July
01 2005:
Welcome back,
June 6 2005 will be remembered by a lot of our fruit loving friends
when Hell Officially Froze Over. That was the day when Saint Steve sold
the farm and dumped the PowerPC for the Darkside of the Evil Empire
Intel.
Well some say it was inevitable while others are still reeling at the
thought of OSX running on an x86 chip, and an Intel one at that, but
if we try and look past all of the hysterics, many are starting to realise
that this could actually be a good thing.
First a bit of history leading up to the announcement.
Now despite outward appearances, Apple have never really been a Hardware
Company as such, but more a specialised OEM that was always depended
on 3rd parties to deliver on projected performance and architectural
promises, and at the same time held to ransom to a certain degree by
the same 3rd parties.
The original G3/4 PowerPC’s from Motorola promised much, but failed
miserably in scaling to the heights as promised, the G5 was to be the
new saviour, with not only a far superior architecture, but also huge
potential in scalability. Or so the story goes. The truth however proved
very different. From the initial release of the G5, anyone willing to
cast a keen eye would have quickly realised that the new chip was not
developing as well as expected, the shift to .09 micron was a disaster
resulting in massive heat dissipation issues, and scaling had basically
stopped dead at the initial release – overclocking and water-cooling
being the only way of delivering any clock increases. Steve Job’s
bold statement of delivering a 3.0 GHz system within 12 months had fallen
flat on its arse many moons ago, the much anticipated G5 Notebook was
nothing more than wishful thinking, and the avalanche of Dual Cores
being released onto the landscape by the competing x86 variants, only
highlighted the fact that Apple were in a quandary, and sinking fast.
The were always rumours of OSX being developed equally
on the X86 platform, just in case, and the rumours always gained strength
around a Mac World, or anytime Apple performance landscapes were stalling.
Of course in the past the rumours were easily written off as mere posturing
by Apple to put more pressure on Motorola/IBM to deliver as promised
or else, but this years rumour mill had a slightly different ring to
it, and rightfully so. Watching the simulcast of the keynote with a
few Apple using friends – btw , it has always intrigued me how
the Apple fraternity stop dead to watch a live simulcast of a corporate
entity delivering his usual helium filled view of the world, I can tell
you the same behaviour is not prevalent in the X86 community –
you could have heard a pin drop as Steve belted out his tale of woe
and frustration at not being able to deliver the promised G5 speed grades,
and/or laptop solutions, it had all of the hallmarks of a suspense thriller
, when out of the blue up popped a “Its True” logo with
a distinctive Intel “E” …apart from a few stifled
gasps, there was basically dead silence as the blood drained from the
assembled crew, as well as the Oh Yeh Faithful watching the simulcast.
except of course for the long haired dude who burst out in un-controllable
laughter and was asked to vacate…, O.K I made that one up, but
I was personally asked to STFU and go into the next room if I couldn’t
control myself… ??? Mate , I haven’t been scolded like that
since the last time my mother attempted to take me to church when I
was a mere toddler…LOL. |
On the surface, the announcement was akin to the Apple communities
worst nightmare, how could Steve sell out to the X86 chips that they
– as in the Apple Marketing department - have for years been
telling us were being pummelled by the beloved PowerPC chips ? The
reality was actually very very different, but somehow the monkeys
in the marketing department continually released those idiotic benchmarks,
as if anyone with an IQ above a shoe size would actually take them
seriously. How they are now going to spin this latest manoeuvre is
anyone’s guess, but it’ll be entertaining I would suspect
:-)
So let’s look at the actual detail
of what is happening.
Apple announced that by June 2006 that the first Intel Powered Apple
product will be rolling off the production line, first off the rank
will most likely be the Powerbook line utilising the Intel Yonah Dual
Core Pentium M chip. The transition for all products will be completed
by end of 2007. The Desktop chip most likely will be the Conroe Dual
Core chip that is based on the next generation high IPC architecture
that will supersede the current aging Netburst architecture. A lot
of debate ensued after the announcement why Apple would choose Intel
chips over AMD especially considering Apple and AMD are development
partners, and share common hardware technologies i.e Hypertransport.
Obviously there is more than meets the eye, and Steve was probably
more than a little cautious at committing to another chip alliance
that held even a slight possibility could turn sour in the future,
there is also the question of LaGrande, a DRM and copy protection
technology that Intel are implementing into their future chips that
Apple could exploit in expanding and delivering Digital Media content.
The question of whether Apple plan on
releasing versions of OSX that will run on non Apple Intel systems
has been obviously tossed into the ring, but Steve Jobs has denied
any movement in that area, As it stands Apple –Intel boxes will
safely Dual Boot into either OSX or XP, but there are mechanisms in
place that will not allow the OSX operating system to be able to run
on standard X86 systems. What the actual mechanisms are or how long
it will take a hacker to bypass them is anyone’s guess. There
are already rumours of a leaked X86 OSX doing the underground P2P
rounds..
Either way, it is definitely going to be an interesting ride over
the next 12-18 months, and if anything at least it can temper the
idiotic platform war once and for all, at least at the hardware level.
Soon it will really only be down to the preferred Operating system,
and to be honest, hasn’t it been that all along ??
O.K, that’s it for this one,
For those that want to catch up on past articles, you can read the
blogs at http://techbytes.vze.com/
Until then. Peace.
|
