AMD, Apple - trollers sail out to sea

It even prompted the great Doctor Spinola to issue a bulletin from his redoubt in the deeps of middle England.

Here's a selection of the letters we've got, and bowing to age as we do, we'll kick off with the Spinolagram.

Just a note to readers - we don't normally publish people's email addresses or even necessarily their full names unless they make it clear from the beginning they don't mind. µ

Spinola strikes brack
One of the occupational hazards of working in online journalism is the ability of readers to reply to stories immediately, in bulk and at length. This is a healthy process. We'd like to reverse the process for a change, and write a story in response to a reader's letter.

Richard Getz wrote at some length here about what he perceives as a threat to Intel and Microsoft coming in the form of an alliance between AMD and Apple, centred around 64 bit computing. Getz argues that the upcoming Hammer chip would form the perfect platform for the 64 bit variant of MacOS X.

Unfortunately, his views are couched in the usual ACDNW (Apple Can Do No Wrong) terms - "Apple's design team has engineered a beautiful work of art", "an untouchable user interface with world renowned ease of use, a design style only seen in galleries" and so on. But the basis of his argument appears to be that if Adobe, Corel and Macromedia all produce 64 bit variants of their products, the World will beat a path to Apple and AMD's door. "What is there not to like about Apple?", gushes Getz.

Forgetting for a moment the fact that any 64 bit versions of PhotoShop and CorelDraw 99 (or whatever version it's up to now), will also run happily on Intel (or IBM) 64 bit platforms, the main flaw in his assumption is that users - not the folks running back office systems and servers - want or need 64 bit computing at all.

In maybe 10 years, most applications will come as 64 bit products for the simple reason that the only chips being made will be 64 bit, but right now, the only people who need 64 bittery are those running huge databases, video on demand or esoteric scientific applications. Apple hardly has a fine track record of delivering value for money solutions, so what price a premium 64 bit Mac, regardless of whether it has Motorola or AMD silicon inside? One of the main reasons that Apple has only a single digit share of the World PC market is down to the company's greed - reflected in decades of inflated price tags - rather than how much the CPU it uses happens to cost.

Getz appears to have fallen into the trap of thinking that 64 bit is better/faster than 32 bit because it's a bigger number. There's also an argument that Mac users don't give a rat's ass about the technology inside the box, but simply base their buying decisions on whether that box will clash with the office décor. These are the kind of people who hire Feng Shui consultants to advise on their IT systems. They're more interested in the colour of the thing than any of this tiresome technical 32/64 bit mumbo jumbo.

If Apple had any business acumen, it would try to move away from the tired old Motorola platform and offer alternatives from AMD and Intel, but offering alternatives isn't something that Apple's ever been good at. If Apple had allowed other manufacturers to licence its technology and operating systems years ago, Windows would never have been invented; Microsoft would be a small applications developer complaining about the Apple monopoly; Intel would still be making chips for calculators and AMD wouldn't even exist.

Apple's tenacious grip on its intellectual property has contributed more to Microsoft and Intel's market dominance than any other single factor - Apple wouldn't let anyone else build Mac clones, so people wanting a choice (and not wanting to pay through the nose) had to look elsewhere. What's the point in having a technological lead if you don't use it to your advantage?

Turning to the matter of Apple and AMD getting into bed together, let's have a look at how the PC market stands at the moment. Compaq is lying on its back with its legs in the air; Gateway is barricading the doors; HP is more interested in snaffling up Compaq than doing any innovation; IBM is, well, behaving as IBM always does; Intel and AMD are still banging away at their "mine's bigger than yours" argument; and Motorola - well, who knows what Motorola's up to?

So if we're talking about unholy alliances, we can forget AMD - it doesn't have any money. Intel has loads of cash and has been making desultory attempts to build iMac look-alikes for years. The only move that would make business sense would be for Intel to buy Apple. Microsoft wouldn't mind - it's as happy to flog software to Mac users as PC folks; even Dell wouldn't care much - it could carry on building the bulk of the world's PCs, leaving an Intel-owned Apple to service the overpriced niche market. Dell would be the only other company in the running to take over Apple, but would never get the deal through the morass of US anti-trust legislation. Intel could get away with it.

