Picking up the pieces

Tuesday, Jun. 7 2005 | Author: Scrivs

John Siracusa has written an excellent follow-up to yesterday’s news by Apple concerning their transition to Intel CPUs. If you don’t know Siracusa already he is the genius behind all the great Apple articles that can be found at Ars.

Two years later, a 3GHz G5 has not appeared. Steve Jobs looks foolish, and is undoubtedly pissed. This is the same guy who, back in the G4 days, famously (allegedly) told a senior Motorola executive, “I can’t wait until we don’t need you anymore.” This was in the middle a meeting about future CPUs that Apple still needed from Motorola!

Now Jobs is angry at IBM, and an angry Jobs is not pleasant to deal with. But things could be patched up, right? Maybe, but maybe IBM didn’t see any reason to smooth things over and kiss the ring, as it were. Apple buys a lot of chips, but IBM CPUs are in every one of the three major upcoming game consoles. The market-share winner alone will assure tens of millions of CPU sales.

And IBM doesn’t really care who wins because they get paid for every single unit sold: Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft. What’s 5 million Macs a year compared to 20 million game consoles? And over 5 years, IBM can sell the “same chip” (maybe with fabrication refinements that save IBM money anyway) up to 100 million times. It’s a lot harder to do that with a Mac (although Motorola sure tried…)

That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter exactly. I don’t see IBM being all too pissed about the move by Apple. Jobs can be demanding and it’s possible that IBM sees more money in the console market than the small Apple market.

Still wish they would’ve went with AMD.

Share and Enjoy

Apache Rules!
Estimated Cost of the major gaming consoles
Opera CEO fires board members before getting fired
Apple’s Latest, Good For Linux, Bad For Microsoft
Microsoft: Buy a Wii

Hope you like that post!

Forever Geek is a resource for all things geek. You can stay tuned by having the latest FG news delivered to you for free via RSS.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags:

3 Responses for "Picking up the pieces"

John J.

June 7th, 2005 at 12:41 pm
1

“Still wish they would’ve gone with AMD.”

You know everyone says this but what does in mean really?

Yes it would have been good for AMD to get the extra business, but I wonder if they could keep up with a demand that IBM (Big Blue after all) could not.

I guess I am an “Intel fanboi” but they have shown reliability both in there manufacturing and in there products, not that AMD is not a reliable company they just haven’t had enough time to prove there products.

Also remember that as far as gigahertz go Intel has the faster chips (purely clock speeds, not “equivalency” numbering, AMDâs Athalon64 4000+ is only a 2. GHz chip, the FX55 is only a 2.6) and given that the majority of Macâs that are sold to businesses and institutions are used for some kind of encoding or decoding (music, movies, Photoshop, ect…) or desktop multitasking, which are tasks that the Intel P4 and Pentium D (given that it is not an all new architecture) perform best at. The strength of AMDâs processors are there floating point units, (Good for game benchmarks among other things) Of interest to Apple but defiantly not a priority.

It would have been nice for AMD but if you look at the facts I don’t think it could have realistically happened.
John J.

June 7th, 2005 at 12:43 pm
2

The 4000+ should be 2.4 GHz sorry…
cliche

June 7th, 2005 at 4:01 pm
3

Of course Steve is angry. Can’t put G5s in laptops, so he’s stuck with G4s while Centrinos are kicking ass and getting even better. The G5 itself isn’t evolving much while Intel and AMD are soon to kick ass with multicore architecture. Speaking of which, it’s hard to tell if G5 was ever than Intel or AMD chips: Different benchmarks showed different results and each camp flaunted whichever worked for their side.

Pure performance wise, Apple already lost on the laptop, and starting to lose the desktop. I know that speed is only a part of the experience, but it would have been a big part a few years later if PPC evolved like it did last year.