Is Intel Good for Us?

As registered owner of MyPersonalGetaway, I have been asked my opinion on the announcement from Monday's WWDC conference in San Francisco. Since the announcement was leaked last week, there was time to formulate an opinion but that was thrown out when Steve took the stage Monday at 10AM.

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Here is my perspective on it. GREAT! I could stop right here and have my entire summary on the announcement. We have two years to move over, Intel chips have higher clock speeds and are cheaper, Apple has settled the transition from PowerPC to X86 with Rosetta and Xcode 2.1 and developers already have Intel equipped Macs shipping to their labs next week. Intel is huge and can pour the money in that we need and honestly IBM screwed us! I don't know how they are going to take care of the game console makers after the switch to dual core 970 IBM chips next year but we have had issues receiving enough G5 chips for two years now without IBM fixing the problem. This supply constraint even caused Apple to delay shipment of the G5 iMac for three months.

After looking at the facts for a few days I can say Bill Gates and Microsoft orchestrated this entire plan. An off the record attempt to get his software on Mac hardware and boost his holdings in Intel corp. Bill knew Apple needed lower cost higher clock speed systems to be the final convincing reason to switch to Mac from PC in the consumer economy, but he knew that if Apple went to Intel, he would lose a lot of customers to OS 10. So, her upped his shares in Intel and made sure that windows would be able to run on the new Intel hardware after secret talks with the chipmaker. At the same time he needed to give Apple incentive to switch manufacturers and by convincing IBM to pour money into Xbox 360 R&D; by promising money per chip exceeding what they cost or a guaranteed order amount on the dual core 970s to force IBM to say, "well MS is shipping 2 million units of Xbox 360 and Apple does far less. Plus MS will only need 3.2 GHz for the next three years so we can do R&D; now then sit on the chips as the money comes in instead of working 40 hour weeks trying to increase the 970 to Apple's requirements of clock speed. Bill made IBM work so hard that other game console makers jump ship to IBM's 64 bit chip and make the per year chip production on IBM's part a staggering 10 million chip a year deal at least. Apple looks up, we are still at 2.7 cause IBM has a "better client" they are doing work for and Apple also notices that in a year, we won't be getting any chips from IBM if MS has their way. As soon as E3 started Steve made some calls and inked the deal with Intel. Apple can't afford more G5 supply constraints and the IBM roadmap went to hell a long time ago.

Many ask me why we are not going with AMD. I have to say, I don't know. From what I have gathered they have problems handling memory and their data accuracy is lacking compared to Intel. Bundle that with lackluster deadlines and low R&D; budgets and Apple had t go with the best. Steve would rather give Mac users something to whine about for 6 months than in three years announcing another switch to a different chipmaker if AMD did not do what they promised.

I thought the PowerPC was the best chip for video and graphic arts. Is this going to affect our industry? Well, yes and no. Of course it will affect the industry and how you get work done. Think about this, from what I have heard, we will now be able to run PC video cards as soon as they come out. That new 512mb video card that just came out is all mine. Couple that with increased game performance from the Pentium "d" or Pentium IV w/ HT technology and Doom III will get much improved FPS than any other PC. I have a great question that was answered today. Rosetta and Xcode 2.1 can support multiple binaries so developers can ship applications that install for PowerPC and x86 on the same disk but the PowerPC application will not have support for Altivec. This may be resolved in a future version of Apple's development environment but as of now it is something to be pretty pissed about. The reason why, is applications like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and even iTunes (while encoding CDs) rely on the Altivec. Ever read the ads from 1999 of the G4 over G3 specs that Apple performed? They boasted, "with Altivec and the G4 processor your applications will fly over the subsequent G3 making this a true supercomputer". Ok, great but did you notice Altivec comes before G4. The reason why, is the G3 was a much cooler and solid chip and IBM could push that chip up to 2 GHz easily by increasing the transistors but instead Apple wanted some more get up and go right now so they turned to Motorola and their Altivec technology. If an app is written with code to support Altivec it is going to work 35% or faster than on a G4 w/o Altivec. Although I am not totally sure how it works but I do know my 900Mhz G3 iBook and 800Mhz G4 iBook during encoding are very far apart. The g3 does 4x a sec when the G4 does 6x-encoding AAC at 160kbps.

Think secret posted some benchmark specs for the new Intel maces and they were scoring 100 compared to the G5's 255 or 300 scores using Xbench. That is a huge change and due to the fact that this is new and Apple is going to tweak it but I blame a lot of this on Altivec. Some are asking, "Well if it is so much slower why did Apple switch?" Like Steve said, "we look at the roadmap and it does not look good so we need to move to someone that can help us for years too come. Apple says is seeing consoles from the big three game companies using 970, IBM not increasing speed and so on then they look at Intel which has been around for years and has the money to invest so they know exactly what needs to be done. You an compare the 2.7Ghz G5 with the 3.6Ghz P4 HT and see the 2.7 kicking its ass but next year when that goes to the Pentium d 64 bit running at 4Ghz w/ dual core and that in a laptop compared to our "maybe" 2Ghz G5 in a laptop, I would say the future looks promising.