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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Intel Inside

Intel Inside

by John Cole|  June 6, 200512:13 pm| 21 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

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Apple moving to Intel chips:

Steven P. Jobs is preparing to take an unprecedented gamble by abandoning Apple Computer’s 14-year commitment to chips developed by I.B.M. and Motorola in favor of Intel processors for his Macintosh computers, industry executives informed of the decision said Sunday.

The move is a chesslike gambit in a broader industry turf war that pits the traditional personal computer industry against an emerging world of consumer electronics focused on the digital home.

“This is a seismic shift in the world of personal computing and consumer electronics,” said Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering Group, a Seaford, N.Y., computer and consumer electronics industry consulting firm. “It is bound to rock the industry, but it will also be a phenomenal engineering challenge for Apple.”

I don’t know much about this subject, but I was under the impression that there were huge structural differences in these chips, so I am not sure how smooth or quick the transition will be. And when I say big structural differences, I mean a completely different approach- but it has been years since I paid any attention to this stuff.

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21Comments

  1. 1.

    Jon H

    June 6, 2005 at 12:42 pm

    John,

    Back in the mid-90s, Jobs’ prior company (NeXT) pulled of a similar move, with far fewer resources. They moved from their own Motorola 68040 CPU-based machines to regular Intel-based PCs.

    They then went on to move their operating system onto two more CPU architectures, from Sun and HP.

    Apple later bought the company, and that operating system was converted to run on the PowerPC CPU, resulting in today’s OS X.

    So, in a sense, Apple is converting *back* to Intel.

    Back in the NeXT days, it was trivial for a developer to support multiple kinds of hardware. You literally had to only click some checkboxes in the developer tool, and it would compile the program for the checked CPU architectures. It was rare to have to use special-case code for a particular CPU architecture.

    The code for the four architectures would be combined into a single executable file, which would run on any of the four kinds of hardware.

    The hard part was testing, because most developers couldn’t afford to buy HP or Sun RISC workstations to test on. Such developers just provided the binaries for those platforms, and made it an ‘at your own risk’ kind of thing. But for the most part, programs worked fine without testing on specific hardware.

    It was a pretty remarkable achievment for a company of, at most, 250 people.

    If there are any complications for Apple, I think they’ll mostly come from public perception.

  2. 2.

    Marcus Wellby

    June 6, 2005 at 12:43 pm

    There is a huge structural difference in the chips and I am sure the transition will not only be rocky, it is intended to be rocky. With the price of PC’s plunging year after year, Apple is finding it harder and harder to convince new computer buyers to purchase a Mac. Current Mac owners will be forced to buy new Macs as more and more software will be written to run on the Intel Macs.

  3. 3.

    John Cole

    June 6, 2005 at 1:07 pm

    That is what it was- RISC architecture- the other was SISC, right?

  4. 4.

    Jon H

    June 6, 2005 at 1:18 pm

    CISC, actually, but the difference is less than it used to be, because RISC chips have become more CISCy, and CISC chips have become more RISCy.

  5. 5.

    Richard Campbell

    June 6, 2005 at 1:46 pm

    Also, the whole system underlying Mac OS X is a BSD unix that has been running on Intel hardware for quite some time, so it’s more a matter of Apple taking out any PowerPC-isms they introduced (probably inadvertently) than anything else.

  6. 6.

    Jon H

    June 6, 2005 at 1:54 pm

    The people with the easiest ‘ports’ will be developers who use “Cocoa”, the Objective-C frameworks that Apple got from NeXT. That would be Apple itself, OmniGroup, Delicious Monster, Ranchero (NetNewsWireLite), etc.

    Those developers will probably just have to click some widgets in XCode and rebuild the application for both PowerPC and Intel. That’s how it was when moving from NeXT computers to NeXTStep on Intel (or Sparc, or HP).

    More difficult will be C-based Carbon applications, which I suspect are more likely to have PowerPC assembly or low-level code that is more tightly bound to the CPU.

    These programs will take longer to port. I’d expect big cross-platform apps from the big developers, like Office or Photoshop, are probably already written to be somewhat cross-platform.

    Most difficult will be code that depends on the PowerPC’s AltiVec feature. That tends to be isolated, and doesn’t make up whole programs. Instead, it’ll be used in, say, an image blurring filter function, which can be rewritten for Intel. People who optimize like this are used to this sort of thing, and ought to expect rewrites on occasion.

  7. 7.

    ppgaz

    June 6, 2005 at 3:00 pm

    What Apple brings to the table is differentiation in terms of product positioning, and software development strategies that are different from (and therefore produce products that are different from … some would say better (I am not one of those people) … Microsoft).

