Intel Employee – Apple Likely to Use Stock Chips

[blahsucks]

Not true.

 

Be was getting massive press and was expected to start becoming a huge player. Beos Personal was being downloaded by many many people, and those who did, liked it.

 

So what happenned? The company suddenly decided to shift gears towards the PDA market just as the operating system started to hit its stride..

Next, while they were not huge, they stopped because Apple bought the OS, it became OSX, and the company president/owner was Steve Jobs, after he had been outed. When they bought Next, Jobs came with it. More of like a 2 for 1 deal. Next was basically absorbed back into Apple from wence it came.

Neither Next or Be was necessarily forced onto Intel, and neither was really locked onto one processor, even though both company owners presided over Apple at one time or another.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

That could be said. However, if Be thought they would do well in the OS market, they wouldn't have switched over to PDAs. Be obviously believed that they could get a piece of the Internet appliance/mobile/PDA market if they decided to make such a drastic change.

 

It's not as clear-cut with NeXT, since Steve Jobs was running the company, and he clearly was not happy with Apple. Here's a quote from http://www.simson.net/nextworld/NextWorld_...ExpoSpec04.html :

By porting NeXTstep to more industry-standard systems and licensing NeXTstep to major PC vendors, NeXT hopes to shed its proprietary image. "Everybody thinks of us as a closed company, but we're really an open company," said Mike Slade, NeXT's director of marketing. While Slade wouldn't comment on which other PC vendors NeXT has talked to, he confirmed the company is hoping to sign up numerous OEMs of NeXTstep in the next few months. Slade acknowledged that '486 systems running NeXTstep will not necessarily be any less expensive than NeXT machines because of the required memory, hard disk, and video.

 

While the debut of NeXTstep '486 makes NeXT a software supplier, it does not mean that NeXT will become a major seller of shrinkwrapped software. Instead, the emphasis will be on forging relationships with PC vendors who will bundle the software with their systems, said Slade. Whether or not NeXT will decide to package the software separately had not been determined at press time.

 

Now, it seems to me that NeXT was fairly reluctant to get into the shrink-wrapped software business and that they still wanted a hold over the hardware NeXTstep came out on.

 

I'm not saying anyone was forced onto Intel, just that they made a business decision to abandon proprietary boxes and that they got absorbed by bigger companies.

[sheepdog43]

That could be said. However, if Be thought they would do well in the OS market, they wouldn't have switched over to PDAs. Be obviously believed that they could get a piece of the Internet appliance/mobile/PDA market if they decided to make such a drastic change.

 

It's not as clear-cut with NeXT, since Steve Jobs was running the company, and he clearly was not happy with Apple. Here's a quote from http://www.simson.net/nextworld/NextWorld_...ExpoSpec04.html :

Now, it seems to me that NeXT was fairly reluctant to get into the shrink-wrapped software business and that they still wanted a hold over the hardware NeXTstep came out on.

 

I'm not saying anyone was forced onto Intel, just that they made a business decision to abandon proprietary boxes and that they got absorbed by bigger companies.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

With Be, it may have been the right decision or at least what they wanted. They got bought out. The handlheld hardware market was much smaller and eaiser to design for and Be would have been a good place to start considering how it ran (fast) on almost anything.

 

Basically PDA's were an easy, open market at the time, so why fight with Microsoft?

 

 

The problem with NeXt is simple. it is the same problem with Apple now.

 

Steve Jobs. You never know with that guy what he will do. He has hurt Apple in the past just to punish hardware manufacturers (ATI, lttle does he know it only hurt the customer). He is kind of like the kid who brought the basketball and if you make him angry,, he takes his ball and goes home. Jobs is still that kid.

 

Keep in mind, the head man at Be, was the guy who replaced Jobs at one time. The apple (no pun intended) does not fall far from the tree. Both like to do things just to trip you up.

 

Sort of like Richard branson, who will practically throw his company away on a hair brained scheme that will never make money.

[OSX Blows]

Most developers SHOULD know unix or have learned how to program in it while in school.

And you forgot group d) of apple users, professionals.

 

That's right most developers, how many home users do you think that makes up um.... 5%? 2%? 1%? NONE?????

 

And as for group "d" they always lie in either b or c

[OSX Blows]

A lot of what your saying is that the new cpu's will combine aspects of both cores, which ever parts combine to make them. Didn't I say that the cores aren't going to die but rather converge?

 

Dual core's at present do not perform anywhere near "TWICE AS FAST" in real world sceenarios pentium D or yonah. On paper you would think that they are twice as fast but they're not. Just like Two SLI'd 6800 ultra's aren't twice as fast as 1.

