Why Apple and Intel are destined to clash

[Barefootsies]

Interesting read. Especially the part about Apple buying AMD. I have always preferred AMD, but I think with Apple behind them. They can make a serious comeback.

A long time ago, in what seems like a galaxy far, far away, Apple and Google were the Brad and Jennifer of the tech world. Google had the cloud, Apple had the clients, and both companies were such industry darlings that fantasizing about world-changing Apple/Google team-ups was a popular pundit pasttime. The love extended all the way up to the top of Apple, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt taking the stage alongside Jobs at WWDC 2007 for the iPhone's unveiling. Jobs was supposedly so pleased with the prospects for Apple/Google collaboration that when he learned of Google's secret "Gphone" project (Android), he reportedly hit the roof.

Given how much engineering effort the company has focused on its iOS-based products?to the point where most of the CPUs in Mac hardware have fallen a full generation behind?it's hard to imagine that Jobs isn't feeling similarly betrayed by yet another Apple partner's full-court press into the smartphone market. I'm talking, of course, about Intel, which just hired former Apple and Palm VP Mike Bell to head up its smartphone efforts, and which is rumored to be contemplating a purchase of key baseband chipmaker Infineon. Intel is jumping into the smartphone market with both feet, and the company's goal isn't just to create a direct iPhone competitor?no, Intel wants to empower a whole ecosystem of iPhone competitors based on x86.

Is it a coincidence, then, that Apple doesn't appear the least bit inclined to bring its Mac line up-to-date with the latest 32nm parts from Intel? No, it isn't. But the story of the present and future of Apple's relationship with Intel is considerably more complicated than "Betrayed Apple Flees Intel for AMD."
Lagging on Intel, watching AMD

According to the Mac Buyer's Guide, the Mac Pro averages 236 days between refreshes; but it has been 510 days since it was last updated. The iMac was last updated 279 days ago; its average is 221. (Rumor is that updates are coming Tuesday, which, if true, will be just 19 days after I bought a 27" Core i7 iMac.) On the portable side, the Macbook Air has gone 413 days without an update, when its average is 255 days. Finally, the Mac mini was recently updated within a normal time interval, but it was a cosmetic update only?the machine kept the positively geriatric Core 2 Duo. All told, Apple looks set to skip Intel's 32nm Westmere generation almost entirely, and this was after the company appeared reluctant to upgrade to Nehalem. There are probably a few reasons why Apple has been slow to refresh its Mac line.

First, there's the fairly remote possibility that Apple could be seriously considering AMD. Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge will, by all accounts, be an incredibly strong family of processors, so it's hard to imagine that Apple will jump ship for AMD at this point. But Bulldozer is a truly novel architecture in many respects, and with all such attempts at radical (as opposed to incremental) improvements, it's likely to either really rock or really flop. If the project works and AMD can deliver a cheap, high-performance Sandy Bridge alternative that doesn't waste any die space on an integrated GPU, then Bulldozer would be a great option for Apple. The company would be free again to choose between ATI and NVIDIA discrete GPUs, without having to engineer around Intel's IGP.

So while we find it unlikely that Apple will move to AMD on the desktop, a combination of a successful Bulldozer launch from AMD and a string of high-profile Intel smartphone wins would put such a platform shift well into the non-crazy category.

As for other reasons why Apple is apparently skipping Westmere, we can offer two more possibilities. One possibility is related to the fact that Intel's desktop Westmere parts are an evolutionary step backwards from a system architecture point of view. We've covered this elsewhere, but to recap: Arrandale and Clarkdale move the memory controller off of the processor die and return it to the northbridge, where it lived prior to Nehalem. This move boosts memory latency, which is not good, but the real killer is that Westmere also puts the northbridge, which contains Intel's ho-hum integrated graphics processor, into the same package as the processor die. Apple can't be pleased with having to engineer around Intel's IGP in the MacBook, and the prospect of doing this on the desktop has to be particularly unappealing. It's also probably not possible to do in the MacBook Air due to space constraints.

Sandy Bridge moves the IGP and memory controller back onto the processor die, which should at least boost performance by lowering memory latency again, even if you do still have to deal with the IGP issue.

The other possible reason that the Mac line is in such sorry shape is that Apple just doesn't care very much about the PC anymore. Jobs has compared the desktop PC to a pickup truck?a utility-oriented niche that will remain popular but will nonetheless be a niche. It was clear from Apple's press conference on the iPhone antenna issue that Apple's engineering focus is now squarely on its (non-niche) iOS products, which represent the future of the company. Sure, Macs are selling well, and Apple can still steal desktop and laptop PC marketshare from the Windows crowd. But the desktop PC market as a whole is mature and commodified, and it simply can't compare to the booming mobile market as a source of the kind of revenue growth that can justify Apple's stratospheric stock price.

This is especially true in a challenging economic environment where consumers and businesses are lengthening their hardware upgrade cycles, and where the real growth story for commodity PC hardware seems to be not on the desktop but in the data center. Outside of a few important niches?none of which are large enough by comparison to the iPhone and iPad markets to be worth devoting any real engineering effort to?the desktop PC is largely an Internet client.

So the Mac will remain with Apple as a legacy product that still throws off a great revenue stream in return for a minimal amount of investment, but the Mac does not represent the kind of explosive, long-term growth potential that can justify the company's position at the very top of the technology market capitalization heap. Or, to put it another way, Apple will be happy to take PC reference designs from Intel (or AMD?) and repackage them in nice mobile and desktop enclosures?effectively outsourcing PC R&D to the chipmaker?while focusing its own engineering efforts on differentiating its post-PC products from the rest of the market... a market that will soon include Intel-made smartphone reference designs.
The reference experience

You may wonder just how serious of a threat Intel is to Apple's smartphone interests. Depending on how you define "serious threat," the answer can go a number of ways. If by "serious" we mean that Intel is serious about the smartphone market, then the threat is definitely very serious.

