“Jobs has chosen to launch the migration to Intel as the Mac is enjoying its best growth spurt in years. Mac sales are expected to soar 26% this year, thanks to the combination of the iPod’s ‘halo effect’ and a rebound from a weak 2004, when chip delays depressed sales. Next year will be less torrid. While Apple may still gain some share, analysts are betting that Mac sales growth will be about 6%, close to the overall PC market,” Peter Burrows writes for BusinessWeek. “And that doesn’t account for Mac buyers who will sit on the sidelines till new Intel-powered models appear next summer. Of course, diehard Macolytes will keep buying in the interim. Mac user Silvano Colombano, a robotics scientist at NASA, says: ‘If I needed a new Mac, I’d buy one. When it comes to technology, you can always wait and get something better — but then you’d wait forever.’ Still the risk remains. That’s why Smith Barney on June 7 trimmed its revenue estimates for fiscal 2005 by $200 million, to $13.6 billion.”
“The move to Intel holds other challenges, too. Until now, Apple has announced products on Jobs’s timetable — when they met his stringent demands. With Intel defining the hardware guts, he’ll have less flexibility. “Apple faces the risk of becoming [just] another player coming out with new products at the same time as everyone else,” says Forrester Research analyst Simon Yates,” Burrows writes. “Still, hooking up with Intel is worth the risk. So long as Apple is growing, software developers are likely to adapt their programs to run on the ‘MacIntels.’ And in the long term, Macs with Intel inside could spark growth. For starters, it could help close a speed gap in the fast-growing laptop market. Currently, Apple’s top-of-the-line PowerBook runs at just 1.67 gigahertz per second, compared with 2.21 gHz Wintel models.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Gigahertz per second? Burrows is so enamored of the “MHz myth,” he probably wouldn’t change his tune if Gordon Moore himself showed up to explain that you cannot compare the performance of different chip architectures by looking at clock speed. Every time Burrows repeats it, though, he comes off more and more like an idiot which diminishes the rest of what he’s writing. You can’t just drop a line about how the earth is flat and expect us to believe what’s in the rest of your article about the solar system, Peter. This is the second time in just two days for Burrows doing his readers a disservice by repeating his beloved “MHz Myth.”
Burrows is BusinessWeek’s Computer editor in the Silicon Valley bureau. In the hope that he’ll correct his recent articles or at least get it right in the future, his email address is:
Related MacDailyNews articles:
BusinessWeek serves up one last blast of ‘MHz Myth’ for old times’ sake – June 08, 2005
That’s funny… i emailed that idiot yesterday with a small breakdown of why you can’t compare G’s to G’s, and basically told him it was false and misleading (isn’t that the new journalist moto). Well i had a read receipt on the email and he read it shortly after so this just makes him more of an idiot
MHz per second?
hertz |hərts| (abbr.: Hz) noun ( pl. same) the SI unit of frequency, equal to one cycle per second.
So what does per second per second mean? I get one second every second, but Intel gets more than that!
Well that’s a reality distortion fields if I ever saw one. What if Steve’s RDF intersected with Intel’s RDF? I guess we’d get a MacIntel.
What have we gotten ourselves into?
Now every idiot Windows programmer with no aesthetics sense will be wanting to write for Mac OS X. What a friggin mess. I’m sticking with my PowerPC.
“Apple faces the risk of becoming [just] another player coming out with new products at the same time as everyone else,”
Say what you like about it, you can’t argue with this point. if everybody is getting the core chip from the same vendor
AlexD,
somewhat true, but Apple’s products are not usually about having hardware that’s years ahead of everyone else, it’s about having integrated products that are years ahead of the competitors in terms of innovation. Like the iPod – same parts as everyone else, just put together a lot better than everyone else.
“So what does per second per second mean?”
That’s the performance of the chip under acceleration! Lorentz contraction, anyone? Then there’s the Doppler effect where the clock speed increases in pitch as it approaches you and drops as it passes…
per second per second of course means the processor is accelerating. it works like gravity, after the first second the processor is running a 1.67 Gigahertz. After two seconds twice that much. The formula is as follows:
V=gt
Where V is speed, G is the acceleration due to gigahertz and t is time.
After being up for just a few hours that Powerbook will be the speediest computer on the planet! I guess journalist get special computer deals OR don’t understand math
MW “inside” as in unfortunately this article is not an inside joke
Isn’t conceivable that Intel could be breaking anti-trust laws, just like our “friends” at M$, by monopolizing on the cip industry?
Just a hair-brained thought….
Intel aren’t breaking anti-trust. They are healthily competing with AMD, not trying to crush them. Apple could quite easily have put Athlons in the Macs. They chose not to.
Not like Microsoft at all.
I had reason recently to change the mid-plane (motherboard for you followers of MickeySoft) in my iMac G5 and while it was apart had a good look at what was on it. If I remember correctly the silicon was from about 10 different chip manufacturers.
