News & Views

Apple rocked the tech world on June 6, 2005, by announcing that Macs using Intel processors would be heading towards the market by mid-2006. (Jobs was mum about whether they would be the only vendor building the hardware for these new systems. Phil Schiller said later that only Apple will build Intel-based Macs.) Is the world turning upside down, or what?

Lets back up a minute and look at the big industry picture.

About six months ago, IBM sold its entire computer operation to Lenovo, a large off-shore manufacturing conglomerate. IBM got out of the computer manufacturing business. Thats not to say that IBM doesnt still make microprocessors, because it does. But IBM never used its own processors in the computers it made, so now some clone maker in Asia can make computers called IBM computers and use the most generic, cheap, parts it can find.

In 2001, Sony and IBM announced a jointly designed processor called CELL which is apparently a media rich processor designed to work best in a cluster of processors. However it wasnt until about six months ago that Sony actually started announcing some numbers. Sonys Kutaragi likened a single Cell chip to IBM's 32-node RS/6000-based chess supercomputer Deep Blue. The exponential scaling rate suggests Cell really doesn't come into its own until you use lots of them together.

That's certainly the design philosophy: With built-in broadband connectivity, microprocessors that currently exist as individual islands will be more closely linked, making a network of systems act more as one, unified 'supersystem'. Just as biological cells in the body unite to form complete physical systems, Cell-based electronic products of all types will form the building blocks of larger systems, was how Kutaragi described the Cell concept back in 2001. To put this into context, it would take 2200 PowerPC 970 chips - aka the G5 - to yield just over ten teraflops - much the same as you get from 2000 Athlon 64s - getting similar performance out of just 64 Cell cores is impressive. So IBM and Sony are getting very cozy with their new processor, and you have to imagine that IBM probably doesnt really have much interest in pushing the 970 architecture when the CELL blows the doors off the PowerPC 970.

Following that, roughly a month ago, Microsoft announced that its new game console would dump Intel microprocessors and that it would use two very high-powered version of IBMs PowerPC chipset to to drive the xBox 360. The unit contains a three-core IBM PowerPC processors, clocked at 3.2GHz and capable of handling six threads simultaneously. Each core has an AltiVec vector engine for handling multimedia data. It should sell for under $500. So here we have Microsoft, in one of its rare moments, designing and building its own closed hardware, much like Apple has been doing for the past 30 years. And Microsoft did all their software development and prototyping for these machines on Apple PowerMac G5 computers!) Microsoft has not licensed any aspect of its xBox 360 system to other manufacturers. Very likely youll subscribe to Microsoft to use the box.

Do you think xBox 360 is just a game console? If so, guess again. The xBox 360 will the nerve center of an entire home media center architecture for gaming, audio, and video. This thing is like a Mac mini on steroids. The Mac mini looks like a rag doll in comparison to the xBox 360. I dont think Intel was too happy to see Microsoft parading this fantastic new box and noting that it did not have Intel inside.

So IBM and Sony are now working together. IBM and Microsoft are now working together. Do you think IBM has much incentive to burn the midnight oil to juice up Apple products? Apparently not. Enter Intel, who wants a piece of this pie, and is motivated.

Ostensibly, this looks like a good thing for Mac users, whatever those are nowadays. As I noted last month, I would not buy an Apple laptop right now, or a Mac mini, because neither has the horsepower to properly do HD video. IBM has been unable to provide a G5 chip that runs cool enough to live in a laptop. iMac G5s are melting components at an alarming rate due to the heat. And as recently as this past weekends Sacramento Bee, we were told that laptop sales are eclipsing desktop sales because people want to take their data and carry it around with them wherever they go. So Apple really needs an ultra-fast laptop that offers acceptable media performance for our ongoing convergence of voice, telephony, video, and data. One that wont burn your loins.

The good news is that Apple has been secretly developing Mac OS X for Intel processors for the past five years. And apparently OS X flies on Intel processors. Steve Jobs said that all public demos of OS X have been done on Intel processors without telling people that the CPU wasnt a Mac.

So in the final analysis, I will conclude that Apple was pushed, rather than saying that Apple jumped ship. The technology triumvirate between Apple, Motorola, and IBM fell apart and never really bore fruit. The competition came to IBM and got far superior microprocessors and performance out of IBM. Apple was continually getting the short end of the stick. Intel has the resources and the engineering talent to push the envelope with its microprocessors.

So I do hope this all works out for everybody. Once again, if you buy into this new paradigm, youll need to update your software to get recompiled versions that run on the X86 architecture. Perhaps horrid pieces of software like VirtualPC will be a thing of the past. Perhaps Mac users will have a much easier time of running those corporate software programs that weve been unable to run all these years because we did not have an Intel processor. Well find out if the bean counters in corporate America are locked into the Windows operating system, or just locked into low-cost commodity hardware with Intel processors.

I can guarantee you one thing: we will all have to re-evaluate what being a Mac user actually means once you see MacOS X running on a Intel processor. If you have enjoyed being in a cult for the past 22 years, you may not enjoy this move to the mainstream with (presumably) commodity hardware running Apples highly secure, highly innovative, designer OS.
(c) 2005 Bill Davies, MacNexus, the Sacramento Macintosh User Group. May be reprinted by any user group with attribution.