A friend writes:
I don’t by the iTanic theory. Itanium is an answer to
a question no one was asking. If it’s about power,
Apple would stick with POWER. [Goofy] way to put it, but
IBM has the fastest processor architecture bar none.My third best guess is Apple/Jobs had a falling out
with IBM. (Possible) Jobs, like most of the princess
CEO’s, must have his way. He didn’t get it with fab
issues and performance targets.My second best guess is Apple saw the writing on the
wall vis-a-vis cost per unit. That’s cost in terms of
power, cost as a development target, and cost to
build.POWER and derivatives run hot. A G5 based portable
system would be a battery hog with a capital H.
Celeron and Pentium-M run pretty cool, relatively
speaking. The technical justification is reasonable
but should be solvable in other ways.RISC architectures yield better performance at the
expense of substantially more complex compilers and
code. Intel is a relatively easy platform for which
to develop and optimize code. I’m not sure I buy this
as a motivator. When is the last time you wrote code
that used low-level chip functions? Assembly
programming is a dying art outside of the S/390 space.Cost to build – this I buy. There are a hell of a lot
more Intel chips, fabs, and sources. Apple has got to
increase volume somehow, and people are just more
comfortable with Windoze. Perhaps Apple has plans for
an ultra-cheap Mac Mini that will break the $350 mark.
This is an especially pertinent mark to break given
the transition of many home PC functions into the game
console market.My prediction: Apple will not survive this change if
it is all about cost. They barely survived the 68000
to PowerPC shift.Here’s a shadow conspiracy theory, and my best guess:
The CPU will become irrelevant in favor of
programmable coprocessors, particularly Cell. This
could mean that IBM will still have a significant role
in Apple hardware. It could also mean that Apple is
scared $hitless of the smart console market,
especially with IBM cozying up to Sony.I have to admit that I didn’t see this one coming.
The industry rags have mentioned an Apple/Intel
announcement for years, and I always thought it was
nonsense.What’s your theory?
I dunno. the only reason I thought of Itanium was that it was 64 bit and I couldn’t see Apple going back to 32 bit, even with the extensions (to get around memory address limits).
[composed and posted with ecto]