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About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Thursday, July 08, 2004Apple: Up the Market Without a CPULinux Insider: "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 Gates to drop Xenix in favor of an early CP/M release with kernel separation hacked out ... Wintel's dilemma is, however, a fairly long-term issue. Much closer at hand is Apple's immediate problem. 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. 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. The cell processor, furthermore, is confidently planned for mass production at 65-nanometer sizes early next year ... 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 ... The bigger issue is that although the new cell processor is a PowerPC derivative and thus broadly compatible with previous Apple CPUs, the attached processors are not compatible with Altivec and neither is the microcode needed to run the thing. Most importantly, however, the graphics and multiprocessor models are totally different. As a result, it will be relatively easy to port Darwin to the new machine, but extremely difficult to port the Mac OS X shell and almost impossible to achieve backward compatibility without significant compromise along the lines of a 'fat binary' kind of solution. In other words, what seemed like a good idea for Apple at the time, the IBM G5, is about to morph into a classic choice between the rock of yet another CPU transition or the hard place of being left behind by major market CPU performance improvements ... if Apple tries to stay with the PowerPC-Altivec combination, it can either be performance starved out of the market or driven there by the costs of maintaining its own CPU design team and low-volume fabrication services. If, on the other hand, 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." [ Posted at 12:16 PM | Permalink ]
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