Don't shoot the messenger
But it looks like the rumours might be true this time if
news.com is right..

http://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-5731398.html

Well dude it would be greatly surprising - the Mac rumour mill has come up with some bizarre things over the years.... if it IS true, you would have to assume that Intel have continued development on improving the Pentium M for this purpose (I would assume that they're doing this anyway for desktop PCs) since the Pentium 4 is pretty much a development dead-end as far as I have read.

Either way, what would Apple possibly have to gain? Well I guess the answer is: reliability of supply. At this stage though, unless Intel really have done something impressive with the Pentium M architecture, I can't see Apple trading performance for supply reliability.

Just my thoughts on the matter.....

do you really believe Steve Jobs is gonna turn macs into expensive , goodlooking PC's ? The whole mac community buys macs because they are different than PC's , so I don't see the commercial value in moving to intell .... it would piss off the very loyal mac community that kept apple going all these years

but then again .... who knows ... I hear they stopped making drawbar organs , rhodes piano's and analog monstersynths and now try to emulate them using software ... another redicilous rumor I guess .....

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mac pro 8 core 2,33GHz , macbook pro 17" 2,4GHz , logic pro 9 , 828mkII , NI complete 5 , all spectrasonics , mackie control universal , genelec .........

I'm quite sceptical, to say the least. The risks are, to put it mildly, considerable, and the benefits highly unsure.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple coming up with an agreement with Intel next to the one they already have with IBM though, but ditching IBM altogether would require massive amounts of work (and thus money) from software developers whilst the outcome of this hard work and these investments is highly unsure. Still, Apple made moves in the past few could understand and the current rumours could be true.

I'm in San Francisco tomorrow, I haven't got the chance to visit the WWDC but I'm sure I'll be reading or hearing the outcome of Steve Jobs' speech somewhere in a paper or on the news...

Cheers,
Frank

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Imagination is more important than knowledge - A. Einstein

I could see why they might want to ditch IBM as they seem to have stalled a bit with the G5 - once again we seem to be back to overclocking boosts rather than all new CPUs, and still no sign of a G5 laptop on the horizon. But ditching PPC? That just sounds stupid, unless intel are planning to release their own PPC chips (which is about as unlikely as unlikely can get) surely it will mean dramatic rewrites involved on an even larger scale to the 680x0 to PPC shift and the shift from OS9 to OSX? Seeing how long its taken the OSX shift to really kick in (you could argue that OSX was only really ready after 10.3) and how long its taken developers to catch up, surely that would be suicide?

Ok so I'm just a PC user, but if Intel is to take futher consolodation of the market (even if it is only a couple of percent) its bad news for everyone. If Apple were to move to x86, with Intel's closeness to MS wouldn't AMD have made a better partner? After all their chips are better performers. But then, wouldn't perhaps a shift to Cell be a more promising notion, although Cell does all seem a bit hot air at the moment, its still PPC based and would be a lot less troublesome.

I really hope this is BS. If its true, its bad news for everyone, except Intel.

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http://www.jeremycorbett.co.uk

hmm would be interesting, because if I remeber correcly Intel are part of the Micosoft project which is supposed to put an end to piracy..

well its puts an end to privacy, and enables you to be screwed over.

one of the reasons i will not be using the next version of windows as it will be implemented in that.

would be sad if this sort of shite got into MacOS

bill gates owns a share of apple though doesnt he?

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P.I.G.L.E.T - where is polly?

The news is now on the BBC website so it sounds like this is how the wind is blowing for Macs.

The changeover to new chips would probably not be as bad as the changeover to the new OS. In learning OSX developers had to write applications using new APIs. However, once Apple have ported OSX and the developer tools/compilers to the new platform - it could be as simple as re-compiling the source code.

Application developers will be encouraged though to keep software compatible with older Macs, but again this is not too difficult. To be honest what it will hurt the most is Apples sales in the long term. People are not going to buy new Macs if the current architecture is being phased out in the next 2-3 years.

