The HammerMac?
"And, as pointed out in the article, provide AMD with major OEM presence in N/America...What are the chances of an AMD/APPL partnership around OS/X??? "
I won't speculate on what the chances are, but will note several points:
1. As a caveat for these points, I've been a Mac user since 1986, and an investor since 1984, and knew Woz and Jobs distantly back in the Homebrew Computer Club days of 1977-78. Also, a friend of mine lent them money to build the Apple I and then was a principal designer of the Apple II. So, I follow Apple closely.
I currently have 4 PowerMacs and some older museum-type Macs. I use a Titanium PowerBook and a G4 Tower with LCD display as my main Macs.
2. As for the Mac OS running on x86, this has been done several times, in-house, shown to a select few (and probably to Motorola to light a fire under them). The Mac OS X FreeBSD core, known as Darwin, already is readily available for x86: Apple put it in the Open Source domain and it can be run on x86. Check the usual Google sources, SourceForge, etc.
3. However, the Aqua interface (the actual windowing system, icons, graphics) is not part of Darwin. I would not be surprised if multiple ports to x86, and possibly to IA64 (for when IA64 is a desktop solution, several years from now), and probably to Hammer, are not already well along. Apple, like a lot of companies, runs Skunk Works projects which may or may not turn in to products.
4. The lagging performance of Motorola on the PPC (only recently allowing Apple to introduce 1 GHz processors) is causing trouble for Apple. An SOI version is coming (announced from Moto, but not in use by Apple, yet), and IBM has their own versions. Cf. the usual sources, including The Inquirer, for details on the "G5."
5. Does Jobs _really_ hate Intel? This is the popular view. My hunch is that Jobs loves himself a lot more than he hates Intel, and so he will use whichever solution is best. (I don't mean "loves himself" in as negative a way as it sounds!).
If the Hammer is what AMD says it will be, and if it can be churned out in large quantities for a reasonable price (say, $200), then it may make sense for a Mac product based on Hammer.
6. Remember, a "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks" product offering does not mean much if the vendor is not committed to it. Recall that Sun briefly offered a 386-based machine in the late 80s.
7. What would be the strategy of Apple running on Hammer? First, the better performance over G4, should G5 slip and slip. (However, G5 is anticipated to run, IIRC, at 2 GHz and have outstanding performance....remember that the existing line of G4s actually does have good performance, even at half the nominal clock speed of AMD and Intel processors...especially for video applications and the like.) Second, the ability to run x86 code "closer to natively."
8. However, this x86 code would be _BSD_ code (part of the universe of *nix-type code), NOT, repeat NOT, Windows code. It's not clear to me that this is a big deal for anyone, as the *nix community already uses a variety of processors and vendors.
9. Could there be a Windows port to this hypothetical machine? First, I expect we would have heard something leaking out about a Microsoft project. Second, it would probably take longer than it would for a Mac OS X version running on Hammer (or P4, or IA64). Microsoft is very slow in such things, and is years late in even fully supporting P3 and P4 features!
10. What about emulation? Something like Virtual PC has pretty good performance: could Connectix be working with Apple to release an emulator for this hypothetical HammerMac? Hmmmhh. This would result in some performance hit, but might give performance equivalent to a 1 GHz PIII (given what I see when running VPC 5 on my 550 MHz G4, then scaling for clock speed and Hammer instructons being x86 instructions...).
(And note that lower emulated performance may not be a big deal. The peak performance is usually sought by graphics/video professionals running Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, etc., and by gamers. The former category is a heavy user of Macs anyway, so Windows emulation would just be icing, and the gaming community is already scattered amongst consoles, different systems, etc. Few will be buying a HammerMac (hypothetical) to be running an emulated version of Everquest or Quake.)
11. So, do I think it's likely? No. Possible, and possibly already running inside Apple as a feasibility study skunkworks project, but there are just _so_ many things which have to be done in order to launch a major new platform....we would have heard more about it if anything were to be coming soon. (Soon, meaning, at next January's big rolllout show...a good time to launch a HammerMac if AMD wants to steal some thunder.)
12. Longer-term, I expect Apple will reconsider going with Intel (or AMD, but not because "Jobs hates Intel"). Or they might migrate to the Power4 processor (not the same as PowerPC, though IBM makes both, and Power4 builds on PPC).
13. Bottom line, Apple will not be AMD's savior. Even if Apple were to adopt the Hammer, the <5% market share means what it means. (Granted, this <5% user base is visible, vocal, and influential...)
So, put me down for an "I doubt it, anytime soon."
--Tim May |
