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



Shawn Hearn wrote:
In article <lVYpe.2151$751.1605@newssvr30.news.prodigy.com>,
 "Sean Fahey" <a2fan@hotmail.com> wrote:

The PPC wasn't going to go where Apple needed , fast enough. The Pentium 4
is actually a pretty good processor, with better branching and latency then
the PPC. Now they've got dual cores, hyper-threading - it was a good time to
make the change. Get over it already.


I agree to a point. Don't forget that one thing that Apple apparently wants to do is migrate its entire line of Macs (both pro and consumer) to a 64-bit architecture, which would leave out the Pentium 4 chip and Celeron as likely CPUs to be built into Intel based Macs. If anything, Apple with go with an Itanium processor for its Macs and perhaps some lightweight version for laptops and iMacs. Even Steve Jobs said in his keynote that all the stuff he was demonstrating will never be sold as Mac products. The only thing that seems fairly clear is that the future Intel Macs will have an x86 architecture or some superset of it.

Actually, it will be to 64-bit Pentiums, due out soon.

Moving to the IA-64 would be a mistake, since Intel has relegated
IA-64 to the high-end server market--that would leave Apple exactly
where it was with PowerPC.

-michael

8-voice music synthesizer using NadaNet networking!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/