Apple Mac computer changing their processor

[Jingguo]

i just read that Apple is changing their Mac computer's proccessor chip from AMD to Intel. kinda shock 4 me.

[Airconvent]

i just read that Apple is changing their Mac computer's proccessor chip from AMD to Intel. kinda shock 4 me.

already announced sometime back...the OS will still be Apple though..

[qu1xs1lv3r]

yeah old news... my mom used to work for apple..

apple rox!!!!!!!

[weixing]

Hi,

i just read that Apple is changing their Mac computer's proccessor chip from AMD to Intel. kinda shock 4 me.

It should be from PowerPC to Intel, right?? To me, it is a downgrade move... wonder why??? May be it is Microsoft idea.... :?: :?: :?:

Anyway, look at the positive side, we may be able to use Mac OS on our PC. But on the negative side, we may soon have a Windows Mac OS coming up next... combining both OS and what we have is a user friendly OS with lots of security loopholes, bugs and virus... hee hee hee

Have a nice day.

[MooEy]

apple has planned this move quite long ago when they switched to a unix based os. moving to intel is the right move since this would allow them to produce their macs at much more competitive prices. u wun be seeing any crappy prescott in the apples, but the next generation of cpus from intel.

~MooEy~

[Airconvent]

actually apple never intended for their os to run on intel chips.
to them, doing this would mean a risk that easy and cheap third party hardware can be purchased to run their software.
in fact, shortly after the release of their intel version OS, someone already hacked their security code to enable it to run on any normal pc!
previously people would have to bother to reverse engineer an apple computer, use non standard stuff to build a pc, so apple was pretty safe as far as pirates are concerned.

apples was forced to switch to intel because they were losing market share to customers who felt that the speed difference between Intel and Apple was huge against Apple's favour. The culprit is IBM and Motorolla.
they were unable to produce the Power pc chips fast enough to meet apple's demand. also, they are also encountering alot of technical problems bumping up the speed of their chips, so while intel and amd surge ahead, the powerpc became known as a slow poke instead....steve jobs know unless he went with the tide, his apple would be left behind in the speed race..

[weixing]

Hi,

apples was forced to switch to intel because they were losing market share to customers who felt that the speed difference between Intel and Apple was huge against Apple's favour. The culprit is IBM and Motorolla.
they were unable to produce the Power pc chips fast enough to meet apple's demand. also, they are also encountering alot of technical problems bumping up the speed of their chips, so while intel and amd surge ahead, the powerpc became known as a slow poke instead....steve jobs know unless he went with the tide, his apple would be left behind in the speed race..

I don't agree with you... yes, Intel processor are fast... but only in term of clock speed The only thing intel can do to match with PowerPC performance is to run their processor at higher speed. You may wonder why is this so... One reason is the instruction set problem... intel x86 got a huge instruction set and their instruction set are difficult to decode and require more clock cycle to execute compare to the PowerPC instruction set. Generally speaking, at the same clock speed, Intel processor is slower than PowerPC... That's why intel processor are not popular in the high-end computer market.

Have a nice day.

[Airconvent]

Hi,
I don't agree with you... yes, Intel processor are fast... but only in term of clock speed The only thing intel can do to match with PowerPC performance is to run their processor at higher speed. You may wonder why is this so... One reason is the instruction set problem... intel x86 got a huge instruction set and their instruction set are difficult to decode and require more clock cycle to execute compare to the PowerPC instruction set. Generally speaking, at the same clock speed, Intel processor is slower than PowerPC... That's why intel processor are not popular in the high-end computer market.

Have a nice day.

actually, this was the general feeling some years back but not today.
apple's graphic platform has remained relatively stationary while windows has surged forward. they are still not as stable but most people don't care. by using the ms platform , the performance hit is minimal now and they are tapped to most of the rest of the world. intel chip can go as high is 3+ Ghz. eventually, so matter how efficient your code is, brute speed will compensate if fast enough which is what is happening now.
also, the graphics hardware is also faster too....apple knows it still has an edge now but the future for IBM is a question mark as the fastest power pc they are trying to push out is still way slower than an intel chip...

[weixing]

Hi,
Below are an article on this:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/06/ ... ibm_1.html

Have a nice day.

[Tachyon]

Just in case anyone thinks the PowerPC chip is going to disappear, it is not. In fact, IBM is targeting the PowerPC in Servers with higher margins than low margin mass consumer products like Macs. That is probably why IBM and Apple went separate ways.