So what Intel CPU's will Apple be using?

[Son Goku]

One can be guarenteed that if AMD does something, Intel will aim to do it next, and vice versa... And looking at the situtation, Intel does have the advantage in terms of fabs. AMD's advantage comes with the ex-DEC engineers they managed to soak up. OK, 2 seperate instances with DEC's business going under, which relate to this.

In the first instance, Intel purchased DEC's fab (which added to their own mfg capability), though DEC kept their R&D team. Intel however, as I remember acquired some of their employees involved with the fab itself (outside the development area, per the agreement). Some of those employees however, had decided to leave Intel and went to work for AMD of their own accord...

Following this, Compaq for a time acquired the Alpha, until they dispenced with it, chosing instead to go with the IA-64 platform for their high end servers and what not... The former Alpha dev team, largely got soaked up by AMD again... In fact, even before this happened (aka hyper-transport being used on the AMD Irongate chipset), DEC and AMD had been business partners of sorts (hyper-transport was developed by DEC)...

But when it comes to actual manufacturing, AMD has Dresdan, and they might be in the process of developing another fab. Otherwise? Intel, and it's undeniable has the manufacturing capability that AMD could dream of...

I think AMD did catch Intel with their pants down when they came out with the 1 GHz Tbird, having beat Intel to the 1 GHz mark first, and with the Athlon arch (fairly new) could continue to clock higher. The older P6 arch, introed with the PPro and carried up through the PIII just didn't have much more room for clock increases, without a die shrinkage they weren't then ready for.

As such, it was probably a business decision to rush the P4 out (with Willemette) before it was arguably ready (and included many of the things planned for it). Unfortunatetly for Intel, having a 1.5 GHz Willy that under-performs a 1 GHz PIII in benchmark after benchmark doesn't look good, and really does epitomize to customers what AMD told people for years, clock isn't everything...

But since then the P4s got better (Northwood, and then the 3.0c) and AMD was left playing catchup. Then the Athlon 64 came out... You can be pretty assured they'll try to stay kneck in kneck with each other. AKA, AMD plans quad core, Intel will plan something to compete (or one up it). AMD will respond to one up that... Further, Intel is going to know what has been anounced that we're aware of, so will have that edge in terms of planning they're next chip...

 

[Xie]

AKA, AMD plans quad core, Intel will plan something to compete (or one up it). AMD will respond to one up that... Further, Intel is going to know what has been anounced that we're aware of, so will have that edge in terms of planning they're next chip...

Indeed, as AMD and Intel share licenses for tech, for example AMD has allowed Intel to use AMD64 info to make it's own version. In the future Intel will do the same for AMD. It just seems that Intel is winning the race still because everyone (non-tech folks, aka "average joe") still believe the Mhz myth and Intel still plays on that. They also advertise it like crazy.

 

[Son Goku]

Well, for Intel it would be sound marketing: 1. They did have the higher clock (except for that period when the Athlons hit the 1 GHz mark and my honest assesement, I don't think they expected AMD to come so strong), 2. bigger number == faster is easy for a consumer to grasp onto, without needing to know too much about how CPUs work, 3. it would allow their marketing to capitalize upon one of their traditionally held strengths...

If I were Intel PR dept. and I wanted to bring over/keep customers, I'd probably launch an ad campaign around supporting that public image. For AMD, the trick would be trying to convince customers this isn't entirely the case, and that would require educating the customer about details of the inner workings of the CPU that many customers don't know, and quite frankly don't want to know...

AMD would still have to address the simple fact that Intel does have the fab capacity that they lack, and simply building new fabs would be an expensive proposition (especially for the smaller company) and not something one does at the flip of a hat. It'd be a major investment.

All said, if I were Apple and looking at the business side of things, I'd probably chose Intel as well. Their ability to produce in larger volume is the reason. When it comes to meeting consumer demand, if I'm working for a customer I feel no sense of loyalty for a given supplier or hardware company. I care about meeting the needs of my consumer base. If I have a demand for 50,000 units by next week, I'm going to want a supplier, who in this case could get 50,000 CPUs into my greasy paws before next week, so the people doing the actual building can meet the contract.

Someone comes to me with a $50 million contract, I'm a platform agnostic I don't care which competitor gets the order, as I'm working for the paying customer, not the supplier

 

[X-Istence]

AMD has tried to play the number game by calling their 1.8 Ghz CPU, a Athlon 2000+.

 

[Sazar]

AMD has tried to play the number game by calling their 1.8 Ghz CPU, a Athlon 2000+.

Ah but they had reason to by insinuating that their 1.8ghz thunderbird was the same as their 1ghz athlon processor running at 2000+ mhz or so.

The number games is not the domain solely of AMD.

Intel perpetuated the MHz myth. They unfortunately ate a lot of cake when they had to move away from it themselves.

AMD did what it needed to do to move away from the b.s. marketing Intel perpetuated and still be marketable.

