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For 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, June 09, 2005

Going for Broke

I, Cringely:

Apple's Decision to Use Intel Processors Is Nothing Less Than an Attempt to Dethrone Microsoft. Really.

I love Bob Cringely. This article, however, is completely out to lunch. For example:

PowerPC's dedicated vector processor in the G4 and G5 chips that make them so fast at running applications like Adobe Photoshop and doing that vaunted H.264 video compression. Apple loved to pull Phil Schiller onstage to do side-by-side speed tests showing how much faster in real life the G4s and G5s were than their Pentium equivalents. Was that so much BS? Did Apple not really mean it?

That was always a bit of BS. Applications that used Altivec had to be specially written for that purpose. In general-purpose computing, Intel-based systems were almost always faster than Power PC systems. But this one is worse:

Tiger -- is a 64-bit OS, remember, yet Intel's 64-bit chips -- Xeon and Itanium -- are high buck items aimed at servers, not iMacs. So is Intel going to do a cheaper Itanium for Apple or is Apple going to pretend that 64-bit never existed? Yes to both is my guess, which explains why the word "Pentium" was hardly used in the Jobs presentation.

Dahhh... Bob, seriously. Intel's latest Pentium 4 chips are fully 64-bit capable. It's called x64, Bob. It's not exactly new.

Where the heck is AMD?

Right where they always were: Beating Intel in the head-to-head comparisons, but not shipping in the same volume. Apple went with Intel because Intel has both the technology and the volume shipping it needs. Obviously.

This announcement has to cost Apple billions in lost sales as customers inevitably decide to wait for Intel boxes.

I'm not sure about billions. But it will cost them some sales, and certainly delay many sales.

Is this all really about Digital Rights Management?

No, it's not.

Moving to the Cell Processor would have made much more sense than going to Intel or AMD

This pretty much shows how out of touch Cringely has become. The Cell processor is almost completely useless as a general purpose computing chip, and would have required Apple and all app makers to completely rewrite everything, which would have been a non-starter. And now, ladies and gentlement, we enter la-la land:

This isn't a story about Intel gaining another three percent market share at the expense of IBM, it is about Intel taking back control of the desktop from Microsoft ... So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin product with better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS. By the way, the new Apple OS for the Intel Architecture has a compatibility mode with Windows (I'm just guessing on this one).

LOL. But you're just guessing on the whole thing. Whatever.

I love speculation. It's fun. But let's be sure to put this purely on the opinion side of the table and then remind everyone that this guy is completely out to lunch about Intel's 64-bit capabilities today, the differences between the volumes of chips Intel and AMD can ship, the fact that the Cell processor wasn't a possibliltiy at all for Apple, and whatever other factors you'd care to toss into the mix.

That all said, I noted Intel's "platformization" the other day, and this actually does jibe with that. Which, in the end, is what makes all this so much fun.

[ Posted at 6:11 PM | Permalink ]