[WinMac] Apple to move on Merced
Daniel L. Schwartz(expresso[at]snip.net)
Wed, 14 Apr 1999 08:49:28 -0500
Good morning, all!
Remember a couple of months ago when I posted about how Apple
was on shaky
ground with the PowerPC processor, with no roadmap past the G4 when the
Somerset design facility was closed last September?
Well, it looks like Apple is covering its bets. Read on...
*****
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/990413-000018.html>
Apple to move on Merced
Analysis: Shift away from PowerPC just Intel spin, but Merced support is
something else...
ARTICLE:
Posted 13/04/99 3:58pm by Tony Smith
Apple to move on Merced
Claims that Apple is to make, or at the very least is considering, a
strategic shift away from the PowerPC platform and over to Intel would be
easy to dismiss if they had appeared on a Usenet newsgroup. But when they
come from a senior figure within Intel's Architecture Group, the team that
guides the evolution of the company's IA-32 and IA-64 processors, you have
to sit up and take notice.
And that's just what The Register heard this week, from just such a source,
one who has, in the past, been pretty damn reliable.
The claim goes something like this: Apple is working closely with Intel on
64-bit versions of MacOS X Server and MacOS X Client for Intel's
forthcoming Merced processor the first to use its IA-64 architecture. The
IA-64 version of Server will ship in 2001, Client will ship in the
2002-2003 timeframe.
The background to this plan, claims the source, is trouble within the
Apple-IBM-Motorola (AIM) PowerPC consortium centering on each partner's
view of where the processor technology should go and the features it needs
to deliver.
Clearly an Intel insider can't be taken at face value where a rival
processor platform is concerned. Intel spokespeople may claim that the only
real competition on the company's radar screen is Advanced Micro Devices,
but PowerPC remains a threat, especially in the areas Intel isn't too hot,
in particular embedded systems -- processors that go into cars, fridges,
mobile phones, not PCs.
The embedded processor market isn't directly relevant to the Mac world, but
it does matter inasmuch as it's the place where Motorola's semiconductor
division makes most of its money. Motorola long realised PowerPC is
probably never going to make it big in the PC arena, so it's been
concentrating on better equipping the chip for embedded roles. That's why
Motorola developed AltiVec, the upcoming G4's instruction set extensions
for handling data streams. AltiVec isn't about competing with the Pentium
III's comparable Streaming SIMD Extensions, it's about competing with
Digital Signal Processors.
*****
MY PERSONAL ANALYSIS:
This is an interesting development if indeed it is true. Personally, I
would prefer to see the MacOS - OS/X ported to the Compaq Alpha for the
much better floating point performance, not to mention the fact that Merced
**hasn't even been taped out yet,** but this shift (if it is true)
represents something good: The divorcing of the Mac hardware from the
software.
Shops that adopt IA64 boxes will now have a choice between
NT, Tru64 unix,
other flavors of *nix, and OS/X. This cuts down on the risk of getting
"stuck" with worthless hardware that runs a discontinued NOS... This will
only be good if OS/X runs on "off-the-shelf" hardware, and does *not*
require special code to be written for proprietary hardware (like the
now-dead and unsupported Apple Network Server 500's and 700's running older
versions of IBM AIX).
Where Apple goes with the MacOS and OS/X *after* the G4 CPU will be
interesting...
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