Amd acquisition rumors not so unfounded...

[Centauri]

^Agreed 100%. Apple pulled the biggest PR 180 in history with the tales they spun during the x86 transition and in hindsight it was naieve to believe Apple's claims that IBM wasn't capable of hitting their needs. IBM was and is incredibly capable and the 970 had significantly more versatility than was ever realized in actual products.

 

[lamedude]

We talking about the same IBM that couldn't deliver Job's 3GHZ G5?

 

[Idontcare]

^Agreed 100%. Apple pulled the biggest PR 180 in history with the tales they spun during the x86 transition and in hindsight it was naieve to believe Apple's claims that IBM wasn't capable of hitting their needs. IBM was and is incredibly capable and the 970 had significantly more versatility than was ever realized in actual products.

Still though, if you sum up the revenue generated by sales of x86-based products and compared to the sum of revenue generated selling ARM-based (ipod, ipad, iphone) for Apple since they switched, I think the resulting bar graph would indicate that the switch to x86 was something they had to do but certainly wasn't critical to the future of the company.

 

[superstition]

FWIW... IBM was willing to improve clocks and perf/watt. The problem was that IBM said they needed to ditch Altivec and substitute a less complex SIMD unit to do so. Apple said no to eliminating Altivec and switched to Intel, which didn't have Altivec to begin with. IMHO, Apple was using IBM as leverage to get a good deal from Intel because that's the direction they wanted to go in anyway.

The G4 had Altivec and ran fine as a laptop CPU (albeit slowly due to its outdated design). If that was IBM's excuse it was a poor one.

Altivec was fast, too. I had a dual 450 MHz G4 system and it encoded CDs at a tremendous speed for the time even with just a 100 MHz bus and 100 MHz RAM.

 

[Ajay]

The G4 had Altivec and ran fine as a laptop CPU (albeit slowly due to its outdated design). If that was IBM's excuse it was a poor one.

Altivec was fast, too. I had a dual 450 MHz G4 system and it encoded CDs at a tremendous speed for the time even with just a 100 MHz bus and 100 MHz RAM.

Altivec was very complex logic for it's time. The key to your comment is "450 MHz". It's not as hard to get complex logic working correctly at that speed compared to 3GHz, especially at 90nm.

Prescott was over 3GHz, but it was designed for higher speeds from the get-go.

 

[superstition]

Altivec was very complex logic for it's time. The key to your comment is "450 MHz". It's not as hard to get complex logic working correctly at that speed compared to 3GHz, especially at 90nm.

The G4 with Altivec scaled up to 1.x GHz and would have gone further with better development. I really doubt that it prevented IBM from scaling further. Even if Altivec had been disabled the G5 was too power-hungry to work in an Apple laptop.

Wikipedia says the last G4, the 7448, went up to 2.4 GHz at 90nm. I don't see how Altivec is a factor given such a stat.

 

[Ajay]

The G4 with Altivec scaled up to 1.x GHz and would have gone further with better development. I really doubt that it prevented IBM from scaling further. Even if Altivec had been disabled the G5 was too power-hungry to work in an Apple laptop.

Wikipedia says the last G4, the 7448, went up to 2.4 GHz at 90nm. I don't see how Altivec is a factor given such a stat.

Well, I don't remember how Altivec in the G4 compared with the G5.

In any case,that was what I heard when IBM was having problems scaling up the clocks on the PPC 970. Could have been bogus. Maybe the real problem is that IBM wasn't going to have 65nm soon enough - or, that Apple really wanted to up its margins by building systems off a standard x86 platform (I really think it was the latter - so they set a goal they were pretty sure IBM couldn't hit).

 

[Centauri]

As I recall, the AltiVec implementation in the G5 was hobbled relative to the G4's - part of the reason that the G5 wasn't anywhere near the stratospheric improvement over the G4 that Apple made it out to be (the other being the significant increase in pipeline length). The Dual 1.42GHz G4 Power Mac traded barbs with the Dual 1.8GHz G5 in plenty of tasks. Had they shipped at the same clock speeds, the G4 would have in all likelihood come out on top in spite of its bandwidth starvation.