The original Thunderbirds were awesome procs compared to the competition.

 

[Xie]

AMD would still have to address the simple fact that Intel does have the fab capacity that they lack, and simply building new fabs would be an expensive proposition (especially for the smaller company) and not something one does at the flip of a hat. It'd be a major investment.

Agreed. Probably one of the things holding AMD back from taking more Intel share is the fact that they don't have the fab capacity. It's like a catch 22, do you build and hope they come, or do you wait till they come and then use the $ to build and possibly get more? In that sense Intel has the advantage as they own the market and have the $ to expand at will.

 

[Son Goku]

Ah but they had reason to by insinuating that their 1.8ghz thunderbird was the same as their 1ghz athlon processor running at 2000+ mhz or so.

Yeah, that's essentially what AMD was saying... And though I would have prefered to see the real clock on the CPUs (aka setting mobo settings could be made a bit easier, especially where the board boots up and did upon first boot set it too low); AMD needed to do something.

Besides, from a benchmark standpoint, some were saying that AMD's performance rating was a bit on the conservative side. AKA if one were to compare it to Intel's procs, an AXP 1900+ was really performing a bit better then a 1.9 GHz Intel proc, and closer to a 2.0 GHz in some benches at the time...

 

[Son Goku]

AMD has tried to play the number game by calling their 1.8 Ghz CPU, a Athlon 2000+.

Yes they did, but as was previously said, Intel had done it previously. It makes sense Intel would have marketed in this manner, as I have mentioned.

Thing though, I'm quite certain that saz for instance is well aware of CPUs and that if I were to tell him about processor X being able to perform a given instruction in fewer clock cycles then processor Y, lower cache latencies, the ability to issue more instructions from the front end, etc; he would be able to understand what I'm saying. I'm fairly certain that others (and perhaps most) on this board would be able to do the same... It is after all a technical forum...

However, and the thing to remember, Intel, AMD, etc don't just market their products to us. They market them to the average computer user, including the caller one typically finds on the tech support line. They're trying to put their argument in language such users can understand. The MHz myth was what such users could understand, and it also fit into one of Intel's biggest streangths (the higher clock) for many years.

In the case of AMD, I'm not sure what it would take to educate many of these users about just what is wrong with the MHz myth. I've actually run into, or known people who ran into:

- Comp slow, upgrade Pentium 90 to Pentium 100, then Pentium 120, and wonder why comp is still slow. Problem, only 8 MB RAM on Windows 95 (yeah, this was awhile ago). Someone finally tells them (hey pal, the prob isn't your processor, add more memory to that box)...

- OK, good, some people have gotten the idea that more memory can be a good thing. Only problem, I've run into some people who have gotten the idea "so well", that they then end up thinking "comp slow, buy more memory, CPU must not matter".

So now (and this wasn't in recent years), got 512 MB RAM and it's slow, they add more. Oh, then 1 GHz not enough... Big prob, they had so much memory, the comp wasn't even using it.

On the other hand, the perf rating allowed AMD to counter Intel's false MHz claims, in a way which would be more understandable to a large number of consumers out there...

 

[muzikool]

Kind of crappy pictures, but they are real...

 

[X-Istence]

If those are real, look at the amount of space left in the case!!!!

 

[muzikool]

Supposedly they are real... almost too much room. I hope they make them prettier.

 

[X-Istence]

If there is that much room left, think about how much smaller they can make it. Or if they keep it the same size, think of the amount of firewire/ide HD's i could stack in there

 

[Xie]

If real that is alot of wasted space, even for just a dev kit.

 

[SPeedY_B]

Why is it wasted? That's a fully functional computer. What else would a developer need in there?

 

[Son Goku]

That is a lot of empty space...

Depending on how much upgrading is allowed (and yes I'm aware we're talking Mac here, not PC), one could perhaps add a second hard drive, or a DVD burner (I'm assuming there are some apps for OS X that allows one to burn) or something... Other then that, and some extra cooling (if one so desires and it runs a tad warm), not sure what else one would do with it...

 

[SPeedY_B]

You can already upgrade PowerMacs, there's an extra 3 drives in mine and an additional DVD Writer.

The extra space is due to better cooling as the components used in the development machines aren't exactly complex and most features are on-board. Once there's some more powerful components in there, some more cooling will need to be added, etc. It will be nice to have a little more space to play with though, G5's are pretty tight packed at the moment.

 

[Xie]

That is a lot of empty space...

Depending on how much upgrading is allowed (and yes I'm aware we're talking Mac here, not PC) ...

As far as I'm aware you can upgrade a PowerMac right now just about as much as you can upgrade your "PC" (but a Mac is a PC also - PC does mean "Personal Computer").

 

[Sazar]

There is similarly a lot of empty space in a lot of today's ATX and some psuedo-BTX full sized x86 based setups.

Empty space is not always bad.

I would love for lotsa empty space in my system so I could cool it better