Bye Bye Intel?

Fast post/sharing.

That would be a punch in the face of those people that recently just purchased a MacBook Pro with Retina and paid almost $3,000. This is Apple and I think we just have to say “Mac Intel, welcome to the vintage section”.

http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-10-12/commentary/34405004_1_apple-licenses-macbook-powerpc-chip

14 comments on “Bye Bye Intel?

  1. They’re talking about ARM? So where’s PowerPC?
    I assume that the only way out is PowerPC because ARM consumes too few power and thus is too slow.
    And there basically is only x86, PPC and ARM.

    I’d appreciate this step very much.
    Especially when they’d have to port OSX back to PPC and PowerISA we might see G4/G5 ports which would be crazy fuckin awesome!

    But, I’m dreaming

    • I’m afraid PPC consumes too much power to put it in small devices like iPhone of iPad.
      However, let’s hope that some newer PPC-chips might do the job. But I did not yet hear about new developments in the PPC-market.
      ARM is indeed meant to use in smaller devices but they might make a heavier version for desktops and notebooks… That is: if desktops and notebooks are still to be out there for a long time, I am not so sure about that…

      • The only reason Microsoft releases Windows RT is because they want it to run on tablets and these mostly are ARM based.
        For real work they’re just too slow.
        They’re very good for mobile phones and tablets which only run one (maybe two) apps at the same time.
        For that purpose they’re very good because they have a very low power consumption.

        But if it comes to using them on notebooks or even desktops, they’re too slow and I don’t think we will we much more powerful ones in the near future.

        On Macs we expect hard-core mulitasking and real performance even when running 15 apps and more than 3 tabs in the browser.
        For that purpose PowerPC is just the best choice as they’re very fast and there are models out today that have a still low power consumption (too high for phones but great for notebooks).

        The only reason I can not believe they’re releasing PowerPC Macs is because they dropped them so hard.
        Or maybe they just want to make money by first making customers switch to x86 and now back to PPC again.

  2. For the past year or so there have been obvious inclinations that Apple will be moving from Intel x86 chips to RISC-based ARM processors. We’ve been seeing it with the iphone (A5) and ipad. They’ve been investing a lot of time and money to development of their own processors. I think the macbook and macbook air will be the first to transition if this happens. Even Microsoft is doing something very similar with the Windows 8 being released as an ARM-compatible version, dubbed Windows RT. It’s funny because ARM is really just an offspring of PowerPC. Both are part of the RISC family. I’d personally love to see this happen if it does.

      • Interresting, yet not true. ARM dates back to the first half of 1980’s and was developped by british company called Acorn to be replacement of then outdated MOS6502 in their line of computers (Acorn Archimedes).

        PowerPC is product of alliance between Apple, IBM and Motorola, where IBM gave instruction set, Motorola gave bus and Apple used it in computers.

        There is no relation between ARM and PowerPC except they are both RISC instruction set microprocessors.

      • @Martin… That’s very interesting. Thanks for sharing. I just Wikipedia ARM and came across this info which I find fascinating too…

        Apple, DEC, Intel, Marvell: ARM6, StrongARM, XScale

        In the late 1980s Apple Computer and VLSI Technology started working with Acorn on newer versions of the ARM core. The work was so important that Acorn spun off the design team in 1990 into a new company called Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. Advanced RISC Machines became ARM Ltd when its parent company, ARM Holdings plc, floated on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998.[12]

        The new Apple-ARM work would eventually turn into the ARM6, first released in early 1992. Apple used the ARM6-based ARM 610 as the basis for their Apple Newton PDA. In 1994, Acorn used the ARM 610 as the main central processing unit (CPU) in their Risc PC computers. DEC licensed the ARM6 architecture and produced the StrongARM. At 233 MHz this CPU drew only one watt (more recent versions draw far less). This work was later passed to Intel as a part of a lawsuit settlement, and Intel took the opportunity to supplement their ageing i960 line with the StrongARM. Intel later developed its own high performance implementation named XScale which it has since sold to Marvell.

  3. Did you know, that Apple is now probably the only manufacturer of desktop PowerPC chips in the world? IBM does server chips only, Freescale is now into automotive, but Apple still manufactures PWRficient chips for US Government. They are even used in current Amiga clone. It’s low power consuming dualcore 2GHz 64bit chip. Irony, isn’t it?

  4. The PowerPC chip is still quite ubiquitous outside the consumer industry, NASA Rover, Curiosity, is powered by the PowerPC chip, for example.

    Personally, ever since the Pentium III privacy fiasco, I have searched for other alternatives to this giant company; the PPC chip was my favorite out of all the other chips: Cyrix 686, AMD K-series, ARM, etc.

    I wish Intel would go away as a company; it is my suspicion that they collude, or even strong-arm, their customers, much as Microsoft did years ago. I have no real proof, just a gut feeling (see: http://articles.marketwatch.com/2010-08-04/industries/30718986_1_doug-melamed-amd-and-intel-amd-shares). It’s my feeling that Intel did not want the Feds to look too closely and thus were willing to deal.

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