Could be interesting. Make or break for Apple maybe.

Wayne

Lifted from the register.


Why Apple won't embrace intel

By Arik Hesseldahl,Forbes.com

Published Monday 23rd May 2005 22:30 GMT

NEW YORK - Reports of Apple Computer shifting to building its computers with Intel chips, moving away from using chips made by IBM and Freescale Semiconductor, usually surface around the time Apple is close to making an important change in its system.
So the latest round of speculation on Monday suggested that once again Apple is close to making the leap to the Intel people camp. And though such a change is still not likely to happen, the emergence of such tales say more about Apple's unhappiness with IBM than any intention to switch to another chip maker.


Indeed, speculation was so hot that even a vague prospect of an Apple jump to Intel was enough to power the Dow and Nasdaq to double-digit gains on Monday, with Apple's stock up $2, or 5%, to $39.66 as of 3:15 p.m.
The last time these rumors floated around the computer industry was barely a few months before IBM debuted its Power PC 970 chip at the Microprocessor Forum in 2002. That chip ultimately landed in Apple's PowerMac G5 and iMac G5 computers. When the Apple-Intel rumors started flying in August 2002 - prompted by a research report by Bear Stearns analyst Andrew Neff - IBM was still trying to win Apple's business.
Since then strains have appeared in the Apple-IBM relationship. Nearly a year ago, Apple, which rarely makes public any details about its manufacturing operations, took the unusual step of publicly blaming IBM for disappointing sales of its PowerMac G5 computers, which have shipped about 1 million units since late 2003. Apple even went so far as to disclose that it had been planning to announce a new version of its iMac consumer desktop computer, but that the release had been delayed because IBM couldn't meet Apple's demand for the PowerPC chips, for which it was the sole source.
This time, Apple is trailing in the notebook PC game. Competitors like Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba and others are all offering notebook PCs using Intel chips with clock speeds of 2.8 gigahertz and in some cases faster than 3 GHz. Apple's flagship notebook, the PowerBook G4 is still running at 1.67 GHz with a version of the Power PC chip manufactured by Freescale Semiconductor, the former chip unit of Motorola.
Apple has been eager to sell a PowerBook G5 with an IBM-made PowerPC chip, but IBM hasn't yet been able to deliver a chip suitable for notebooks. The chip consumes too much power, which at once shortens battery life and generates heat. "IBM doesn't have a strong history of building chips that consume low power," says analyst Kevin Krewell of Instat/MDR, a chip market research outfit based in San Jose, Calif.
Apple may also be signaling its unhappiness that IBM's focus has turned away from Apple and toward the many videogame consoles for which it is building chips. IBM PowerPC chips - three of them, in fact - are going into both Microsoft's (Xbox 360, which hits the market later this year, and the Nintendo Revolution, due out in 2006.
Finally, IBM also has had a substantial role in developing the "Cell" processor used in Sony's PlayStation 3, which it developed in partnership with Sony and Toshiba.
Meanwhile, Apple has been awaiting a high-end PowerPC chip that, like recent chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, sports a second core, essentially giving one chip the computing power of two.
"IBM has its resources stretched all over the place for the videogame manufacturers, and meanwhile its dual-core PowerPC chip is late to market," says Krewell. Might that be enough to push Apple into Intel's arms? "Never underestimate what Steve Jobs might do when he's really mad," he says.
Still, the technical reasons that might keep Apple from jumping from IBM to Intel chips are fewer than they have been in the past, but they're a reality.
"It used to be a much bigger deal to switch chip architectures than it is now," says Dean McCarron, analyst with Mercury Research of Cave Creek, Ariz. "It's not trivial, but it's not as if the software developers don't have the option to do it."
What might complicate that process, however, is the way the IBM chip handles complex computing for features like 3D graphics. The PowerPC chip has a feature that Apple calls the Velocity Engine. Intel's closest equivalent is a feature it calls SSE3. Adapting software developed for the Apple environment optimized for the Velocity Engine to work with Intel chips and the SSE3 extensions isn't going to be easy, Krewell says.
"Those features don't match up on a one-to-one basis," he says. "You can't bring them over without suffering a performance hit." Krewell says Intel would have to create a whole new set of extensions on its chips just for software designed to run on Apple systems.
And it's on that note where Apple's relative position in the personal computer market will hurt it. Intel's biggest customers like Dell, HP and others on the Windows side of the computing world, have a bigger voice in what features wind up on Intel's priority list. Apple's relatively small 2% to 3% market share would necessarily place its requests for new features on Intel chips at a relative disadvantage.
It's also not impossible that the latest round of Apple-Intel rumors are a deliberate leak from Apple, designed to ratchet up the pressure on IBM and win concessions.
Apple has been particularly aggressive on the legal front, recently suing such Web sites as ThinkSecret.com and PowerPage.Com among others for revealing trade secrets covered by non-disclosure agreements signed up Apple employees, who are often suspected of being the source of such rumors.
Assuming that someone at or close to Apple is talking about a potential switch to using Intel chips, Apple may want to sue to find out who's talking without authorization. If it doesn't take legal action, that says a lot about who may ultimately be the source of this latest rumor - Apple itself.