 

With the CPU's at present this is largley due to the fact that a lot of developers can't program for them, in fact most apps written for dual cores today run slower than their single core counterparts (programmers are having problems utilising the dual cores and in particular the cache) and until they get to grips with thigs like this you won't see significant increases in a given app. This change should come around quite quickly you would hope. You will see an improvement in running multiple apps but how much still remains to be seen there will still be a small but significant OS overhead preventing the "twice as fast". I have spent some time playing with a Pentium D rig and at present I wouldn't trade in my HT P4 for one. Running Half-Life 2 and just to make it fair I put the same gfx card in both PC's (a 6600GT & and 6800 Ultra) the Pentium D wasn't anywhere near my HT P4????? and won't be for quite some time. Until Vista is mainstream and you're at least one software engine revision maybe two down the road your not going to see a huge benefit in running 1 app or game. You don't have to take my word for it try it yourself with a pentium D.

 

The current generation of PC's are more than fast enough for todays average user the only thing that is going to drive cpu sales will be things like the resource devouring vista. PC's have now got to the stage where they can do most things asked of them by most users.

 

Maybe when the second cpu version ships or I might even wait for the 3rd to buy one. Right now I have a v fast P4 media center that handles everything I throw at it. And I won't be upgrading to vista until maybe 2007.

 

And I'm porbably wrong lol but I thought I'd read on the register that Intel were going to be producing two low power Itaniums before the desktop CPU's to combat something AMD was doing?

 

With regard to the design of the core I would be interested to see how much of the the M's benefits are down to imrpoved fab processes (smaller scale, reduced inductance + reduced leakage and different materials, strained silicon etc) rather that redesigned core logic. How much of the core logic is the same? (forgetting the hyper threading) more than you would think i would bet! how much has been done to reduce leakage accross the transitor gates to reduce the power loss and have the switching times been reduced (which happens when transister sizes are reduced). How similar are the cores for a logic perspective?

 

IA64 is where the future is..... x86 wih EMT64 won't live forever....

 

lol

 

people take things far too seriously

[OSX Blows]

terry-

 

Well, thanks for your comments. I understand that it wasn't a fantastic interview - I hesitated to post it, as I knew that he didn't know as much as I thought he did. He didn't "fool" me though - he made no claims as to what he knew before the interview.

 

But the fact that he works at Intel does count for something. First, no other news site has gotten such an interview, regardless of quality. Secondly, rumors do float around the "fab" which might have told him something we didn't already know. "What was that memo I saw about production being changed to another fab the other day?" "Oh, something to do with Apple. Word is that they..." You know how it goes.

 

And on the DMCA thing - yeah, we did delete some things that were clearly in violation of the DMCA, and if necessary, we will continue to do so. While we still want to remain compliant, we're also working out a clear standard for what can and can't be posted. I'm also aware of copyright law (although I had to educate myself about the DMCA once this site grew), but when other sites are recieving C/D letters, it just makes sense to batton down the hatches.

 

Constructive criticism is fine, and I truly welcome it. Asking that I live up to the standard set by Ars Tecnica is unfair - I'm a college student doing this on the side and I have no industry connections whatsoever. However, when I try to find unique content for this site and discover that it's called "totally biased" (OSX Blows - to what questions were you refering?) and that it "sucked," it makes me question why I bother providing this content at all.

 

Hi I didn't mean any offense, your obviously enthusiatic which is a good thing but the whole interview was filled with leading questions which makes the whole interview very biased. If your doing a constructive interview your questions need to be open ended, you were trying to get the tech to say great things about Apple that he was never going to say. The interview came accross as someone who was very enthusiastic trying to lead someone into saying that Apple were the best thing since sliced bread. Sorry but that's how it came over. All credit to you for getting access to someone at intel though. And don't be put off by getting some flak about it if you're new to it it's one of those things that imrpoves with experience. Interviewing is a lot lot harder than most people think and did a pretty good job.

[johnniecarcinogen]

I am glad you posted this intereview Mashugly, information is information.

 

Since this guy had some time to reply to your questions, it is not nessesarily the answers he gave but maybe the syntax and word structure that he uses that makes this interview interesting to me.

 

It is noteable that before he even answers anything he stresses that he only works in the "FAB" department that only deals with processors and he goes on to blabber about waffers and all to emphasize this. Although the questions he chose to answer did ask about P4's this just makes him justify not talking about any other "things" Intel and Apple have been talking about when he says

 

As we all have now learned Apple and Intel have been talking for a long time about a lot of things.

