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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (14320)	6/5/1998 12:46:00 AM
From: Jeff Hayden	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

Bill, --To what degree do IBM and Motorola do this design work? Is IBM just a second sourcefab for finished M products?, or are they an active collaborator, and might enable the project to better endure? Does Apple fund any downstream work now? Apple-IBM-Motorola = AIM. AIM is a tightknit consortium dedicated to promoting the PowerPC line that was started with IBM's Power Architecture, R6000 workstation chips some years ago. Note that Motorola has added the AltiVec processor to the PowerPC; it's not sure IBM will follow as a second source for this yet. Apple definitely contributes its needs to the AIM group. However, if I remember correctly, the G3 - PPC750 - was not a result of Apple's input. I think IBM or Motorola initiated it on their own to optimize the chip for the Macintosh operating system. Apple was not the first to use it; I think PowerComputing was. Apple, at that time, seemed a little aloof about it as the chip can't be used in a multiprocessor system - the PPC 604e could. As it turned out, the G3 blew the 604e away and Apple was embarrassed. Not only that, Apple saw that if they left the clones to their G3's (and their blazingly fast new cache designs), they would run away with all of Apple's marbles as Apple didn't have a G3 design available. What to do? Shut down the clones, get the G3 and fast cache into their new designs and into production as fast as they could. Downstream work? I bet Apple has already started to code the AltiVec capability into OSX. It is mind boggling in capability and it would be a shame to lose the chip to Motorola cost cutting. I think Motorola needs AltiVec also for their networking and cellular switch controls. It seems ideal for handling ATM switching at multigigabit speeds. Somewhere on the web today, I found an article that said CISCO, who is the biggest network hardware outfit, ussd no Intel parts. I think they're also eyeing an AltiVec PowerPC - big bucks here. Jeff