Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006

24seven · Post by **24seven** » Tue Jun 07, 2005 4:08 am

I'm sure you have all seen this somewhere else, but I thought I would post it anyway for anyone that hasnt.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html

Post by **Derek** » Tue Jun 07, 2005 12:42 pm

I would like to add that phaedrus sent me the news submission but I failed to post it before 24seven

phaedrus titled the submission "Cold Day in Hell: Apple switches to Intel/x86"

24seven · Post by **24seven** » Tue Jun 07, 2005 1:59 pm

Sorry, I was bored this morning.

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Mon Jun 27, 2005 3:07 am

i don't believe this..

apple is helping to make intel richer... and helping them to monopolize more over AMD

ugh.

im stunned

phaedrus · Post by **phaedrus** » Sun Jul 10, 2005 9:41 pm

Once again, I find myself shilling for Ars Technica on a web forum somewhere, but they've got some excellent analysis of the Apple + Intel bit.

It seems to be a combination of scale and product breadth. Intel can supply nearly ever piece of silicon that Apple needs (from the iPods up through the Xserves), and then some. Intel can do it at volume. To pull a number mostly out of my arse, Apple only represents somewhere in the neighborhood of 3% of Intel's volume, which makes it easy to accomodate Apple. AMD would have to increase their volume to around 15% of their current, and they don't have the breadth of catalog that Intel does.

Basically, it looks like Apple is moving away from the percieved performance of their Macintosh line to making it second burner, and selling entirely on user experience. What Apple is probably doing is switching over to the iPod as their primary business. Intel has desktop, server, mobile and handheld processors, as well as chipsets and IO boards, everything. All of it at volume, with discounts.

Nobody else has that, and (finally) it seems that Intel is moving back to performance processors instead of MHz processors (their roadmap includes dual-core desktop derivatives of the Pentium-M architecture, slated for 2007, the time that Apple intends to release the first x86 desktop PowerMacs, hmm...).

Anyway, most of this is parroting Hannibal over at Ars Technica, but it makes a lot of sense to me, and I haven't heard any other good speculation.

But at the end of the day, I have agree with Kuun, it's just another little bit of the market pushing Intel's monopoly, and that is not a good thing (I'm with AMD on their antitrust suit). Also, it is increasing the marketshare of an ugly architecture. I don't like the x86 architecture, the assembly language is ugly and the machine code worse. I'm a much bigger fan of architectures which are designed without legacy in mind (Alpha, POWER/PPC, MIPS, but particularly Alpha

), but I use x86, because that's where the commodity, hobbyist hardware is available and affordable.

Ooh, complete tangent, but one of the suggested reasons for Athlon 64s doing better with 32 bit code than 32 bit x86 processors, is that the x86-64 extensions add architecture registers which 32 bit code can use, making it easier for the compilers to optimize code (this is one of the reasons the RISC movement started--even if the movement is meaningless in the days of OoO-superscalar CPUs--it's easier to write an optimizing compiler for a register-rich architecture with a simple memory layout, both of which the x86 architecture lacks, blech).

Jeff

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Thu Jul 14, 2005 9:08 am

phaedrus wrote:I'm a much bigger fan of architectures which are designed without legacy in mind (Alpha, POWER/PPC, MIPS, but particularly Alpha ),

So you like Alphas?

I got two Alphastation 250 4/266 machines sitting on my floor. They were bound for the bin so I rescued them and brought them home. I know they work but I haven't looked into what they contain in detail. I know there is a SCSI disk in there though, a loud, slow and small (1 gig or so) disk.

I guess I will check them out and install Linux on them. I have no real use for them so I might try to sell them to somebody who would like to have them for a symbolic sum.