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The news this week about
Intel becoming the next CPU source for Apple is so full of ironic and comic
moments it is like an Alan Ayckbourn farce. The
announcement leaves Intel in the driving seat and as unquestioned leader in the
motherboard market. It comes at a time when IBM's PowerPC architecture is
having its finest hour, as supplier to the new gaming consoles from Microsoft and
Sony. Even though Intel has long been known for its power-hungry CPUs and IBM
for more power-efficient processors, Intel is getting Apple's business after a
power-miserly G5 laptop chip failed to materialize. And let's not forget this
delicious irony: here is IBM, pushing 64-bit computing on its most populist
platform, the G5, and Apple, one of the first to provide a consumer-grade
multiprocessing machine, going to Intel with still-to-ship multicore CPUs and just
as Microsoft releases its own long-awaited 64-bit Windows.
And here is Apple, long being
criticized for arrogance and closed-architected, gets kudos for going with a
more "open" platform that holds the possibly of running both Mac OS
(in whatever incarnation that will end up being in 2007), even with a company
that is possibly more closed and arrogant than itself. And the anti-Mac corporate
culture runs deep at Intel: when I last visited Intel's campus outside of
Maybe I have been living in
There are several key
take-aways from all this hang-wringing. First off, the key chip in the deal is
the cool-and-quiet Pentium M. (Gee, too bad someone else has already
trademarked that term.) Perhaps Intel will finally see fit to overclock this puppy
and provide Apple with a screaming processor for its laptops, something that
IBM has been enable to provide these past few years. One of the reasons I
bought my G5 desktop was to have a better CPU than what was (and still isn't)
available in Apple's laptop line. While the Mac laptops look cool with their
brushed silver finish, the brains inside them are still a generation behind
what you can get on desktops. As we all know, the desktop is so 1990s, and
laptops are where it is all at these days.
Second, the days of just
considering CPUs as a single element in the PC design are also so 1990s
thinking as well. It isn't just about the chip, but the supporting chips around
it and the graphics subsystem attached as well. Intel clearly has done a better
job than IBM in this department. One could argue that AMD has better bus
architecture than Intel, but I don't want to get into that debate here.
Third, Intel and Apple need
each other at this point in time, but for very different reasons, and that
might make for a tumultuous business relationship over the next several years.
Intel needs a wedge to motivate Microsoft, who has had the upper hand in the
Wintel relationship for far too long. They need to recapture some of the
technology luster that AMD has grabbed and re-establish themselves as the
pre-eminent force in the PC universe. Apple needs a better processing platform
and a way to pack more cycles into their boxes, and also a way to make better
laptops.
Fourth, the Intel transition
isn't going to happen overnight, and even the two-year timeframe that Jobs
outlined is probably optimistic. Remember the transition from 68000 to PowerPC?
I think we finished with that one a few years ago. To make matters worse, Apple
is charging a grand for a software developer kit: they should be giving this
away for free if they really are serious about getting developers on board for
the Intel generation.Ê
Finally, IBM comes out a
loser here in the perception wars, but not much behind in the business sense. They
are making hay with Sony and Microsoft in the new generation of consoles to
come out later this year and next, and chances are they will sell more gaming
units at more of a profit than they could ever hope to get with Apple. According
to analysts, only about one percent of IBM's chip business is related to Apple,
which is about the same as what Apple's overall PC market share is. But the
marquee value of this one percent is huge and noticeable, as all the press this
week has shown.
My take on this is best
summed up with a look at Microsoft's booth at E3 last month, where they were
running the latest Xbox 360 demos on Apple G5s (of course, they were concealed
from easy viewing, but they were there). Again, the ironies of Microsoft using
Macintoshes to run the latest gaming products on a box that will come from IBM
technology: it almost makes you wish for those simple days back when IBM and
Microsoft were developing OS/2. But we all know what happened there, and hopefully
Intel and Apple will have a better time of things.
David
Strom
Editor-in-Chief
Tom's
Guides Publishing
+1
(818) 991-0282 x204
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