Steven P. Jobs is preparing to take an unprecedented gamble by abandoning Apple Computer's 14-year commitment to chips developed by I.B.M. and Motorola in favor of Intel processors for his Macintosh computers, industry executives informed of the decision said Sunday.

Comments 3:36:35 PM    

So, is Steve Jobs going to announce something unthinkably different at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference tomorrow?

'No' says Forbes' Arik Hesseldahl, this is just an Apple ploy to pressure IBM to deliver dual core G5s and a mobile chip. 'Rubbish' says Leander Kahney in Wired News' Cult of Mac blog.

Gotta say, I'm skeptical. If Apple were going to make such a risky jump, why would it trade IBM's state-of-the-art RISC architecture (that Microsoft, among others, has recently adopted for its game console) for Intel's aging CISC? AMD's new chips are widely thougth to be better than Intel's, and Apple would be a much bigger deal customer for AMD (17% market share) vs. Intel (81% market share). If Apple thinks IBM is unresponsive, what would happen if they were in line with the likes of Dell and HP? Apple's tiny relative market share would likely give them less, not more clout with Intel.

Another issue is Mac OS X. Some Mac performance problems, especially for server stuff like web serving and databases have more to do with an oddity in OS X's kernel architecture than with the G5 (Anandtech has an analysis). So jumping to Pentium wouldn't just make performance issues go away.

True, OS X's open source cousin Darwin does already run on x86. But it's unclear how much of Apple's interface technology runs on x86 (though there are reports that Apple maintains a secret x86 build at parity with the current OS X).

But how many of Apple's developers would make the jump? Even though Apple has grabbed most consumer and digital life style apps for its own, what of all the graphics apps (including Apple's own) that have been optimized for the PowerPC's Altivec SIMD technology (aka Velocity Engine)?

It's possible to move OS X apps to run on x86, but it would mean a gigantic engineering and testing bill for developers. Given Apple's market share, many might conclude that the economics wouldn't work. Creative Pros are a significant market for Apple, and they would not relish having to replace all of their applications with new (and doubtless, initially buggy) versions, especially if performance was substantially the same.

One thing that stood out in the CNET story was the idea that Apple would move the low end of it's line - the Mac mini - to Intel by 2006. Huh? Apple will have two incompatible versions of its OS in the market at the same time? This wouldn't be like Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 ('Classic') switch - emulation would be much, much slower if it could be made to work at all. Sounds like a support nightmare for Apple and its customers. That said, Steve Jobs famously dances to his own drummer... many eyes and ears will be looking for news from Moscone Center tomorrow...
Comments 9:53:25 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures