Compiled by Charles Moore
and edited by Dan Knight
- 2006.03.16
This Week's Macintel News
On the Macintel front, there are now over 1,000 programs running
natively on Apple's newest hardware, and yet another project is
getting Linux and Windows XP up and running on Macintel
hardware.
Perhaps the week's most interesting news concerns ultramobile
PCs, handheld devices smaller than a tablet and larger than a Palm.
This size should be familiar to anyone who has ever used a Newton,
but the ultramobiles will have color displays and may have pop-out
keyboards. Apple, how about it?
Finally, lots of news on the Intel front with Yonah, Conroe, and
Merom among those mentioned. For those who can't keep all of those
code names straight, we're hoping to publish a series of articles
covering each of them in the near future.
And in an odd development, Intel and Transitive - the company
that developed Rosetta for Intel Macs - are teaming up to develop
software that will allow RISC software to run on Intel's Xeon and
Itanium CPUs. (Intel's CPUs tend to be CISC, the opposite of RISC,
so there's some real irony here.)
PowerBook, iBook, and other portable computing news is covered
in The 'Book Review. General
Apple and Mac desktop news is covered in The Mac News Review. iPod news is covered
in The iNews Review.
The Macintel Transition
Notebook and Ultramobile News
Intel News
The Macintel Transition
1,000 Apps Running Native on Macintel
CRN's Edward F. Moltzen reports:
"Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said Tuesday that more than 1,000
applications have been ported to the Intel-based Macintosh
platform, but he admitted that some key software is experiencing
performance challenges.
"Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Semiconductor and Systems
Conference, Oppenheimer said Apple is still running about a year
ahead of its planned transition to the Intel platform. 'There are
1,000 applications that are universal today, with more coming,' he
said.
"But some applications, such as Adobe Photoshop, haven't been
optimized for the Intel Macs, Oppenheimer added. 'For power users,
they are going to notice a difference [in performance],' he said.
'They may or may not find that acceptable.'"
- Link:
Apple CFO: 1,000 Apps Running on Intel Mac Platform
Intel the Secret of Getting Maximum OS X
Performance
Gene Steinberg, the Mac Night Owl, says:
"What if Apple had switched to Intel processors at the very
beginning of the Mac OS X era? This may seem a perfectly
absurd question, but stay with me now. From a practical standpoint,
it may have had disastrous results for developers. Imagine the pain
they underwent moving their products from Classic to Mac OS X,
and imagine having to recode for a new processor at the very same
time. You can see where many might have just deserted the platform
altogether, but consider what might have resulted had they simply
endured the extra pain of a double migration."
- Link: The
Secret of Getting Maximum Mac OS Performance: Go Intel!
BIOS-based Linux, Windows Booting on
Macintel
Amit Singh says:
"Given that Intel-based Macintosh computers have neither a
legacy BIOS nor a legacy VGA BIOS, it is rather non-trivial to boot
an x86 operating system using legacy means on these machines.
"We have developed software ('BAMBIOS') that allows such legacy
booting on the Intel-based Macintoshes. For example, a regular
(that is, non-EFI) version of Linux can be readily booted using
this software.
"We are excited about the possibilities of using this software
to multiboot several operating systems on the new Macintosh
hardware. Linux works fine, and we have made good progress with
booting an unmodified Windows XP installation (no 'piracy' required
:-))."
- Link: BAMBIOS:
Legacy (BIOS-Based) Booting on the Intel-Based Macintosh
Notebook and Ultramobile News
Flash Chips Coming to Notebooks in 2007
The Street's Alexei Oreskovic reports:
"Intel will put NAND flash chips into notebook PCs beginning
next year.
"The Santa Clara, Calif., chipmaker said Tuesday that the NAND
flash feature in its forthcoming notebook platform, dubbed Santa
Rosa, would offer the main benefit of decreasing the time it takes
to turn on a PC.
"'We need to have devices that boot up very rapidly,' Sean
Maloney, the head of Intel's mobility group, said at the Intel
Developer Forum taking place here this week. 'The same way you come
off a plane and get a cell phone signal immediately.'
"The news comes roughly three months after Intel announced that
it was forming a joint venture with Micron to produce NAND flash
chips. The joint venture's first announced customer was Apple,
which will purchase $500 million worth of NAND chips to go into its
iPod players.
