10.0).

But using Intel chips in tablet's or pda's makes complete sense, Intel has the knowledge and best chips atm. And especially in laptops, there's still no G5 laptop and Apple sells a lot of laptops.

[Jessterw]

Everyone is assuming a move to Intel means a move to a x86-based processor. While it's possible, it's also equally as possible that it won't be.

The problem with the current batch of Intel chipsets is that they don't have equivalents to some of the capabilities of the PPC chipsets that Apple relies on for a lot of the graphic and video aspects of OS X. So any move would require functional equivalents to be created.

[Kurt]

Kurt, did you actually read the article - and err all of it?
lets see point 1, they compared nix to bsd, which is a different core system.
2) they pointed out that gcc isn't optimized as well as it could be for the PPC arch. now going to an x86 arch will do what? hmm?

So you mean you couldn't compare say, a diesel engine to a regular one, and say which car is faster?

Come on.

The GCC tests were just trying to get a performance measure out of the PPC, to compare to the P4 and Opteron.

I'm referring to Lmbench. OS X just takes forever to create new threads. It's not that it's a bad OS per se, but it's a dog *speedwise*.

Just have a look at the server numbers: OS X crumbles when it has more than 2 clients. Just re-read the MySQL part. http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p=6

Going to an x86 architecture will mean MORE competition for Apple. More OSes ready to run FASTER on their own hardware than OS X.

[az]

There is a german article on heise online today that Rumors are growing louder that Apple is going to start using intel CPUs, first in their lower-end PCs like the mac mini in mid 2006, and then also in their higher-end lines, like the Power Macs, in mid 2007. The sources say Steve Jobs will announce the move this monday on ADC.

AZ

[Sasq]

You are assuming that there are not already alternative OS's for mac hardware - yellow dog linux for example... which would have been a better os to use to compare the ppc...

yes there is a thread problem, but again, there are too many holes in the test.

Why not use a bsd distro on the x86 boxes to compare mysql.. different OS, different Kernel. make all things equal and show me results. The problem could very well be that version of mysql is not optimized for either ppc or bsd based distro's.
Too many extra variables.

[KeiFront]

Just have a look at the server numbers: OS X crumbles when it has more than 2 clients. Just re-read the MySQL part. http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p=6.

Only things I see is a slow threading mechanism in OSX, it would have been nice if they also included the 2.4.x kernel into the comparision because the 2.6.x kernel has a lot better thread management.

[Kurt]

@Sasq: I'm not assuming that there aren't alternative OSes for the Mac, I said there would be MORE on the x86 side. Many more in fact.
Assuming the MySQL test is bogus, I don't see how you could have a OS X as fast as another Mac OS (Linux or BSD) with such lame thread creation efficiency in Darwin.

[Jessterw]

Ignoring the whole performance questions, I'm still at a loss at how moving to a x86 or Intel platform would hurt Apple. Apple would still be selling Apple hardware, which is where they make their money. There is already a good size segment of people (usually developers and the like) that buy a G5 and then throw an alternate OS on it. Does Apple care? Hardly. Sure they'd love it if everyone was running OS X, but that doesn't mean competition on the OS front is going to hurt them if they make it easier for consumers to run a greater range of software on their hardware (nevermind that there is more quality software available for OS X than other platforms).