Posted on 06/09/2005 8:17:17 PM PDT by ScuzzyTerminator
Boy, that would sure be Intel's loss.
What's amazing is that anyone would pay Cringely to write this stuff.
An extremely unintelligent analysis.
1. Intel is already shipping, in cheap-ish systems, CPUs that have the EM64T extensions, which is essentially a clone of the AMD64 instructions. Close enough to properly be called a 64-bit chip.
2. The Cell processor has several flaws vs. a G5 or G4 chip, but the biggie is: the Cell does not do out-of-order execution. That is a show-stopper and means that a 3Ghz Cell CPU would in most cases be outperformed by a 1.7GHz G4 (or so), let alone a G5.
Those are indeed errors, and Intel is NOT buying Apple ... however, it's a FACT that Apple would be switching to Intel chips, phasing in late in 2006 and completing the transition in 2007.
So ....
The reason is simple: it could end up running afoul of both the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the European Union equivalent in no time flat.
Okay - if this analysis is wrong, then why *did* Apple go with Intel?
My theory is that Apple will be getting out of the hardware business altogether. Which is something they should have done a long time ago.
I pray the theory of this article is correct. I'd love to see Apple/Intel
I don't see a merger in the future, but it has two motivations: a direct challenge to Microsoft, and the fact IBM was dilatory in getting a laptop usable version of the G5.
The first aspect of the move was set was set up with OS X, which is really a bunch of extremely cool and user-friendly utilities and a GUI running in a UNIX environment. I suspect the whole thing was written in a dialect of C (as most variants of the UNIX kernel and most UNIX specific software are), so it should be trivial for them to port it to another processor. And, on the financial side by the success of the iPod and iTunes. The iMac Mini was a teaser to the mass market, and is slated to be the first Intel chip Apple (in the accounts I read elsewhere).
Basically this represents the challenge Linux was supposed to mount, but never could because it had no strategic center: a variant of UNIX for Intel chips, but this time with a really sweet GUI and a host of good applications already written.
If they do the full port so that Mac OS X can be installed on any recent Pentium machine, plenty of folks sick to death of all the Windows security issues and instabilities will take the plunge.
Apple/Intel ping...
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
"Apple and Intel are merging."
ba-har-har-hardy, har-har.
Because IBM couldn't push the PowerPC in the ways Apple wanted (no 3Ghz G5 or PowerBook G5 yet); because Apple apparently thinks Intel is a more reliable long-term partner than AMD and IBM; and because IBM was probably getting less sensitive to Apple's demands, due to IBM supplying the CPUs for all three of the next-gen game consoles.
The base kernel is C and some hardware drivers are written in C++. Almost all of the cool stuff is written in Objective-C, which is C with a few object-oriented extensions added - syntax is similar to SmallTalk.
A pure guess of course but I think IBM wants out of the chip business. Note their recent decision to sell their PC hardware operation. Doubt if IBM sees the return on R&D to continue development of the chip line. If Apple has 3-5% marketshare that probably doesn't give IBM much, if any, return. It's possible IBM uses the chips in other boxes, but still, they can't be doing that much volume and margins in the chip business are slim.
A merger would also crank off a lot of current Intel customers who would view them as competition and might make AMD a more acceptable solution. Does Intel want to lose, say, Dell to AMD? Ouch.
Plus as noted earlier by someone else a merger might trigger an anti-trust problem. It was speculated that 10 years ago when AMD was in a struggling second place Intel could have dropped prices and put them out of business, but choose not to, preferring to keep them around to keep the feds off their backs.
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