So all this hype about Intel is just that, hype. You look into the innards of any Wintel PC and you will see the same effect. Only a few components in most of them are Intel, the rest are Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, Nokia, Matsushita, NEC, nVidia etc.
There is no way that new Apple products will be driven by what the rest of the personal computing world does. Apple will always be Apple doing things its own way and usually to a higher standard than the rest of the field.
Gimme my Intel based PowerMac G6 Quad dual-core CPU workstation.
While comparing GHz, or worse yet GHz per second, is nonsensical, his point is valid. The Pentium M is dramatically faster than the G4, and not being able to keep up in the laptop market is a key reason Apple needs to switch. It looks like he doesn’t understand any of the technical details, but has a point that needs to be made.
“Until now, Apple has announced products on Jobs’s timetable — when they met his stringent demands.”
———-
And look how swimmingly that went with the 3GHz G5. Dipshit.
Unless Apple buys a chip maker, they’ll always be coordinating their timetable with that of their suppliers, whoever they may be. Just like, oh, every business on the planet. GM doesn’t arbitrarily announce a new Chevy without first contracting with over a dozen suppliers, and the deli on the corner doesn’t announce that today’s lunch special is corned beef without first ordering enough from their supplier.
Shouldn’t Business Week writers actually, you know, understand business?
Intel’s not in any antitrust trouble here.
If rumors about the short-term Intel CPU roadmap are true, Intel may get itself a monopoly in CPUs chips. But wielding monopoly power is not illegal in the U.S. (although it may be in the EU). Abusing monopoly power is illegal in the U.S. Abuse includes such acts as leveraging one monopoly to monopolize another market (like using a Windows monopoly to monopolize the media player or browser market), using monopoly market power itself to create an artificial barrier to entry (like charging more for Windows to PC vendors who also buy from AMD), etc.
What I don’t quite understand yet, is how all the Video Game console makers are moving to PowerPC at 3.5 Ghz –and yet IBM doesn’t have that in sight for Macs?
I think we will be pleasantly surprised in the near future.
But, overall, I think it’s about the Pentium M. DRM for Video. WiMax and strategy –like lower costs on commodity components that work with the Intel or AMD chip–not necessarily the Pentium Desktop chip itself. Intel has some advantages and disadvantages compared with PowerPC –overall its a wash. Lower registers but better GCC optimization and faster memory access but no AltiVec. So, what this low watt article is so wrong about –is that moving to Intel processors is because of desktop power. Others have said it will be cooler or lower power. All are wrong, except when it concerns the laptop chip; Pentium-M. The G4 and G5 chips are cheaper and per calc to watt ratio cooler and lower power than corresponding PC chips. Intel couldn’t make a Mini-Mac clone for less money and that was cooler –even as a demo.
Overall, I think Apple will benefit from this move–but only if other things that we don’t know about work for this strategy. Less and less do I think it helps development or is about desktop power. Its about costs, laptops, other components and DRM (possibly to be kept from being shut-out by being made incompatible). Hopefully, at least for desktops, Apple will also allow AMD.
MHz per second!!! The standard of journalism sinks further!!!
So let me get this straight… Every second that PowerBooks run, they run 1.67GHz faster – according to the article. That is so awesome.
“Apple faces the risk of becoming [just] another player coming out with new products at the same time as everyone else”
And Apple wasn’t tied to IBM for CPUs?…
GHz per second !!! That is the acceleration of GHz!!!! Anyone know high school physic will know distance/second square!! So Intel must have a secret weapon to accelerate the speed of CPU!!!
“With Intel defining the hardware guts, he’ll have less flexibility.”
Uh, no. Intel will provide the CPU and maybe a few other components, but they will not be supplying the motherboard. The motherboard designs will still be Apple’s- that hasn’t changed. Intel will be just a chip supplier to Apple- just like IBM has been.
Here’s what I wrote to him:
Good morning Peter,
I just want to drop you a line and explain something about processor speeds. In your June 9th BusinessWeek Online article, you mentioned that current PowerBooks are much slower than laptops in the PC world, citing a 1.67ghz PowerBook vs. a 2.21ghz Wintel laptop. There are many problems with this comparison.
First of all, there are many contributing factors that go into determining the speed of any computer, including hard drive speed, type of memory, operating system, graphics card, and of course, processor. These other factors can have more to do with the overall speed than the processor.