END


Hmmm m see depends who's writing really...


Max

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if you don't know who i am, i aint gonna tell you.

Believe you me, just because it's on the BBC website doesn't give the story any more creedance. They use the same sources for technology news as the rest of us...

Intel aren't as close to MS as they once were.
XBox 360 and the Sony PS3 are using PPC G5 derivatives...
Intel don't just make CPU's.
Intel may be able to fab the the PPC under licence for Apple (as IBM are underperforming here).
There are fundamental architectural differences between X86 and PPC - X86 has no Altivec which is heavily used by many Apple (and 3rd party) media apps. I think it'd require more than a simple recompile to get the best performance.
X86 isn't that much faster than PPC, it's a big gamble for potentially not much gain.

Guess we'll see later today.

Well, The Register have just changed tunes..!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/06/apple_intel_migration/

Goodbye PowerPC - hellow Centrino!!

Wayne

Pentium M would make sense for the Powerbooks, but Centrino.....??

The headline of the article is Apple to ditch IBM - not PPC.

There is a difference.

Is there a future in PPC?

MS seem to think so with their next-gen PPC based consoles, and their current use of Mac G5's . . . .

Has PPC's future ever looked so bright? Possibly not.

My prediction is that Intel are to fabricate PPC chips for Apple. In return, Intel will get to use those chips in embedded devices, and/or some digital-lifestyle and/or server products, running Mac OS X PPC.

Running Mac OS X on Intel x86 (64 Bit) is one thing, but running Mac OS X app's is another. Every single app would need to be recompiled and optimized. Far from trivial. It's this kind of optimization that we're only just beginning to get in Mac OS X and OS X applications that takes the time. A mere re-compile alone, and the subsequent dismal performance like Mac OS X users suffered with the early OS9 ports, is something Mac users just can't take - again.

Apple x86-based PowerBooks? It ain't gonna happen . . .

Pentium M is the processor, Centrino is the brand. They are often used interchangably.

As far as recompiling goes, the article says:

"Today's Mac OS is portable by design, and thanks to its NeXT expertise, the company is well versed in optimizing 'Fat binaries' which run on several processor architectures.

Industry sources also say Apple is a licensee of Transitive's QuickTransit virtual processor technology, which allows anything to run on Intel x86 (and vice versa) via dynamic instruction translation."

Looks like Apple will rely on emulation for now.

So yes - I would expect x86 powerbooks in the next couple of years!

Centrino = Pentium M. You might be confused with Celeron, though, which are cut down Pentiums.

