Paraphrasing the ex-IBMer: Intel was a single company with the lion's share of the market. While two companies--IBM and Motorola--had to divvy up a much smaller share of the market, while still investing, individually, tremendous amounts of money.
And Apple played one against the other, according to this person. IBM had been concentrating on delivering high-performance, single-core PowerPC processors, this person said. Presumably by ratcheting up the gigahertz rating on single processors. The goal was to exceed 3GHz. But when Intel, as part of the discussions with Apple, showed a dual-core multi-core processor roadmap, Apple reconsidered this strategy, according to this person. Though IBM did deliver multi-core PowerPC designs for the Mac as shown in the graphic, these were not the same kind of multi-core designs that Intel was proposing.
Big Blue was hoping to move Apple to Cell and then get the economies of scale there, according to this person. Can parallels be drawn with Advanced Micro Devices and its struggles to compete with Intel over the last few years?
Witness AMD last year going to the brink and then saving itself by spinning off its manufacturing operations. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy , which we encourage you to read.
Upon its release in the Mac, the PowerPC impressed the heck out of Mac users thanks to the significance of the upgrade compared to the line. As longtime public-television tech journalist Stewart Chiefet put it at the start of a Computer Chronicles episode :. Is the PowerPC worth it? They used to use a pretty powerful computer here, a Quadra , but using the it used to take a minute or so to preview a complex graphic like this one.
Now it takes about 10 seconds. But even then, it was not exactly an unvarnished success. IBM and Motorola joined Apple in this endeavor with the goal of creating a next-generation standard to drive the technology industry forward … but after all that, the only big company that was primarily using PowerPC chips in its PCs was Apple. Learn More, Hoser. It was much more successful in video games, however; during the seventh generation of the console wars, all three primary game platforms—the Nintendo Wii, the Xbox , and the Playstation 3—used the POWER instruction set architecture in their respective processors, with the Wii using a direct successor to the processor the original iMac G3 used.
But for many years, Apple still greatly benefited from access to this architecture, which was so highly advanced that, at the time the G4 processor was first introduced, it was technically classified as a weapon by the U. And in , a PowerPC-based chip actually pulled off the multi-core trick that Apple had dreamed of for itself years prior with Project Aquarius. That chip, the IBM POWER4 microprocessor, became the first commercially available multi-core microprocessor , and was also one of the first processors to top the symbolic 1-gigahertz mark for processing power.
It was never a good idea to make Steve Jobs explain the limitations of a processor line at his biggest keynote of the year. There were a lot of reasons for this, but one of the most embarrassing might have been the 3-gigahertz problem. See, at the time Apple announced the Power Mac G5 in , Jobs made a claim that the company would soon be shipping a machine with a 3-gigahertz processor, which turned out to be a bit more ambitious than the G5 was actually capable of.
After discussing a 2. What happened? What happened was: The G5, as you know, is a very complex chip, and in the semiconductor industry to make things run faster they traditionally shrank the geometries, and so the PowerPC was being made in nanometer geometries.
And in the last year the semiconductor industry has gone from nanometer to 90 nanometer expecting everything would just get faster, no problem. It hit the wall. As Low End Mac explains , while IBM and Motorola had in the past made available mobile-specific versions of various PowerPC processor generations, there had at times been a bit of a delay between the time that a PowerPC generation had hit the desktop and for its portable equivalent to emerge.
These days, an Intel-esque solution to this conundrum might look like this: Develop a laptop with multiple cores to get more processing power out of the last generation.
But multi-core CPUs were still new and the potential untested, and that left a generation of Mac laptops stuck in limbo. Ultimately, the Powerbook line topped out in , with a single-core G4 processor that had four times the processor speed of the original G4, introduced six years earlier. As a CNet piece explains , a variety of factors, including access to Windows and a decaying partnership with IBM, drove the move. For these reasons and others, Jobs found himself on the WWDC stage, two years after introducing the G5 and one year after admitting its technical limitations, announcing a move to Intel.
In late , Apple even released a four-core model—its first model with a multi-core processor two of them, in fact. But Mac diehards admittedly felt a little defused by the whole situation. As far as I can recall, this is the first new top-of-the-line Mac that has ever been introduced with a slower clock speed than its predecessor.
Yet the Mac community is making little fuss. Click graphic to zoom. Click graphic to zoom by 1. Christensen says he hopes this will enable highly integrated, controllable Digital Signal Processing DSP boards that catch on better than similar efforts using PowerPC. With the Xilinx Zynq and the Altera Cyclones, you can save power by not running the fabric as fast and the processor is in charge.
Freescale has come out with these i.
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