Second, even if you are just basing your comparison on processor speed, it’s very important to note that you cannot make an accurate comparison unless you compare processors of the same family, like a 2.21ghz Pentium to a 3.6 ghz Pentium. Processors from different families have different architectures and the ghz speed rating has a completely different valuation. It’s not the same as comparing cars and how many miles per hour each can go. The ghz rating of a processor rates the speed at which a cycle completes a pipeline stage. The various families all have different lengths of pipelines. Pentiums have historically had longer pipelines than other processors. The longer the pipeline, the faster the cycle rating is, but it also becomes less efficient. PowerPC chips have historically had shorter pipelines giving them lower ratings but higher efficiency. PowerPCs basically do more work per stage, so the cycle rating is lower, but they need to complete fewer stages to get to the end of the pipeline. The best analogy for this would be, imagine you and I just bought new cars and we decide to race. Say you have a Ferrari capable of a top speed of 221 mph and I have a Honda Civic capable of 167 mph (just for the sake of comparison). Most people would assume that you would win the race, and, all things being equal, you would. But when it comes to comparing processors from different families, all things are not equal. The Pentium 4 has 22 pipeline stages and the PowerPC G4 has 7. So, in our race, you, in your Ferrari, have to travel more than three times as far as I do to get to the finish line, but your car can go only marginally faster, thus I will still win the race. Now of course this is a very simplified analogy and there are a number of other factors to consider, but the point is, the numbers don’t even begin to tell you the whole story.
Intel has successfully used this as a marketing point for years now but, interestingly enough, when they announced the Centrino and Pentium M chips last year, they didn’t push the ghz ratings. They began to make their chips more efficient and, therefore, had lower cycle ratings, but the chips still performed in line with their predecessors. If there was ever any question about the truth of the “MHZ Myth”, Intel put it to rest last year.
Well, at least with the advent of Intel Macs we won’t have to be fighting the MHz myth any more. The majority of the population never got it anyway and probably would never have got it. Now Joe Sixpack will be able to read the specs and have the Mac be “just as good” as the PC.
If you wanted to do the whole “automobile analogy to explain how a computer works” thing, you probably should have equated Mhz to RPM.
Thank you Jack for using “Intel Macs” in your post. This is how they should be termed. We had 68K Mac, PPC Macs, G3, G4 & G5 Macs, and now we’ll have Intel or Pentium Macs. None of the Mactel/Macintel crap. Macs are not generic like the Wintel CLASS of machines which are duplicated by dozens of OEMs and homebuilders. Let’s stay pure. There will be only one Macintosh and that will come from Apple only, regardless of the processor used.
Also stated: “With Intel defining the hardware guts, he’ll have less flexibility.”
Last time I checked, Apple designs all their motherboards. I am assuming this will be the same with the Intel Macs. Therefore, only the processor will be on Intel’s timeline, same as it was with IBM (G5) and Motorola (G4).
I wrote a polite note to Peter regarding the “Mhz Myth” and he promptly replied with the following to my amazement:
=========
“Thanks for the note. I do appreciate your efforts on this, and understand your frustration. I do understand the issue, and will try to do my part to more accurately depict the true nature of “speed.”
–Peter
===========
If you look over some of his past articles, he’s generally pro-Apple.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2005/tc20050413_6107_tc024.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/05_12/b3925608.htm?chan=mz&
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2004/tc20040727_6351_PG2_tc120.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_44/b3906025_mz072.htm
Time to give some credit where credit is due.
“Gigahertz per hour”?
Yeah, and the US Navy ships sail at 30 knots an hour
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MJ said: “What I don’t quite understand yet, is how all the Video Game console makers are moving to PowerPC at 3.5 Ghz –and yet IBM doesn’t have that in sight for Macs?
I think we will be pleasantly surprised in the near future.”
First, the fastest PPC next-gen console will be running at 3.2 not 3.5GHz.
Also, these chips will have smaller on-chip caches and other limitations that wouldn’t prevent from being good as desktop/notebook PC processors.
Also remember that in 2-3 years, the Xbox 360 will still run at 3.2GHZ…IBM has no incentive to produce faster ones because it’s the way the video-game industry work; they don’t update processors. IBM will use it’s high end Power chips to ramp up the speed for the next next-gen video-game machines.
Also all those chips won’t run in a laptop, and IBM had no plans to do a chip that could.
And you know what? You could be “pleasantly” surprised this xmas when MS/IBM announce that they can only produce a handful of Xbox 360 for the whole month of December because of “production problems”. This would show the world that Apple made the right decision (either way, they had no choice).
With IBM/Freescale, we were never sure if they could produce a chip that would be faster and with lower power consumption than intel chips. We are sure that intel will produce chips that are equal to intel chips, we don’t have to bet on it anymore.
Would you rather have 1000$ in cash now or a lottery ticket with a chance to win $1500? If you do take the ticket and win $1500, you will brag about having made the right decision? This kind of mindset is what makes Casinos very profitable…
Virtual-Twin
“And you know what? You could be “pleasantly” surprised this xmas when MS/IBM announce that they can only produce a handful of Xbox 360 for the whole month of December because of “production problems”. This would show the world that Apple made the right decision (either way, they had no choice).”
As long as IBM don’t stop producing G5s for Apple to devote their plants to the XBox. We could suddenly find iMacs and PowerMacs getting scarce over Christmas if that were to happen.