"Intel's move to incorporate NAND flash into a notebook platform
would mark the first major extension of NAND flash into PCs."
- Link:
Intel Flashes Forward
Intel's Robson Technology to Improve
Notebooks
Extreme Tech:
"Accessing a disk drive is hundreds of times slower than
accessing main system memory. Flash memory is slower than the DRAM
used for system memory, but it's still far speedier than pulling
data from rotating magnetic media. If you've ever waited for a
large game level to load, you'll know what we mean. There you sit,
with the hard drive light flickering, staring at a progress bar on
the screen. For this, you've paid $50?
"But it's not just a matter of loading applications faster. One
of the major sources of battery drain in a notebook PC is its
spinning media. If you could get data from a large flash memory
cache instead of spinning up the hard drive, you'd save a lot of
power. Boot times would speed up substantially, too. Since a flash
cache is nonvolatile, powering up from hibernate would be quicker
and use less power than coming out of hibernation using the hard
drive. Add the fact that hibernation uses less power than standby
mode, and you can see the potential for big power savings."
- Link: Intel's
Robson Boosts Hard Drive Performance
Ultramobile Future: Implications for
Apple?
TechNewsWorld's Rob Enderle reports:
"There are three points to keep track of: First, the Ultramobile
PC isn't a tiny notebook - it is something else entirely. Second,
this class of device will lend itself to customization and likely
morph into a variety of form factors over time. Finally, this
product will probably do the most to define Web 2.0 from a hardware
standpoint - and will also be defined by it.
"Last week, Intel held its Developer Conference, an annual event
where the company showcases the changes it plans to make in its
next-gen products. With Microsoft's new operating system due to hit
the market in a few short months, Intel planned more dramatic
changes this year than would typically be the case.
"Thanks to its new ties with Apple, we got an unprecedented look
at future hardware offerings from that company as well. The
presentation was impressive. It included the first meaningful
showcase for Viiv, which suddenly seems to make sense to me.
"Also last week, Microsoft launched its Ultramobile PCs,
codenamed 'Origami.' These could have more impact on personal
computing than the PC ever had. For Apple and Microsoft, the future
looks bright."
- Link: Intel's Bright
Future: Are There Implications for Apple?
Ultramobile PC Designs on Display
eWEEK.com provides a slideshow of new concepts and designs for
future ultramobile PCs from Intel. See the winners, the losers, and
the just plain weird. We've included two of these images in today's
Macintel Report.
- Link:
Ultramobile PC Designs from Intel on Display
Intel Executive Says Ultramobile PCs Need
Yonah
IDG News Service's Ben Ames reports:
"The upcoming Yonah processor is needed to balance the competing
demands of performance and mobility in handheld PCs, an Intel Corp.
executive said Wednesday at the company's Spring Intel Developer
Forum in San Francisco. Although Sean Maloney did not name the
device he held in his hand during a keynote presentation, its
dimensions appeared to be similar to a handheld built on Microsoft
Corp.'s Origami project.
"On Wednesday, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. at the Cebit trade
show in Germany showed the Q1, built on the Origami concept, and
falling somewhere between a tablet PC and a PDA (personal digital
assistant) in size and ability.
"Ultramobile PCs need what Yonah will offer, said Maloney, Intel
executive vice president and general manager of its mobility group.
Yonah is the dual core version of the Pentium M. It offers better
power efficiency than a conventional dual-core processor because it
uses a shared cache of memory, he said. That allows both cores to
access data without connecting to the frontside bus, a step that
demands time and power. That strategy also allows Yonah to save
energy by switching off 'micro logic areas' of the cache while they
are not being used."
- Link: Ultramobile
PCs Need Yonah, Intel Executive Says
Intel News
Intel's Talk Starts to Match Rivals'
Products
The Register's Ashlee Vance reports:
"You have to hand it to Intel for talking about power management
and the benefits of multi-core processing with such confidence.
Using reality distortion, Intel has convinced itself that it
pioneered such technology instead of being the lone laggard to
catch up with the rest of the industry.
"At the Intel Developer Forum, various executives spun the yarn
about Intel taking power consumption issues seriously years ago. In
addition, the company long had an ambitious multi-core processor
plan in place, we were told. Now Intel will combine the fruits of
all this work to crush the competition on a performance per watt
basis."