    The reason why Apple is getting caught in a corner in the PC market is not only price/performance issues, it’s the fact that at one time, Apple did things better, especially in software, while MS had huge room for improvement. MS has made large improvements in product, and done so faster than Apple has. The nature and extent of Apple’s advantages have eroded. Meanwhile, Dell is selling dekstops today for $400 that, pound for pound and feature for feature, cost $1200 not long ago, and $700 even less long ago. The gains in value vs price made on the Wintel side have greatly outstripped what Apple could accomplish in the same time frame.

    Apple has to break free of its albatross chip dependencies for cost reasons. Whether they can compete on the other aspects of the whole product, at least in the mainstream of the market, remains to be seen.

    The PC market itself is headed for a profit corner. The machines being sold today are faster and slicker than the ones being sold 4 years ago …. but they do not do anything essentially different from those things they did then. Without differentiation in product capability, the thing degenerates into a commodity situation and then it’s just a question of who can deliver the most value for the dollar in undifferentiated products. My hunch is that Apple cannot compete on that field, but I’ve been wrong about them before.

  8. 8.

    ppgaz

    June 6, 2005 at 3:07 pm

    Oh, BTW, does anyone know …is Dobson planning a boycott of Apple, say, or Dell, for having a “gay agenda?”

    If Dell really steps up to the plate on this, and adopts lifestyle-choice-friendly policies, then I can go all Ford and all Dell and have a totally F–k Dobsonites purchasing policy here at my Empire!

    Of course, Dobson could invent the Faith Based Instruction Set (FBISC) and really turn the industry on its ear.

  9. 9.

    Jon H

    June 6, 2005 at 3:16 pm

    “My hunch is that Apple cannot compete on that field, but I’ve been wrong about them before.”

    Then again, all the Taiwanese MP3 player vendors are screaming how their products have FM tuners! and this feature! and that feature! etc, but still get outsold by Apple’s functionally minimalist iPod.

    Also, consider that Microsoft is kinda caught up in its own barbed wire, trying to finish an operating system update that’s long overdue.

    Apple just released a major OS update, and is expecting to release another in late 2006/early 2007, about the same time Microsoft ships Longhorn.

    If Apple can crank out two generations of OS features in the time Microsoft takes to ooze out one, it won’t take long for Apple to take a significant lead in features.

    (And actually, when Apple’s prior major upgrade, 10.3, shipped, Microsoft was also talking about Longhorn. So it’ll be more like 3 from Apple for each of Microsoft’s.)

  10. 10.

    ppgaz

    June 6, 2005 at 3:28 pm

    I agree, although I was talking more about how many standard deviations’ worth of improvements in quality MS has had to make, compared to Apple’s. Apple’s stuff was less buggy and MS had made strides. The differentiation now in terms of practial usability and tractability is a lot less than it used to be.

    Apple needs some of that genius that it has come forth with over the years, to reopen that gap.

    This is like the race between the small, elegant rabbit and the big, bloated, tortoise. The tortoise just plodded away and now is in a rather favorable position value wise. The rabbit seems to operate in fits and starts.

  11. 11.

    Jon H

    June 6, 2005 at 3:52 pm

    ” The rabbit seems to operate in fits and starts.”

    This is true, but it’s been more consistent since Jobs came back, and especially since OS X shipped.

    Apple’s management in the early/mid 90s really sucked.

  12. 12.

    Richard Bennett

    June 6, 2005 at 4:35 pm

    The interesting question is whether Apple will build PC-compatible clone hardware and how they’re going to get device driver support.

    If Apple does build a true clone, its OS port will be potentially marketable on all PCs, and if they don’t they’ll be in a corner as far as support for hardware devices goes. One compromise would be to add NDIS driver support to OS X like the hack that’s been done for Linux, but it’s not easy to do that in a way that preserves performance.

    Another implication of Apple building a true clone would be the liberation of Apple’s customer based from their crappy hardware.

    I have no doubt that Apple will screw this up, and they probably want to screw it up in order to focus on the teeny-bopper iPod market.

  13. 13.

    Jon H

    June 6, 2005 at 5:29 pm

    As I understand it, Apple doesn’t intend to make OS X run on any Intel box. Whether someone will make it run is another question.

  14. 14.

    Simon

    June 6, 2005 at 6:25 pm

    Apple has been having problems with IBM’s chip yields for some time now, and I think the fact that there has been no practical way to shoehorn a G5 into the laptop line finally drove Apple away.

