Intel, PPC & Apple

In June 2006? Apple will be releasing the first of the intel-based macs true?

It wont be a complete transition, I mean it wont be June 2006 and we have Intel Mac mini's, ibooks, powerbooks and powermacs and imacs.... they said by 2007 the transition would be 'complete'.

So that means that Apple will be selling whatever Intel products it came up with for June, along side the PowerPC stuff they have now... How is that going to work out for them?... I am going to assume we wont see an iMac or PowerMac with an Intel-Inside come 2006 so wont they be in kind of a..

"Introducing our New Intel Mac! YAY!... But the PowerPC's over there are cool too. But we are dumping PPC for Intel Macs eventually..Yay?"

What will happen to their 'benchmarks' showing the G4/5 vs the Pentium? Wont that be giving mixed signals to customers?

"Wait they are saying the G5 is better than Intels Penitum 4 over here, but over here this new Intel Mac is better than both of them because its in a mac? Eh."

It would seem highly likley that there is going to be a time when they are selling Intel and PPC macs side-by-side on their site...

With the Intel-Macs being at a disadvantage if they run PPC software in emulaton (bugs? speed problems? incompatibilities?) and they cant emulate Altvec, games software will that work? If not thats a major drawback since the Mac already hs so few good entertainment titles out there. Maybe Apple are hoping that the people that will buy the first Intel macs wont be looking to be 'entertained' with them - but then wont those sorts of people go with a PPC to get native/better software support and be less bothered about the 'newest' thing...

OSX x86 for the Intel-based Macs can run PPC software aparentley at a very reasonable speed (with Rosetta). Good stuff then. But i was told it cant emulate Altvec? What of 'games' ? Will current games out there work on the Intel-macs running OSX-86?? If not wont that leave the 'new' macs without many (if any?) support for the entertainment software thats out on Mac meaning that you upgrade you can't use any of your games software.. or you buy a Mac now and you can't run any of the current Mac games.

Thoughts? No one really explained these things, maybe i just wasent awake when they did but id like to know if someone has the answers..

There are many thread on this subject. Here are a few. If you search the board you will find many more.

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23070&highlight=intel
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22013&highlight=intel
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21233&highlight=intel
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19894&highlight=intel
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19947&highlight=intelh

i think apple should have got intel to make a ppc based processors for apple.
maybe even gone with amd, amd outperform intel(only in high level amd doest really have a low power cpu).

mohit

But Intel has 0 experience with the PowerPC platform, would need tons of additional R&D to get on board and would have a product only one of their customers need/want.
Apple would be forced to pay towards these additional expenses and the CPU's would probably also cost more.

Makes absolutely no sense for everyone involved.
This way: Apple gets new processors with lower power consumption and better speed increases as increasing chipspeed is Intel's core business. Users can now also run windows apps at full processor speed and the mac becomes the only platform capable of booting OS X, Linux and Windows.

Intel gets a new customer at no extra cost.

Answering your games question is simple: now that Apple will be x86, every Windows game made can be easily ported to run on OS X, and I'm sure plenty of companies will be jumping on the bandwagon in a race to who can convert the most games first (I'll guarantee you some of the already-established companies such as Aspyr will make a KILLING during this period).

By the time the first Intel powered Macs arrive the chips will be comparable with todays PPC offerings, mainly because todays PPC offerings from Apple haven't really changed much in 12 months or more. My twin 2Ghz G5 machine is 18 months old yet the top PPC offering from Apple is only a twin 2.7Ghz machine.

No matter what Apple wants you to believe IBM hasn't stopped developing the PPC line and by the time the MacIntel comes out the top PPC chips from IBM will surpass the G5 by many times and will still outperform the dual offerings from Intel and AMD just as they do today (if you have the money and are willing to do it you could put together a 32 core PPC based machine from IBM today).

Amen-Moses

1. Intel will not be making PowerPC-based CPUs. There have been public statements to this effect.

2. At the moment, the biggest problem Apple has is with notebook/portable CPUs. The G4 has been outclassed by newer Intel and AMD chips, and the "mobile G5" CPUs that IBM announced are actually slower than the G4.

3. Intel's Pentium-M is a good mobile CPU: fast and power efficient at the same time.

4. The G5 is, for the moment, as fast or faster than Intel's best Pentium-4 and Xeon models, when running properly optimized software. Virtually every benchmark you can find backs that up.

5. Notebooks account for about 50% of the market today, and growing.

6. Intel's "roadmap" shows it focusing increasingly on low-power CPUs.

What does all this mean?
- The PowerPC is a capable desktop/workstation/server CPU, but is not suited for the mobile market
- Intel's lineup now, and in the future, concentrates on mobile CPUs

For Apple, the mobile market takes precedence. From the iPod to the iBook and PowerBook, mobile products account for most of Apple's revenue. Apple is willing to give up it's stronger desktop CPU (G5) in order to better pursue the mobile market. That's where the money is. I expect that Apple is hoping that Intel will be able to offer something competitive with IBM and AMD on the desktop in the next year and a half. But even if Intel can't offer anything better than the P4 on the desktop, Apple will still have what it needs to compete for people's hands, pockets, and laps.

technologist said:

For Apple, the mobile market takes precedence. From the iPod to the iBook and PowerBook, mobile products account for most of Apple's revenue. Apple is willing to give up it's stronger desktop CPU (G5) in order to better pursue the mobile market. That's where the money is. I expect that Apple is hoping that Intel will be able to offer something competitive with IBM and AMD on the desktop in the next year and a half. But even if Intel can't offer anything better than the P4 on the desktop, Apple will still have what it needs to compete for people's hands, pockets, and laps.

Click to expand...

Additionally, there's the obvious possibility of switching the desktop line over to AMD, and keeping the laptop line with Intel, since they're both x86. However, this will cause problems since A. it won't make Intel very happy and B. They'll have to have two different optimization levels of OS X if they want it to run at its finest on all of their systems. There's also a very slight possibility of keeping a G5 lineup in place for its desktops, but this would divide their software market, and require a much larger Apple employee base; although most of it is already established and the bulk of the work is done, future operating system developments would be extremely taxing, so this possibility is highly unlikely. The AMD-for-desktops move is more feasible, as they do have the Motorola-IBM divide in place already.

Amen-Moses said:

By the time the first Intel powered Macs arrive the chips will be comparable with todays PPC offerings, mainly because todays PPC offerings from Apple haven't really changed much in 12 months or more. My twin 2Ghz G5 machine is 18 months old yet the top PPC offering from Apple is only a twin 2.7Ghz machine.

No matter what Apple wants you to believe IBM hasn't stopped developing the PPC line and by the time the MacIntel comes out the top PPC chips from IBM will surpass the G5 by many times and will still outperform the dual offerings from Intel and AMD just as they do today (if you have the money and are willing to do it you could put together a 32 core PPC based machine from IBM today).

Amen-Moses

Click to expand...

And why would anyone want a 32-core PPC based machine?

With multiple cores and multiple registers, would that be matrix computing?