I can't see Intel starting up a new fabrication plant to manufacturer PPC chips which are against their philosophy, particularly if they are only going to be made for a niche 2% of the market - this is why Apple got so unhappy with Motorola and IBM because they weren't making the chips they wanted - because the market was too small for them to make the kind of investment Apple wanted.

If this is really for real, it seems like a desperate act of a company struggling to stay in the game. The Mac Mini has hardly been the startling iPod-like success they invisaged (although they don't exactly seem to be marketing it agressively - seen any adverts for it?), and an act of desperation too far. Again I also would have thought AMD would have been a far more suitable partner with Intel struggling to progress the P4 without daft power demands and AMD's 64 bit chips coasting along quite nicely. Perhaps its just Pentium Ms for the Powerbooks?

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http://www.jeremycorbett.co.uk

Quote wayne:

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So yes - I would expect x86 powerbooks in the next couple of years!

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So what does that mean until then? Powerbooks stunted at G4 level for the next two years?

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http://www.jeremycorbett.co.uk

Quote Mahoobley:

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Centrino = Pentium M. You might be confused with Celeron, though, which are cut down Pentiums.

I can't see Intel starting up a new fabrication plant to manufacturer PPC chips which are against their philosophy, particularly if they are only going to be made for a niche 2% of the market - this is why Apple got so unhappy with Motorola and IBM because they weren't making the chips they wanted - because the market was too small for them to make the kind of investment Apple wanted.

If this is really for real, it seems like a desperate act of a company struggling to stay in the game. The Mac Mini has hardly been the startling iPod-like success they invisaged (although they don't exactly seem to be marketing it agressively - seen any adverts for it?), and an act of desperation too far. Again I also would have thought AMD would have been a far more suitable partner with Intel struggling to progress the P4 without daft power demands and AMD's 64 bit chips coasting along quite nicely. Perhaps its just Pentium Ms for the Powerbooks?

---

Pentium M's for the PowerBooks? So new versions of every Mac OS X PPC app just for PowerNooks? Or they're running under emulation? No emulation is without a performance hit - a hit that I'm sure more than makes up for any current CPU gains.

The point about PPC is that presumably MS thinks they're worth something and that IBM can deliver for their next-gen consoles.

Intel don't currently have a RISC chip that is scalable, like the PPC, all the way from tiny embedded devices to supercomputers. They know they need to enter this market at some point, now is the time.

G5's with the IBM970 are not far behind the cutting edge of desktop computing, if at all. Yes, we wanted to be 3GHz a year ago, but still it's not a disaster to be 2.7GHz right now, and dual-cores are coming. PPC is far from being over.

Apple profits are way up, with nearly $6bn in the bank they've never been higher, and this is not all due to iPod sales - which do account for something like 42% of it. The Mac mini has been selling very well thank you, and an x86 box that could run Windows at full speed would kill Apple . . ..

Quote Mahoobley:

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So what does that mean until then? Powerbooks stunted at G4 level for the next two years?

---

I don't know. I think that Apple might rush to get the Powerbook range updated, especially if they cannot get the chips they need from IBM or Moterolla.

But I can still see this hurting Apple computer sales for the next few years. Even if the software does not need to change, emulation has a performance cost and this will be seen particularly in media intensive applications like music and video. Native is always better!

However, it could also be good for apple in the long term. If they produced an OSX component like Wine, then you could see Macs being able to run Mac and PC/Windows software equally efficiently - and without the need for Windows itself!

Wayne

I did write a long and heavily speculative post just then, but decided to edit it and say I'll wait until the announcement

[P.S. I reckon they are actually going to switch to Cell]

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http://www.jeremycorbett.co.uk

Quote Mahoobley:

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Centrino = Pentium M.

---

This is not true - Pentium M is the processor, Centrino is a 'brand' that intel let you put on a computer if it contains a Pentium M, Intel Wifi and various other intel bits and peices. It's a way of forcing laptop makers to buy most of the chips from intel.