- Link: Intel's Talk
Starts to Match Rivals' Products
Intel CEO Throws Down Gauntlet to AMD
CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos reports:
"Intel is not taking the recent gains made by chip rival
Advanced Micro Devices lightly, according to CEO Paul Otellini.
"Otellini, in an interview with reporters at the Intel Developer
Forum here on Tuesday, said that the company's manufacturing
capabilities and new chips coming later in the year will put it in
a position to regain some of the market share recently ceded to
AMD.
"'The No. 1 competitive asset is the sheer scale of the
65-nanometer, 300-millimeter manufacturing capacity,' he said. By
the end of the year, Intel plans to have four of these factories
running, and its 90-nanometer factories, currently used to produce
many chips, will start making chipsets.
"AMD is expected to begin 65-nanometer manufacturing in the
second half of 2006. The shift to 65-nanometers should enable both
companies to produce faster chips at less cost."
- Link: Intel CEO Throws
Down Gauntlet to AMD
Intel Confirms Next-gen Centrino Debut in First
Half of '07
The Register's Tony Smith reports:
"Intel has confirmed that 'Kedron', its roadmapped
next-generation wireless network adaptor, will support 802.11n, and
made public the name and release window of the next incarnation of
its Centrino platform: 'Santa Rosa', based on the 'Crestine'
chipset, which is due to ship H1 2007.
"All these points emerged last month, with Taiwanese notebook
maker sources specifically pointing to March 2007. Santa Rosa will
incorporate 'Merom', the mobile form of Intel's next-generation
architecture....
"Indeed, Intel yesterday confirmed roadmap leaks by noting Merom
will ship in time for the Christmas 2006 buying season. It will be
pin-compatible with current Core Duo processors."
- Link: Intel
Confirms H1 '07 Next-gen Centrino Debut
Inside Intel's Conroe Architecture
Extreme Tech's Loyd Case says:
"At the 2006 Intel Developer Forum, Intel showed a Conroe system
running existing generation PC games faster than an AMD system. And
not only was the Intel system running at 2.66 GHz - a slower clock
rate than the top Pentium 4-it was outpacing an overclocked Athlon
64 FX-60. Wrap your brain around that idea for a bit while we dive
into the architecture of Intel's new progeny.
"Listening to Intel discuss the new architecture benefits is
somewhat reminiscent of listening to AMD talk about the Athlon 64
several years ago. Much of the discussion revolves around
instruction efficiency (fewer cycles per instruction), lower power
usage, and so on. But while Intel may be sometimes slow to respond
to market pressures when they make a shift, the entire company
enthusiastically moves in the new direction. By the time the smoke
clears, it sounds like Intel invented the concept of IPC."
- Link: Inside
Intel's Conroe Architecture
Intel Says Bus Architecture 'Still Has
Legs'
eWeek's John G. Spooner says:
"Intel will continue riding the bus route.
"Executives at the chip maker, in a high-level discussion of its
Core Microarchitecture at its spring Developer Forum, here, said
that the company's bus approach - using a series of pipelines and a
discrete controller to shuttle data between its processors and
memory versus directly connecting the chips - still has legs."
- Link: Intel Cites
Reasons to Stay on the Bus
Intel Raises the Stakes with Multicore
Chip Strategy
eWeek's John G. Spooner says:
"Intel is assembling the building blocks for a radically
different chip architecture that could arrive by the end of the
decade.
"Although the chip giant officially announced its Core
Microarchitecture at its spring Developer Forum, here, researchers
at the company have already been working on a potential follow-on
that will be capable of harboring tens of cores, far more than the
Core Microarchitecture and its predecessor, which is already in
development at the moment, Intel executives said."
- Link: Intel Raises
the Stakes with Multicore Chip Strategy
Partnership Set to Run RISC Software on
Intel Chips
CNET News' Stephen Shankland says:
"Intel has begun a partnership to help a start-up, Transitive,
with software that enables computers with Intel chips to run
programs written for rival processors.
"Transitive's translation software will be used to let software
from rival RISC (reduced instruction set computing) processors run
on Intel's Itanium and Xeon server processors. The partnership is
designed to make it easier for customers to scrap competitors' gear
in favor of Intel-based systems."
Transitive is the company that developed the Rosetta software
used on Intel Macs.
- Link: Partnership Set
to Run RISC Software on Intel Chips
