“Just recently Steve Jobs has had to apologize to the Apple community for not being able to deliver on last-year’s promise of a 3-Ghz G5 by mid 2004. IBM promised to make that available, but has not done so,” Paul Murphy writes for LinuxInsider.
“A lot of people have excused this on the grounds that the move to 90-nanometer manufacturing has proven more difficult than anticipated, but I don’t believe that. PowerPC does not have the absurd complexities of the x86, and 90-nanometer production should be easily in reach for IBM.
my belief is that IBM chose not to deliver on its commitment to Apple because doing so would have exacerbated the already embarrassing performance gap between its own server products and the higher end Macs. Right now, for example, Apple’s 2-Ghz Xserve is a full generation ahead of IBM’s 1.2-GHz p615, but costs about half as much,” Murphy writes.
“For the last three weeks I’ve been talking about the impact the new Sony, Toshiba and IBM cell processor is likely to have on Linux desktop and datacenter computing. The bottom line there is that this thing is fast, inexpensive and deeply reflective of very fundamental IBM ideas about how computing should be managed and delivered. It’s going to be a winner, probably the biggest thing to hit computing since IBM’s decision to use the Intel 8088 led Bill Gate to drop Xenix in favor of an early CP/M release with kernel separation hacked out,” Murphy writes.
“If… Apple bites the bullet and transitions to the cell processor, IBM will gain greater control while removing Apple’s long-term ability to avoid having people run Mac OS on non-Apple products. Either way, Apple will go away as a competitive threat because the future Mac OS will either be out of the running or running on IBM Linux desktops,” Murphy writes. “So what can Apple do? What the company should have done two years ago: Hop into bed with Sun. Despite its current misadventure with Linux, Sun isn’t in the generic desktop computer business. The Java desktop is cool, but it’s a solution driven by necessity, not excellence. In comparison, putting Mac OS X on the Sunray desktop would be an insanely great solution for Sun while having Sun’s sales people push Sparc-based Macs onto corporate desktops would greatly strengthen Apple.”
Murphy writes, “Most importantly, Sparc is an open specification with several fully qualified fabrication facilities. In the long term, Apple wouldn’t be trapped again, and in the short term the extra volume would improve prospects for both companies. Strategically, it just doesn’t get any better than that.”
Full article, with much more, here.
MacDailyNews Take: An interesting read with lots to think about. What’re your impressions?