Monday, June 06, 2005

Apple to Intel announcement at WWDC?

Apple to Intel announcement at WWDC?

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Just when POWER CPU's are poised to take off (thanks to being in the three leading next-gen consoles), Apple is going to switch to INTEL! Now if they were switching to AMD... (but AMD often have volume problems, so probably not a great idea)

But as this article points out, if OS/X will run on INTEL (sounds like Pentium-D or Pentium-M targets), then presumably it can run on AMD (AthlonX2 and 64?).

I really don't get it. These rumors have been coming and going for the last couple of weeks and I for one hope they're not true (I much prefer the idea of Apple adopting INTEL Xscale for some small device, though it does go against all that Apple have ever stood for.)

Please Apple, please stick with the POWER CPUs, they're about to get cheaper (hopefully, thanks to the volume of console sales), OS/X already runs on POWER, Apple have already changed CPU architecture once before (Motorola 680x0 -> POWER), applications on OS/X on POWER often outperform Windows on INTEL despite the huge gap in MHz [PentiumM/Athlon show that MHz is not king].

With the battle of the multicores now ramping up, these are going to be interesting times, and with IBM backing INTEL on it's own hardware (only servers, since it sold of it's PCs) and yet backing POWER for Apple (existing G5), Sony (PS3), Microsoft (X360) and apparently Nintendo (Revolution - not clear if this is actually a POWER CPU) and in it's Unix (AIX/Linux) servers... I wonder how much pressure IBM can bring to bear on Microsoft to develop Windows on POWER... (at which point head to head comparisons would get real interesting...)

Actually... did a little more reading... word is that the triple core CPU going into the X360 is of the POWER line, but the multi-core CPUs for the PS3 and Revolution are custom CPUs. Which still makes life interesting since MS has had to port the Xbox OS to POWER, which means that porting Windows can't be too hard... But does reduce the potential CPU volumes...

[sigh]I should stick to developing... I don't even have a console... don't really want one either...

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