Might Apple ditch PowerPC for Satanic chips?

IS APPLE SERIOUSLY thinking about switching processor platforms? There's been no end of speculative answers to that question over the past few years, but Apple itself has been resolute on the point: no we're not.

That stance may have changed, if comments made by CEO Steve Jobs at the company's quarterly earnings confab. Asked whether Apple is now mooting a move to x86 chips, Jobs noted that that couldn't happen until the vast majority of its users and - more importantly - its developers have migrated to the Unix-based Mac OS X. That won't have happened until the end of this year, he added.

"Then we'll have options," said Jobs, "and we like to have options."

Ditching PowerPC and Motorola, Apple's prime supplier, is, as we say, an old chestnut, and Jobs could well have been just fanning the flames of investor interest. God knows, the company needs its share price to rise.

It also needs a shot in the arm of its processor strategy. The significant architectural changes incorporated last January into the latest, G4-class PowerPC 7455 processor meant that the 1GHz chip was able to deliver greater performance than its clock frequency suggested, as does AMD's Athlon XP.

Six months on and Apple's dual 1GHz CPU boxes are looking woefully underpowered again. Digital Video Editing magazine's comparison of a Power Mac G4, a dual Athlon MP 2000+ system and a Dell machine containing a single 2.53GHz Pentium 4 produced an unhappy result for Apple: "the Mac dual 1GHz G4 could not even come close to keeping up with these two PCs".

Apple is expected to launch new high-end Macs based on faster G4-class processors - the PowerPC 7470 at up to 1.4GHz, we hear - but that won't happen until late next month. Even so, it's unlikely to turn around Digital Video Editing's test results.

In the same timeframe, Apple will ship Mac OS X 10.2, which should eliminate many of the OS' performance limiters, primarily its sophisticated but processor-intensive graphics engine. Reports from beta testers suggest users will see big improvements - provided they're willing to cough up $129 for them - but it's hard to see those changes plus the upcoming faster processors allowing Apple to reduce the performance gap with Wintel significantly.

Mac OS X 10.2 ships on 24 August. It's clearly the release that will drive the level of adoption Jobs is predicting by the end of this year. But what else is happening in that late 2002/early 2003 timeframe? Why, AMD begins shipping Opteron and, later, Hammer-based Athlons. Could these be the "options" Jobs referred to?

A lot of Mac users - not to mention AMD fans - would like to think so. AMD may be x86, but it isn't Intel, and not being Intel and Microsoft are the two main reasons dedicated Mac users stay dedicated - me included, though I'm processor agnostic.

How's this for a scenario: a Power Mac based on an x86-64 AMD chip and an Nvidia nForce 2 chipset. That would almost certainly deliver a significant hike in Mac performance without sacrificing any on the Apple platform's distinguishing features: Firewire, USB, AirPort, etc. And it could probably be offered more cheaply too.

Mac OS X's abstraction of the hardware it sits on makes that possible. Plausible is another matter. ISVs would certainly have to recompile their code, and it would mean the death of Mac OS 9 backwards compatibility. The former doesn't necessarily mean vendors would have to support multiple versions - if the x86 and PowerPC versions were functionally the same, sharing the same code base, running on Apple-certified hardware, support and installation issues would be minimal. The transition from 680x0 to PowerPC was harder to do.

And plenty of users would be happy to wave farewell to the Classic Mac OS - if they haven't done so already.

So we're all set for an AMD-Apple future? Well, Motorola's next major G4 architectural revamp, the 7500, is believed to be scheduled for an early 2003 release. And just as Dell likes to court AMD to give it bargaining power with Intel, so Apple may be hinting at a new processor strategy to encourage Motorola. Jobs comments came in the same week that Motorola's chip division announced further significant Q2 losses ($1.3 billion). And there has been talk that Apple is considering a variant on IBM's Power4, though this seems unlikely for a company that makes desktops and notebooks, not big server iron.

PowerPC or AMD - or Intel, for that matter - at the very least, Apple realises it may have to change CPUs. It's done so before - 680x0 to PowerPC, no less complex a change than from PowerPC to x86. While the plan may simply call for an alternative if PowerPC can't deliver, Apple is clearly getting itself into a position where it can make that shift and take its users with it. µ