    As for ppgaz’s comments about the usability/functionality gap closing, I don’t agree at all. With multiple headline features of Longhorn already released in Tiger and even a few in Panther, Apple is at least years ahead with much time to refine. Once this transition is complete, it should also be much easier for companies to port code from one to the other than it ever has been. It’ll definitely be a tricky (for some users painful) transition, but I can’t see how it won’t be good for Apple in the long-run. You have to keep in mind that they’ve spent considerable resources researching/planning this strategy for the last 5 years, and failure is not an option.

  15. 15.

    Simon

    June 6, 2005 at 6:30 pm

    One other thing on the which box the OS’s can run on. I think I read that Apple will not allow the OS to be installed on third party boxes, but will not prevent a user from installing Windows on an Apple/Intel box. If you had the option, wouldn’t it be a big plus to triple boot all the major OS’s.

  16. 16.

    Richard Bennett

    June 6, 2005 at 6:56 pm

    Apparently Apple’s big issue was power consumption, and they determined that Pentium-M is a whole lot better for laptops.

    But once again, the installed base will be orphaned with no support and an expensive upgrade path, but they’ll love it because they’re a bunch of masochists anyway.

  17. 17.

    The Phnom Penh

    June 7, 2005 at 1:48 am

    I think what’s really going on is the shift in the computing world to “trustworthy computing”. It’s something that Microsoft wants, so they can force people to buy Windows licenses. It’s something that Hollywood (and this is likely where Apple got pushed into this) wants, so people can’t pirate movies. But the planned lack of interoperability between TC and non-TC platforms will mean that places like, say, Cambodia will either lose access to computers entirely, or will lose the ability to share information with the rest of the world. I love my Mac, but I hate this decision by Apple.

  18. 18.

    Richard Bennett

    June 7, 2005 at 3:49 am

    Naw, PP, that’s not what this deal was about, it’s just some loony crackpot conspiracy theory. IBM wants to sell to gamers, and Apple wants to stay in the race with Microsoft.

  19. 19.

    TM Lutas

    June 7, 2005 at 12:39 pm

    Actually listening to the keynote would have settled several issues raised here.

    Darwin is the open source OS that underlies Mac OS X. It has been publicly available in an x86 version for years. Everybody who’s seriously looked at the issue has concluded that Apple’s been keeping OS X for x86 running for a long time. It turns out that it’s been running since day 1 and all versions of OS X have been dual platform, always. What’s the real shocker is that all versions of every Apple software project have also been x86 compatible as well.

    Compatibility will be provided in two steps, first by universal binaries that detect the hardware platform they are on and run that code, then Rosetta will provide a PPC emulator to run non-universal code. This will join the 68040 emulator that also exists for old Motorola code written over a decade ago. It’s hardly true that PPC Mac users are going to be left stranded.

    Porting is likely to be much easier than prior efforts like carbonization. Mathematica got ported (if not optimized) in a few hours. That’s just amazing as Mathematica is a huge monster of a project with lots of legacy code.

    Metrowerks has got to be feeling really bad today as Jobs took pains to make clear that you need to be on Xcode if you’re going to survive this transition well.

  20. 20.

    TM Lutas

    June 7, 2005 at 12:41 pm

    Actually listening to the keynote would have settled several issues raised here.

    Darwin is the open source OS that underlies Mac OS X. It has been publicly available in an x86 version for years. Everybody who’s seriously looked at the issue has concluded that Apple’s been keeping OS X for x86 running for a long time. It turns out that it’s been running since day 1 and all versions of OS X have been dual platform, always. What’s the real shocker is that all versions of every Apple software project have also been x86 compatible as well.

    Compatibility will be provided in two steps, first by universal binaries that detect the hardware platform they are on and run that code, then Rosetta will provide a PPC emulator to run non-universal code. This will join the 68040 emulator that also exists for old Motorola code written over a decade ago. It’s hardly true that PPC Mac users are going to be left stranded.

    Porting is likely to be much easier than prior efforts like carbonization. Mathematica got ported (if not optimized) in a few hours. That’s just amazing as Mathematica is a huge monster of a project with lots of legacy code.

    Metrowerks has got to be feeling really bad today as Jobs took pains to make clear that you need to be on Xcode if you’re going to survive this transition well.

  21. 21.

    Jon H

    June 7, 2005 at 10:09 pm

    “Metrowerks has got to be feeling really bad today as Jobs took pains to make clear that you need to be on Xcode if you’re going to survive this transition well.”

    Didn’t Motorola buy them a while back?

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