By the way I agree IBM does know its business. Probably too late to
backtrack on Altivec but I am very leery of MOTs ability to execute.
Agreed. This is eerily reminiscent of 1992, when Apple was totally dependent on Motorola for 680x0 chips. The 68040 (compare G3) had shipped, but Motorola was having a terrible time getting its clock speed up (they struggled to get anything shipping beyond 33MHz), while Intel had the 80486 humming along at 50 and 66MHz. Meanwhile, the 68060 (compare G4) was so late, and had gone through so many silicon revisions.. it eventually shipped, but after Apple was almost on the verge of releasing the first PowerPC 601 machines.
Unfortunately, we seem to be in the same situation today. The G4 is horribly late (it was originally supposed to ship at the beginning of 1999). The G3 is rapidly losing the MHz rate to Intel. And Apple is seemingly dependent on Motorola again for their next gen chip architecture. The decision by Apple to commit to Altivec, and then have Motorola the sole provider of it may come back to haunt Apple in the long term.
Personally, I believe Apple should have not put all their eggs into the Altivec basket, and instead pushed IBM to up the clock rate on their G3s, possibly moving to a "G3.5" design (with longer pipelines) to push the clock rate even harder. IBM has tremendous silicon and fab processes, and could probably ship a 700-800MHz G3 by the end of this year, if Apple had committed to go that route instead of with Altivec.
In any case, now those rumours of Apple going with Merced/McKinley in the long run make more and more sense. |
