8 Jun
2005
8 Jun
'05
12:46 a.m.
On Tue, 07 Jun 2005 08:29:12 -0400
"Curt @ Atari Museum" <curt at atarimuseum.com> wrote:
Apple's move all but ensures the death of the
PowerPC chip since they
were its biggest buyer.
Note that todays IBM POWER chips are "nothing
more" then PowerPC on
steroids. Or better sayed a PowerPC, especially the G5, is a downsized
POWER5. POWER / PowerPC will live on in IBMs server world. And don't
forget the embedded market. There went way more PowerPCs into printers,
cars, SoHo DSL routers, switches, DVD players, ... then im Macs.
Remember MIPS? A big player in the workstation / Unix market. Now that
SGI, the last MIPS user, switched to Itanicum, MIPS is dead in this
market. But MIPS is _verry_ wide spreed in the embedded world.
The amount of chips IBM is selling to Apple is tiny compared to there
total silicon output. It cost IBM to much to improve the G5 / make it
faster only for Apple. So they didn't, leaving Apple with a CPU that is
faling more and more behind the x86 CPUs speed wise. Not to speak about
the non-existing low power G5 for laptops. So the natural decision of
Apple was to switch to somthing else. Unfortunately there is nothing
else then x86 for this requirements. I don't like this switch, but I can
understand Apples motivation.
--
tsch??,
Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/