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

To: Robert Mayo who wrote (25065)	6/5/1999 2:24:00 PM
From: Richard Habib	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 213176

Robert, well it sounds to me as if AppleInsider may have confused some data. The denials from MOT are fairly emphatic. As you say, Apple management stated G4 "this time next year" during WWDC. (Although some tried to twist that to mean Sep) G4 with Altivec is debuing at 400 Mhz which is what was demoed at the IEEE conf this earlier this year. By the way the specs during that demo were a SPECINT and SPECFP of about 20 each according to my notes. Altivec wasn't quantified. For comparison a PIII 500 is 20.6 & 14.7 respectively but keep in mind that G4 will debut against (Assuming Spring) a PIII Coppermine of about 750 MHz. Since Coppermine has chipset improvements and process improvements over PIII you can't simply linearly increase SPEC marks for Mhz but to get a rought idea, I'll do it anyway. A Coppermine 750 (That's probably slightly conservative, may be 850 Mhz by G4 debut) would have rough SPEC marks of about 30 and 22 respectively. That's why I haven't been enthused with the G4. Of course Altivec is impressive on paper but requires cooperation of developers to take advantage of it so I'm a bit concerned about real world performance. After the IEEE conference I noted sites like MacKido trying to downplay Spec marks but you have to use something and Spec marks are a reasonable method. My point is that G4 at 400 Mhz may not have Apple management overly excited. There seemed to be a little defensiveness in MOT management remarks. It could be that Apple having bet the farm on G4 is upset with performance. First, it would be a difficult marketing task to intro a slower Mhz chip. Second, marketing Altivec will be at least as difficult as marketing MMX and SSE was for Intel. It's not a concept easily grasped by consumers, especially Apple's entry level consumers. Bottom line, perhaps MOT is having some trouble with yields for higher speeds, hence the 400 intro and while that is good for embedded apps, probably not for Apple. Apple being disappointed in performance is waiting for higher speed yields to ramp next year. Roy, I wouldn't worry about Merced as a competitor to G4. First and foremost, the IA-64 chips, Merced and it's follow-ons are unlikely to see consumer use for a few years. As we have discussed they are targeted at the big iron market - $ 20K and up machines although you may see them in $8-10K machines. There is quite some info that Merced itself has had some difficulties, given it's radical architecture, and may not be that great. That info suggests that the real big iron killers will be the follow-on IA-64 chips. Willimette in late 2000 to early 2001 will have a SPECFP of about 45 with Foster following targeted at SPECFP of 55-60 so you can see these are very powerful chips. Lastly, Windows 2000 was originally a threat to Apple because it was to wrap Win 98 into it and become one OS for all purposes. That is no longer the case and Windows 2000 will be an enterprise OS with Win 98 or whatever continuing in the consumer market. Despite Jim's, pleas, Apple management has stated it's not interested in the enterprise market and I for one believe them, thus Windows 2000 isn't a competitor. Rich