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NEW YORK - Reports of Apple Computer shifting to building its computers with Intel chips, moving away from using chips made by IBM and Freescale Semiconductor, usually surface around the time Apple is close to making an important change in its system.
So the latest round of speculation on Monday suggested that once again Apple is close to making the leap to the Intel people camp. And though such a change is still not likely to happen, the emergence of such tales say more about Apple's unhappiness with IBM than any intention to switch to another chip maker.
Indeed, speculation was so hot that even a vague prospect of an Apple jump to Intel was enough to power the Dow and Nasdaq to double-digit gains on Monday, with Apple's stock up $2, or 5%, to $39.66 as of 3:15 p.m.
The last time these rumors floated around the computer industry was barely a few months before IBM debuted its Power PC 970 chip at the Microprocessor Forum in 2002. That chip ultimately landed in Apple's PowerMac G5 and iMac G5 computers. When the Apple-Intel rumors started flying in August 2002 - prompted by a research report by Bear Stearns analyst Andrew Neff - IBM was still trying to win Apple's business.
Since then strains have appeared in the Apple-IBM relationship. Nearly a year ago, Apple, which rarely makes public any details about its manufacturing operations, took the unusual step of publicly blaming IBM for disappointing sales of its PowerMac G5 computers, which have shipped about 1 million units since late 2003. Apple even went so far as to disclose that it had been planning to announce a new version of its iMac consumer desktop computer, but that the release had been delayed because IBM couldn't meet Apple's demand for the PowerPC chips, for which it was the sole source.
This time, Apple is trailing in the notebook PC game. Competitors like Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba and others are all offering notebook PCs using Intel chips with clock speeds of 2.8 gigahertz and in some cases faster than 3 GHz. Apple's flagship notebook, the PowerBook G4 is still running at 1.67 GHz with a version of the Power PC chip manufactured by Freescale Semiconductor, the former chip unit of Motorola.
Apple has been eager to sell a PowerBook G5 with an IBM-made PowerPC chip, but IBM hasn't yet been able to deliver a chip suitable for notebooks. The chip consumes too much power, which at once shortens battery life and generates heat. "IBM doesn't have a strong history of building chips that consume low power," says analyst Kevin Krewell of Instat/MDR, a chip market research outfit based in San Jose, Calif.
Apple may also be signaling its unhappiness that IBM's focus has turned away from Apple and toward the many videogame consoles for which it is building chips. IBM PowerPC chips - three of them, in fact - are going into both Microsoft's (Xbox 360, which hits the market later this year, and the Nintendo Revolution, due out in 2006.
Finally, IBM also has had a substantial role in developing the "Cell" processor used in Sony's PlayStation 3, which it developed in partnership with Sony and Toshiba.
Meanwhile, Apple has been awaiting a high-end PowerPC chip that, like recent chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, sports a second core, essentially giving one chip the computing power of two.
"IBM has its resources stretched all over the place for the videogame manufacturers, and meanwhile its dual-core PowerPC chip is late to market," says Krewell. Might that be enough to push Apple into Intel's arms? "Never underestimate what Steve Jobs might do when he's really mad," he says.
Still, the technical reasons that might keep Apple from jumping from IBM to Intel chips are fewer than they have been in the past, but they're a reality.
"It used to be a much bigger deal to switch chip architectures than it is now," says Dean McCarron, analyst with Mercury Research of Cave Creek, Ariz. "It's not trivial, but it's not as if the software developers don't have the option to do it."
What might complicate that process, however, is the way the IBM chip handles complex computing for features like 3D graphics. The PowerPC chip has a feature that Apple calls the Velocity Engine. Intel's closest equivalent is a feature it calls SSE3. Adapting software developed for the Apple environment optimized for the Velocity Engine to work with Intel chips and the SSE3 extensions isn't going to be easy, Krewell says.
"Those features don't match up on a one-to-one basis," he says. "You can't bring them over without suffering a performance hit." Krewell says Intel would have to create a whole new set of extensions on its chips just for software designed to run on Apple systems.
And it's on that note where Apple's relative position in the personal computer market will hurt it. Intel's biggest customers like Dell, HP and others on the Windows side of the computing world, have a bigger voice in what features wind up on Intel's priority list. Apple's relatively small 2% to 3% market share would necessarily place its requests for new features on Intel chips at a relative disadvantage.
It's also not impossible that the latest round of Apple-Intel rumors are a deliberate leak from Apple, designed to ratchet up the pressure on IBM and win concessions.
Apple has been particularly aggressive on the legal front, recently suing such Web sites as ThinkSecret.com and PowerPage.Com among others for revealing trade secrets covered by non-disclosure agreements signed up Apple employees, who are often suspected of being the source of such rumors.
Assuming that someone at or close to Apple is talking about a potential switch to using Intel chips, Apple may want to sue to find out who's talking without authorization. If it doesn't take legal action, that says a lot about who may ultimately be the source of this latest rumor - Apple itself. |
Source : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/0..._embrace_intel/
En tout cas, s'ils font ça, ils perdent définitivement un potentiel futur client (moi) et ils font une belle bourde...
Le fait que ce soit un joli PPC plutôt qu'un ignoble x86 joue à mon avis beaucoup dans la réputation de qualité des Mac.
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05-06-2005 11:56
Les couleurs dans la peinture sont des leurres qui persuadent les yeux, 
