Intel Macs

[RacerX]

Yeah, but NeXT was way more competent than Apple at the time. I hadn't remembered the price similarity, though.

Well, this was a few years into hardware production at NeXT. They (along with Sun and SGI) were starting to feel the squeeze in the workstation market from the increased performance of desktop systems.

The thing to note is that those prices are for those hardware configurations with standard software packages. Apple would have had to tack another $800.00 onto those prices (even more than that in the case of the IIsi because it still needed the FPU on the PDS adapter) to sell those systems with A/UX 2.0.

So in that way, NeXT wasn't just matching Apple's hardware prices, they were working to stay competitive against Apple with any inroads they were making into the workstation market.

Yeah, that was mostly the 24-to-32-bit conversion (the 32-bit enabler didn't come for dirty systems until a year later, IIRC.)

The service tech at my school offered me Connectix's Mode 32 back then for accessing virtual memory on my SE/30 (but I didn't think I needed it back then). I think Apple ended up buying the code from Connectix to make 32 bit enabler that was bundled with later System 7 releases (like you said, about a year later) and was also available as a download for people running previous versions of System 7.

I'm not sure what was more embarrassing for Apple... the dirty hardware or the fact that a third party developer came up with a solution for those systems first.

Yeah, I had dropped System 6.0.8 completely by about 1993 but continued to use my SE/30 (8/80) unchanged until 1997 when I replaced it with a PowerBook Duo 230 (12/120).

 

[jhu]

I don't mind so much going Intel (it's a good company that has made a long string of very good chips) but I'm unhappy about going x86.

The only reason the x86 instruction set is still cookin' is momentum and market share. The very good chips that Intel (and AMD for that matter) make have to push around this horrid vintage klunky mass of 1980s-vintage code, essentially emulating a 386-DX chip in deep-pipelined RISC-like chips, ripping apart those ugly instructions into piece of equal length and guessing how to execute and retire them. Huge portions of the chip hardware exist only for accomplishing this emulation of a long-dead processor that had its heyday when Windows 3.11 was young.

That's a lot of unfortunate overhead, and only the economies of scale have been driving the research & development necessary to not only do it but do it very fast.

The PowerPC instruction set is much cleaner; if R&D at either Motorola or IBM had put all their resources into making chips that would execute it efficiently, the PowerPC should by all rights have left the x86 in the dust. And the chips themselves have been simpler, more streamlined, which indicates a longer subsequent lifetime.

I don't blame Apple for not only switching to Intel but specifically switching to the exact same processor that the rest of the industry uses: Apple is tired of being burned by the lack of serious R&D on the smaller-market chips that Macs have used result in PCs generally being faster. Every time the Mac would catch up (the first-generation PPC chips were as good as competing Pentiums) or get in front (the G3 kicked butt on arrival, and the G5 beat everything but the fastest Opterons and Xeons), it would then lag there while the x86 architecture caught up and went on past again. This way, the same market forces acting to make Dells fast will make Macs fast.

Problem is, it's a sadly burdened chip-architecture and now we're riding it along with the PC. The same efforts on this family of chips will result in less performance than identical development efforts on a more modern and less legacy-hampered design.

while this diatribe maybe true, it still doesn't change the fact that intel's processors are still faster than what apple's using right now. back when transistor real-estate was an issue, the powerpc architecture did have some advantages. now that you can cram nearly a billion transistors into the space equivalent to a large stamp (eg itanium), those "risc" advantages practically disappear. if you want a real burdened architecture take a look at ibm's s/390 systems. those things have to be able to reliably run programs that were written in the 1960s.

 

[RacerX]

while this diatribe maybe true, it still doesn't change the fact that intel's processors are still faster than what apple's using right now..

I take exception to this characterization.

ahunter3 presented his opinion and provided support for his arguments. Labeling that a diatribe seems rather harsh... specially if it is a diatribe you admit maybe true.

I can site examples where almost every stage of PowerPC development had jumped to the front of the performance curve in the industry. Further, currently IBM stands unchallenged in the leadership position in the large scale computing (supercomputing) market.

The primary advantage that Apple gains going with Intel is that Intel is a technology company and they have been looking for the perfect computer company to showcase that technology for years... always with an eye on Apple. As Apple has the flexibility that no Windows based computer maker has, Apple can quickly adopt new Intel technologies that would have other wise languished.

But this turn of events doesn't call for revising history. Apple stayed with PowerPC because at nearly every stage in it's development it had advantages over competing architectures. To my knowledge the only major stumbling of this march forward came with Apple going with Motorola's G4... and even then it had more to do with Motorola's poor production quality than chip design.

In the end Apple can't foot the bill for development of a processor in an area where the processor makers have lost all interest. The final straw was Microsoft diverting IBM's resources away from Apple's needs... something that is now less likely to happen to Apple with Intel.



Well, there is my diatribe for ya.