Intel and Apple? Makes some kind of sense. But the words 'Apple' and 'business sense' don't often appear in the same sentence, do they?

Memories, Dreams, Reflections...
Christian Z writes, succinctly: "This is what I dream about every night....

Watts the problem?
Simon W says: The G4 chips in the new iMacs require about 10-15 watts of power, while an AMD or Intel chip that can supply that much computational performance requires 60-70 watts. Aside from the higher electricity bill that goes along with AMD or Intel, the designer of the computer has to put in much, much more cooling, AND the AMD and Intel chips are physically bigger.

If Apple had any intention of using great big, hot-running AMD or Intel chips, they would not have spent the last year miniaturizing their entire product line and talking up the benefits of quiet, fanless computing. The iBook, PowerBook, and iMac each shrank by more than 50% in volume … how are you going to fit the Athlon in there? How are you going to cool it? PowerMacs ship with four empty PCI slots and three empty hard drive bays, include Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, and AirPort on the motherboard, AND power their displays as well. What kind of power supply would they have to have to also use CPU's that need more than 5 times the power? Two Athlons is getting on for 150 watts, just for the CPUs.

The reason the computers in Apple's retail stores are all hooked up and ready to use, with software on them and accessories such as camcorders plugged into them is that Apple wants you to go to an Apple store and actually USE a Mac, work on it a bit, do what you do everyday on one of their machines and see how if it can make your workday better. Apple's machines are not lacking in performance. For graphics, Photoshop and similar apps (and a LOT of apps are similar, even using the same plug-ins) continue to run faster on the Mac.

For video, Final Cut Pro 3 running on Mac OS X is doing realtime transitions and effects on notebooks with no additional hardware! For audio people, Mac OS X is already displaying the lowest latencies ever seen on a personal computer, and the G4's Velocity Engine runs reverbs like it was designed to do that (which it was). Work with Mac OS X and take a moment to reflect upon the fact that your window into the computer is prepared for you in realtime with the quality of an artist's rendering, compositing the output from each app into a seamless whole, and ask yourself whether the machine is lacking performance.

When I read criticisms of the G4, it always seems to be from someone who hasn't used one to do any real work. It's always, "I would get a Mac, but I can't go from a 1.6GHz Athlon to a 1GHz G4! That's going backwards!" Put the spec sheets away, people … today's broad range of desktop tasks and the requirements of portability (battery life, etc) and small form factors make spec'ing a computer a very, very complex task. There is not even a good way to compare a cumulative spec, never mind just picking one spec like CPU clock speed almost at random and pretending it tells you anything useful. It doesn't. Use some systems outside of Intel/AMD (such as Sun's 1GHz machines, or Apple's 1GHz machines) and you won't regret the education.

Succinct again...
Hinojosa writes: "Outstanding! Please copy your article to Apple and AMD as soon as poosible.

No re-writing, please
I'm not sure you understand what you are purposing and I don't know that I agree with your facts!

"the Mac does not have a processor that can take OS X to the level of performance that is achievable. IBM/Motorola is slow to turn out new technology due to the lack of competition. "

Although I agree that the PowerPC line of chips has fallen behind in general over the past year that was not always the case and there is reason to believe it can again get back on top with the G5 due in the same time frame as all other 64bit chips.

Further, although general performance of the G4 1Ghz chip might fall short of the general performance of a 2Ghz P4 or a 1.5Ghz AMD chip, it does have it's areas of expertise when employing it's vector units. For example a 1Ghz G4 can out compress both the P4 and the AMD when it comes to Mpeg 2 video and other very processor intensive tasks (encoding music, 3D rendering, raytracing, and just in general pixel manipulation)

So in many areas where you can actually see a performance difference the G4 does compete and the G5 should dominate if Mot/IBM can even get close to the same clock rates as Intel/AMD.

"Apple introduces the new iMac while it begins work on a 64bit version of OS X. Remember not all of the applications have to migrate to 64bit with AMD, but can remain 32bit until new version are warranted."

Note the G5 is also a dual mode chip and even though the AMD chip can run 32 bit there are no Mac OS applications available for it. So apple has two choices, Port all of the carbon and cocoa API to AMD. Make an Altevec emulator/translator so that all of the optimizations for the Mot vector unit are not lost and convince application developers to recompile an tweak their apps yet again.

