Why Macintel? Because Apple Can
Daniel Knight - 2005.06.08
The
week's big Mac news is that Apple will be switching from Freescale
and IBM PowerPC processors to Intel Pentium CPUs between June 2006
to June 2007.
Reason 1
There are two key reasons for this. Probably the biggest reason
is that Steve Jobs is ticked at IBM for leaving him with egg on his
face over the 3 GHz G5. When the Power Mac G5 was unveiled on June 23, 2003,
the top speed was 2 GHz - and Jobs promised 3 GHz within
a year based on IBM projections.
Two years later, the Power Mac G5 tops out at 2.7 GHz, still 10%
shy of what we all hoped to have a year ago. In fact, based on
Moore's Law, if IBM had shipped a 3 GHz G5 a year ago, odds
are pretty good that they'd have a 4 GHz G5 today.
What happened?
A lot of things happened. IBM has had a lot of production
problems, and chip yield hasn't been as high as Apple wanted.
That's one reason there's no PowerBook G5 - and probably never will
be. Another reason is heat. With the technology IBM is currently
using, the G5 runs very, very hot.
The other thing is that IBM has been busy developing new CPUs
for Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. As John Siracusa points out over
at ars technica, the three next generation game consoles will
probably account for 20 million IBM-powered systems per year.
Compared with that, what's 3-4 million G5s for Apple?
As Siracusa points out, IBM has the technology to meet Apple's
needs, but it appears they're willing to lose Apple as a customer
now that the gaming industry has grown the PowerPC market so
drastically.
Reason 2
The second reason for the switch to Intel CPUs is because Apple
can. The Pentium architecture is a far cry from the 8088 and 80286
processors used in DOS PCs during the early Macintosh days. Feature
for feature, the Pentium 4 holds its own against the G5. Not only
that, but Intel offers a lot more speed options and a wider variety
of CPUs (such as the Celeron line, a version of the Pentium aimed
at the low-end market).
Not only has Apple been quietly porting OS X and other Mac apps
to Intel hardware - the NeXT operating system that forms the basis
for OS X was being sold on Intel hardware before Apple
acquired NeXT.
As Siracusa notes in his article, the Pentium architecture is
far less elegant than the PowerPC architecture:
- "Right or wrong, sensible or not, this is how a lot of people
feel about PowerPC vs. x86 (or 68K vs. x86, for that matter). I'm
one of the biggest x86 haters. I've often argued that the
collective human effort spent making fast implementations of the
bass-ackwards x86 ISA would be much better spent elsewhere."
And, "It will pain me to know the contortions that instructions
are going through in an x86 CPU inside a Mac." No matter how
sophisticated the x86 architecture has become, the underpinnings
are just messy.
Regardless, the final result - real world performance - is good
enough that Apple is willing to switch its entire computer line to
the industry standard CPU. And it apparently makes economic sense
as well, although most observers believe that Apple will actually
be paying more for Pentium CPUs than for IBM G5s.
We'll learn a lot more over the coming year. Will Macintel
models use regular Celeron and Pentium processors, or will they be
64-bit ones? Will Intel add a processing unit to the Pentium design
in the coming year that will allow excellent AltiVec emulation, or
will apps that use AltiVec heavily (the ones that aren't recompiled
with dual binaries) just have much worse performance? How will the
Macintel computers differ from Windows PCs architecturally? And how
long until someone figures out how to emulate the Macintel
architecture on a standard Pentium or Athlon box so Windows and
Linux users can try OS X without any need to buy a new
computer? How much hot Pentium (or more likely Celeron) power will
Apple be able to squeeze into a Mac
mini without resorting to loud fans?
It's going to be a very interesting year as developers port and
recompile their programs for the new hardware, as Apple gives us
more information, and as developers "leak" their experiences to the
rest of the Mac Web.
Depending on where Apple begins the transition to Intel - top of
the line or bottom - Low End Mac just might buy a Macintel next
June.
