“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?
What no one has yet mentioned is how good is will be for Apple when the next generation game consoles come out. They will all be using PPC or other IBM chips. It will be a cinch to port games written for those consoles to the Mac, for example. IBM’s research in cell processors is bound to have benefits for PPC. Also, with IBM making PPC more open, it will be obvious that PPC is by no means a minority architecture.
but the whole industry hit a wall.. it wasn’t just IBM.. it makes perfect sense
the conspiracy theory is weak,
The biggest hole in his argument is the fact he is ignoring the close relationship Apple has with IBM on the subject of the G5 chip. They don’t stand outside the door like a raggamuffin in Oliver Twist “Please, sir, may we have more chips?”
And not only that, IBM doesn’t care about hardware as much as they care about consulting services. If they were worried about Apple’s XServe, they’d be cranking out their PPC 970 blade servers much faster. And they also have Power 4 and Power 5 coming.
Also, he ignores the fact that Intel and AMD have both had provable problems doing exactly the same thing moving to their own 90 nm processes.
Get in bed with Sun? Great idea! Sun needs to use PPC 970s and later generation G5 chips too! Let’s get IBM cranking out more!
As for the XBox conspiracy mentioned above? LOL!!!! ROTFLMAO!!!!! *Snort*
Oh, you were serious??
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The Article is very funny, he does not now what Cell is just Guessing, Apple is in fine hand with IBM and the Moto less Freescales, On Cell their are multiple sources for CHIP who APPLE can buy from, He forgets Toshibia which is Manufacturing partner. Even if they run out gas there are plenty of other architecture in the wings to fill in gaps in performance.. U of Texas TRIPS CPU, Stanford’s Merrimac which could be transformed into PPC design, Both of these Design in 13 Micron meet the performance spec that CELL is talking about…. Also he forgetting GPU 3D Lab launched a Fully programable GPU that pumps out 760 GFLOPS Single Precesion FP… Again I got chuckle from this Article..
John C. Dvorak on the M$ 2billion payout to Sun: Strange Bedfellows Dept:
QUOTE
Everyone in the Sun community knows that StarOffice does not fit in with anything else Sun does and that the product has always been used to harass Microsoft. For $2 billion, Sun will gladly get out of the software game.
The agreement may squash another possible deal. Sun had been talking to Apple about porting StarOffice to the Mac. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is sick of dealing with Microsoft, and he still grinds his teeth over Microsoft’s relentless copying of Apple ideas. Apple was poised to make a deal with StarOffice whereby Apple could get the source code to develop a jazzy office suite using its world-class design team.
With OpenOffice, the company would be stifled by the open-licensing restrictions. Now with Scott McNealy in bed with Microsoft, you can be certain that any super office suite on the Mac is finito. And you can expect Microsoft to put Apple on the future-upgrades slow track for even thinking about it. Microsoft began hinting that it was already unhappy with Office’s Mac sales. This is the warning that puts Apple in the penalty box. Microsoft will use this phony excuse to punish Apple.
UNQUOTE
I still think that Apple needs to have an Orifice alternative on the backburner, ticking away slowly, but ready to be put in the front burner should the need arise. I wonder how much did the threat of StarOffice encourage M$ to develop Orifice 2004 for Mac. Orifice and Windblows are the two legs underpinning M$’s monopoly.
Sunny Apple?
Apple Sun?
Shining Apple?
Bold and Shiny.. Apple?
The author knows nothing about silicon processing. I work on steppers and 90nm is very very hard. 65 nm is probably 3 years away in any volume.
IBM has made much better progress at 90nm than Intel (you look at clock increases at a given design rule for a given manufacturer … IBM has done about 25% this year and Intel has done about 8%)
The XBox rumor is a very silly ill-founded rumor.
There is no Machavelian plan here. IBM is working its collective butt off to get silicon on the 970/975 series and beyond out the door.
We’ll just have to wait and see what develops before we can evaluate many of the comments here or the predictions I made in the four part series – about 6,000 words of which most of you guys seem to have scanned about 400.
The comments made about SGI are, however interesting. Do you know what really happened to SGI? They had a great product and a good sales story based on the MIPS cpu. That thing had legs in the sense that the design allowed for pretty good downstream performance scaling.
So what happened? Management bought into the Intel/MS hype, that’s what happened. Now the company is an also ran, irrelavant to all but its most devoted fans. Think about that next time some nutty analyst recomments Apple go that way.