Or, because Apple would be on an X86 chip, they could try to make a really good Win32 API port (that MS can break at will in the future) and hope that the Mac application vendors will re-compile for this Mac/Windows thing.

Oh ya, and completely re-write imovie, iphoto, idvd, itunes, FinalCut Pro and DVD studio along with Quarts, quicktime, java, OpenGL.....etc...

"Apple also has some very, VERY dedicated partners such as Corel"...

Adobe has not even finished it's application re-write for OS X. It might be hard to get rapid support for an OS X64/X86 system.

"MD's new Hammer cores just happens to be designed to take special use of MD environments. "

As are the G4 and G5.

"Looking forward towards the holiday season this year and what do we have? Does M$ have a consumer level 64bit OS? No! Does *ntel have a successful 64bit processor? No! Is M$ server solutions even close to being secure? I think not! "

And just think how far along OS X, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes and the rest will be if Apple doesn't have to re-write them for a new Chip and just takes advantage of the G5 which has major advantages over AMD in most of these applications.

Trollers fishing at sea
First, I'd like to say how disappointed I am that you posted such a blatant troll on your site just for the pageviews it'll get. :)

The author of the letter equates the lack of "features" on most AMD desktops sold by OEMs to "strongarm" tactics by Wintel. That's pretty good as far as rhetoric goes, but did it ever occur to him that perhaps the AMD systems are sold more as value systems, since the components are generally much cheaper? To most consumers, AMD means lower prices, not higher performance. So the OEMs cater to that, most AMD desktop systems are value systems.

I'm going to respond to some key sentences I found most amusing:

"Does M$ have a consumer level 64bit OS? No!"

Microsoft has had a 64-bit Windows XP working for some time now. It's not consumer level -- why would it be? There's no 64-bit consumer CPUs. It wouldn't take much effort at all to port the Home and Professional editions to 64-bit, there's already 64-bit Windows XPs out there.

"Does *ntel have a successful 64bit processor? No!"

You've already seen the McKinley benchmarks? Do tell me where you saw them. :) You also seem to be forgetting Yamhill technology, which allows for 64-bit Pentium 4s if the need arises.

"Is M$ server solutions even close to being secure? I think not!"

Absolutely, provided you're competent enough to keep up to date on patches. Not up there with mature Unixes and Unix clones alike, that's for sure. But this doesn't make your case for Apple: OS X Server is a complete joke, no one uses it.

"But Apple will have a brand new OS X-64, an untouchable user interface with world renowned ease of use, a design style only seen in galleries, and the stability of Unix."

Untouchable user interface is right.

Flashy design, memory hog, sluggish responses, bastardized dockbar and all. I'd hate to touch it. I would touch the "Stability of Unix" comment, but I really don't feel like engaging in a rhetoric debate.

All I can say is that from personal experience, OS X is not near the stability of a real Unix. Apple fixed that up real good.

"Apple has all the apps for home users, as well as corporate and design professionals."

The last time I checked, Apple didn't exactly have a huge selection of apps for home users. They have the essentials, but there's not much choice out there. Certainly nothing you can't have on the PC. Conversely, there's many applications you can't get on the Mac but can on the PC.

"What is there not to like about Apple?"

For starters, they're grossly overpriced. They seem to be placing emphasis on style over substance (Aqua is pretty and all, but it's not as funtional as OS 9 was). How about their blatantly false advertising? That gets me every time. Apple.com still talks about how the G4 can "do up to 4 32-bit floating point operations per cycle", saying the "Pentiums" cannot.

That's patently false. Pentium IIIs can do 4 32-bit fp ops/cycle via SSE. In fact, the Pentium 4 one-ups Altivec on the G4 by being able to do 4 x 32-bit ops OR 2 x 64-bit ops (double precision). Blegh!

"Think of it like this, WinTel is like stale beer from a keg you forgot to return from last year's party, while the Mac is like finely aged wine for a smooth robust texture that is sassy, yet not bodacious."

It's more like: "The Mac is like stale beer your buddy tries to sell you with ribbons on top, while WinTel is like Guinness." (You know Guinness owns!)

Richard Getz, I loved your troll. I look forward to reading a similar letter next year, and the year after, and after that... µ