Re: How many times must Apple make such DRASTIC architecture changes?

[fred finklemiester <finklmiesters@fits.fits.orsomething>]

In article <lQw*bgOQq@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>,
 Tim Cutts <timc@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

> In article <1118326364.4d45ce43aa1454279edfdf55a8ae4b33@teranews>,
> Paul Schlyter  <pausch@saaf.se> wrote:
> >Moore's law doesn't seem to hold as much anymore...
> >
> >
> >In 1994 I bought a personal PC: a 64 MHz 486 with 8 MB RAM and 1 GB HD
> >
> >In 1998 I bought another personal PC: a 300 MHz P-II with 64MB RAM and 8 
> >GB HD
> >
> >In 2002 I bought another personal PC: a 1.8 GHz P-IV with 512 MB RAM and 
> >120 GB HD
> >
> >Next year it's time for my next PC, which should be a 10 GHz P-VI with 
> >4096 MB RAM and an 1800 GB HD ..... I don't think that will happen....
> 
> Those figures are nothing to do with Moore's Law.  Moore's Law is often
> misquoted to be about speed doubling every 18 months, or whatever it is,
> but that isn't what he said.  Moore's Law is purely about transistor
> count in processors, and it has held, more or less.  For a while,
> performance increased at the same rate, so Moore's Law got abused for
> that as well, but now we're seeing that second and incorrect use is
> starting to show its faults.  As far as I know, though, Moore's Law is
> still holding for chip transistor density.
> 
> Clock speed isn't rising very fast now, but performance and clockspeed
> are only loosely related anyway.  At the bioinformatics applications I
> deal with in my day job, a 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium2 is roughly 50% faster
> than a 2.8 GHz Xeon, running the same suite of programs, and in both cases
> compiled with Intel's compiler.
> 
> Different CPUs are good at different things; one reason for Apple's
> switch, which Jobs alluded to, is that x86's integer performance is
> blistering (in both Intel and AMD's processors).  Way faster than
> anything else, and in the context of high performance computing, I've
> tried almost everything that costs less than $250,000 in today's market.
> 
> IBM's POWER processors are very good at running very tightly coded,
> floating point intensive code.  In my tests, they are much less good at
> running run-of-the-mill, integer intensive codes such as the desktop
> productivity applications that are the bread-and-butter of personal
> computing.  And that's why Apple have switched.  They've designed their
> OS to be CPU agnostic from the start (after all, it's just a new version
> of NextStep, which was itself CPU agnostic anyway) and all most software
> developers will need to do is recompile -- at least if they've been
> developing in Cocoa.
> 
> And for those vendors shipping more finely tuned applications, the
> switch to x86 is also a blessing; now they only have to fine tune the
> CPU intensive parts of their code once, and then link it into both their
> Windows and OS X ports.  That's a big saving of time and money.
> 
> My main worry about the switch is that enterprising hackers will find
> ways of running OS X on non-Apple hardware.  And if they do that, and
> dry up Apple's revenue stream from hardware sales, we could be in
> trouble.
> 
> Tim

yeah, but what about us PPC folks who have faithfully, but perhaps 
naively followed S.J.s words and upgraded to a G5 thinking we would have 
the latest and greatest platform that Apple could present.  To all of a 
sudden hear of this major change to another platform altogether n the 
middle of the stream seems a bit like being flim-flamed to say the 
least.  The real B.S. is yet to come when Apple will do the hard sell on 
the Intel boxes.  Latest and greatest, most fast and more powerful than 
a speeding locomotive, yeah right Steve.

Yes I am pissed and yes I know the PPC will be around for a while, but I 
still remember Jobs and his presentations claiming the PPC to be a super 
computer, ect ect....

Well, we'll see Apple.  I hope for your sake Longhorn is a bust.