He talks about how he isn't much of an Apple fan and how most Intel employees are oblivious to the computer world or something along those lines and just seems to shrug off the TPM being hacked like he just heard it happened but didn't care.

 

Anyway I hate to write long posts because shorter ones can be more effective but if Intel and Apple have been working on developing a proprietary Apple chipset to run the regular Pentiums a TPM would not be needed. Also the x86 Darwin expirement for generic 386 chipsets (and 915) was just to get OS X to "sing on x86" (as jobs said) not on the plethora of motherboards.

 

This just ads to my theory that the x86 macs will have a unique proprietary chipset not processor or socket type and jaguar x86 will be coded so that it will work on only the apple chipset which may be quite different from 386,586, etc chipsets.

[Guest terry]

A lot of what your saying is that the new cpu's will combine aspects of both cores, which ever parts combine to make them. Didn't I say that the cores aren't going to die but rather converge?

No, you said:

 

Pentium D's (and furture multicore chips) are still going to be largely based on this design but with some of the Pentium M optimisations and power reduction properties

Which simply isn't true, it's the other way round. There's very little, virtually nothing from Netburst left in the new CPU designs. They're based an a completely different design approach from the ground up.

 

Dual core's at present do not perform anywhere near "TWICE AS FAST" in real world sceenarios pentium D or yonah.

Sorry, I lose you till the end of the sentence, grammatically this doesn't make sense to me... I suppose you wanted to say that dual core doesn't mean twice the speed compared to single-core. That's correct, of course. But I didn't say that anywhere. I said that the dual-core chip Conroe is expected to be twice as fast as its predecessor Presler, which happens to be a dual-core CPU, too.

 

On paper you would think that they are twice as fast but they're not. Just like Two SLI'd 6800 ultra's aren't twice as fast as 1.

Sure, of course.

 

With the CPU's at present this is largley due to the fact that a lot of developers can't program for them,

I'm not sure whether they can't, but most of them simply didn't have to, as SMP has until now just been an issue in high-profile computing and not in the home computer market. Besides that, CPUs are generally fast enough to run most apps now at reasonable speed. I wouldn't see a reason why Thomson ResearchSoft's EndNote, for instance, would have to be heavily multi-threaded in order to take advantage of the multi-core architecture. But you're certainly right that with projections like a hundert CPU cores on a chip, new approaches to programming will be necessary.

 

in fact most apps written for dual cores today run slower than their single core counterparts

Nonsense. Single-threaded software runs a bit slower, but software that has been designed to utilize multiple cores runs much faster -- in ranges between 50 to 80% -- on a dual core CPU than on a single core one with the same clock speed and feature set.

 

(programmers are having problems utilising the dual cores and in particular the cache) and until they get to grips with thigs like this you won't see significant increases in a given app.

I wouldn't call that "problems", but yes, as stated above, new approaches to programming are necessary to exploit the power.

 

I have spent some time playing with a Pentium D rig and at present I wouldn't trade in my HT P4 for one. Running Half-Life 2 and just to make it fair I put the same gfx card in both PC's (a 6600GT & and 6800 Ultra) the Pentium D wasn't anywhere near my HT P4????? and won't be for quite some time.

I wouldn't call contemporary games the perfect testbed for exploring the power potential of multi-core CPUs... Try encoding apps, for instance, and you'll see how great the benefits can be.

 

your not going to see a huge benefit in running 1 app or game. You don't have to take my word for it try it yourself with a pentium D.

Sure, I didn't question that.

 

The current generation of PC's are more than fast enough for todays average user the only thing that is going to drive cpu sales will be things like the resource devouring vista. PC's have now got to the stage where they can do most things asked of them by most users.

Yep, that's also the reason why now it is the perfect time to stop the clock speed race and try other approaches to make processors more powerful in the future.

 

With regard to the design of the core I would be interested to see how much of the the M's benefits are down to imrpoved fab processes (smaller scale, reduced inductance + reduced leakage and different materials, strained silicon etc) rather that redesigned core logic.

Actually the P4 is the "redesigned core logic". The P-M is rather a new iteration of the old P6 design that started with the Pentium Pro. And this P4 redesign proved to be inferior to the common P6 architecture from the ground up, everything Intel was hoping for was scalability with the acknowledged design goal of going up to 10 Ghz. The first P4 CPUs were in some respects even slower than their direct P3 predecessors, despite higher clockspeeds.