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Midipicks - the all new MIDI Guitar forum...

Well yes, but if you get a centrino PC its safe to assume you get a Pentium M CPU. The point I was highlighting was the regular confusion between 'Centrino' and 'Celeron', is all.

... but now we have Celeron M chips in Centrino systems? Oh ... never mind

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http://www.jeremycorbett.co.uk

hehe!

Apple are kinda betraying themselves after campainging about the mhz myth for so long!

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P.I.G.L.E.T - where is polly?

They share one thing in common, they're both a load of bollocks...

Unless Intel decide to make PPC for Apple of course, which seems unlikely, but you never know

OMG

I did confuse Celeron and Centrino, oops.
Cell would be "interesting", but using that would mean a complete rewrite I think. Cell ain't a PPC though it has one in there, it's a completely different design philosophy.
Anyone see the PS3 demos at E3? They were stunning.

BTW They've just announced Macs to ship with Intel in June 06... The rumours were true. Demoing it at WWDC now apparently

Edited by steveman (06/06/05 05:33 PM)

Quote kris:

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OMG

---

Hi
What? That Steve Jobs has just announced 10.5 will be called Leopard?

So far he's just commented that most Apple stories RSS feeds are mostly commenting on the Intel rumor.....

Nope,

that it's x86 all the way.

Although www.macrumorslive.com are carrying an updated report they seem to be stalled at the moment, so better results are to be had from
http://live.macobserver.com/article/2005/06/wwdc2005_keynote.shtml

Apple press release

Ages ago I posted on the forum about how much I would like to build my own "Apple machine". Seems like it's got abit closer. Whether it's going to be as simple as that I wonder Already thinking what motherboard it's going to take in this fantasy situation

Folks - how's this for speculation??

Apple is bound to release restricted x86 hardware for compatibility and quality control. Will also probably require OpenFirmware instead of PC BIOS.

Now...wait for Intel Vanderpool chips / AMD Pacifica chips (hardware virtualisation like VMWare on steroids)..somebody has to write the first "Apple x86" compatible Hypervisor that can host MacOSX_x86, write your drivers once (virtual IO drivers) and voila! MacOSX_x86 everywhere.

Possible?

Sheesh - I go away from the board a few weeks and look what happens.

Last time I visited, West Brom were bottom of the Premiership, the French were at the heart of the European project, and Macs would never be made with Intel chips.

Well West Brom are staying up - that's good news!

The French have gone sniffy over Europe - that bad's news from where I come from.

So what about Intel chips in Macs?

Who cares? Developers will (and Balmer has a point about this slowing the number of apps available on MacOS X for a while) but Appple will work hard to make this work as easily as possible. If only 1/2 of what Apple demoed works, then it should be pretty easy for developers and users alike.

The plus side is that this ties Apple into Intel's multimedia and portable (low power) technologies that IBM has shown no interest in competing with.

Personally, I just want a Mac that does the things I need it to do. I don't care if it has PowerPC, Intel or little green gnomes aall called Eric doing the hard work.

So whilst it's interesting on a technical level, and bodes well for the future (with some, possibly significant, risks), I still find myself somewhat neutral about it.

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Andrew

Quote Sarge:

---

Ages ago I posted on the forum about how much I would like to build my own "Apple machine". Seems like it's got abit closer. ...

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No - nothing has changed on this front.

Apple could have opened up the PowerPC spec to 3rd parties before now. It would be a small and specialist market, but it used to exist in the very early days of PowerPC Macs.

Indeed, it was one of the hoped for benefits of PowerPC linked to open firmware. It didn't happen because Apple couldn't find a business model that made money out of it.

Apple can use Intel CPUS and even control chips and still build a closed archetecture.

For them to open it up, they need a business model that will make money. That's the barrier to your dream - the chips inside have never been the issue.

That barrier is still there!

For now ...