At the most recent Intel R&D day, Intel CTO Justin Ratner made reference to "smartphone activity" in Intel's labs, activity that he said the company will soon talk about more publicly. These remarks were in the context of his answer to our question about possible blowback from Intel going into competition with its customers by designing full-blown, market-ready products.

When we suggested that in moving up the stack from hardware and into software, services, and complete products, Intel might alienate some of its key customers, Ratner answered by reassuring us that Intel's product teams design only "reference experiences." Because Intel's products, he explained, come in reference form, a company can either adopt the reference design wholesale by just rebranding it and going straight to market, or it could replace parts of the design with custom engineering.

Rest of the article......
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...d-to-clash.ars

[jollyperv]

I always thought AMD made shit processors, looks like those days are coming to a close.

[bronco67]

AMD has been playing catchup with Intel's great CPu's for a few years now. The best AMD doesn't even beat the last gen Intels. These are facts.


Concerning the mobile app/smartphone market, I'm getting into app creation. It's projected to be a 17 billion dollar per year business by 2012. I wouldn't mind getting a tiny chunk of that.

[tony286]

I see that working for Apple, they like to put out products a little behind the tech curve so you have to update them sooner.

[jollyperv]

Originally Posted by bronco67

AMD has been playing catchup with Intel's great CPu's for a few years now. The best AMD doesn't even beat the last gen Intels. These are facts.


Concerning the mobile app/smartphone market, I'm getting into app creation. It's projected to be a 17 billion dollar per year business by 2012. I wouldn't mind getting a tiny chunk of that.

What kind of programming knowledge/languages does it take to create an app? I know nothing about such things

[bronco67]

Originally Posted by jollyperv

What kind of programming knowledge/languages does it take to create an app? I know nothing about such things

I do 3d animation, and my software has export ability to the Unity Game Engine, which does iPhone apps(with Android coming soon). There's a lot of drag and drop, but also some coding, which my business partner can handle.

It's probably a lot more work than I can imagine, but having 20 or more silly little apps out there making 2 bucks a pop for an indefinite time frame sounds good to me. I'm starting to think residual income is where its at.

Mobile is already huge, and is going to get way bigger.

[munki]

I want the one with the bigger G B s

[4pleasure_Davide]

Damn intresting read idd !

[seeandsee]

I have AMD Athlon 2cores at 4800+ and it works great on win7

[Chosen]

Originally Posted by jollyperv

I always thought AMD made shit processors, looks like those days are coming to a close.

And I always thought that for some people is better to chew than to speak...

[DamianJ]

Originally Posted by jollyperv

What kind of programming knowledge/languages does it take to create an app? I know nothing about such things

Objective C

People that think they can drag and drop and make an app will learn that you CAN do that, but it is like using Frontpage. You CAN make websites using it, but you shouldn't.

[DamianJ]

Originally Posted by jollyperv

What kind of programming knowledge/languages does it take to create an app? I know nothing about such things

Objective C

People that think they can drag and drop and make an app will learn that you CAN do that, but it is like using Frontpage. You CAN make websites using it, but you shouldn't.

[brentbacardi]

I remember AMD used to be the shit back in the day but Intel is definitely superior right now.

[Barefootsies]

Originally Posted by brentbacardi

I remember AMD used to be the shit back in the day but Intel is definitely superior right now.

Agreed.

AMD was the gamer chip of choice.

[Why]

you can use HTML to make an app. in fact many of them do, the app just opens an embedded browser and uses code to hide the toolbar at top.

http://www.sencha.com/ is a good place to get started. they even have two of three completely written apps that come as part of their demo. cool shit!

P.S. if you read this and make part of that 19Billion, i want 1%, Please ;)!

[bronco67]

Originally Posted by DamianJ

Objective C

People that think they can drag and drop and make an app will learn that you CAN do that, but it is like using Frontpage. You CAN make websites using it, but you shouldn't.

I think that's a good general attitude to have about making web pages, but Unity can really get you to a finished 3d app(its geared toward 3d) without a full knowledge of programming. It's been used to make Wii games, as well as many apps sold for the iPhone.

I'm not saying its a drag n drop walk in the park, as it is highly technical and there are many variables to consider with any software dev, but its the next best thing to actually coding.

version 3 will cover the ps3 and Android.

[Meloman]

Originally Posted by DamianJ

Objective C

People that think they can drag and drop and make an app will learn that you CAN do that, but it is like using Frontpage. You CAN make websites using it, but you shouldn't.

I always find it ironic that the consensus is you shouldn't use FrontPage all though I've used it for years and I know at least 2 other 6 figure MONTHLY affiliates that use it still. Go figure.

Long live FrontPage, LOL

[gleem]

Originally Posted by barefootsies

(rumor is that updates are coming tuesday, which, if true, will be just 19 days after i bought a 27" core i7 imac.)

powned! Lol!

[gleem]

Originally Posted by Barefootsies

The other possible reason that the Mac line is in such sorry shape is that Apple just doesn't care very much about the PC anymore. Jobs has compared the desktop PC to a pickup truck?a utility-oriented niche that will remain popular but will nonetheless be a niche.

This is the real point.. they don't care, even with the latest update they haven't redone the chassis design in 7 years, same shit as my old G5, and the further insult is the LCD they put out hich is obviously for laptops with the mini connector and no longer making a MATTE screen an option (for designers/professionals) and the discontinuation of the 24" & 30" LCD.

The only reason I think they updated the pros at all was to try and help the gamers switching to macs to play the latest games and be able to use all the valve games coming down the pipe.