Waiting for Steve's other shoe

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In Steve's defense

He NEVER SAID that Apple would use an x86 processor - only an InHell one. This leaves SOME wiggle room to backing away from x86, but the timing is critical - as developers are starting to want new Macs to develop on.

Using a "straight" x86 chip solution is DEATH to Apple. Jobs stopped mac clones before, but it would be impossible now. OS/X would become just another (pirated) OpSys that runs a FEW applications on a PC. This makes no sense - except for seppuku!

Using the OLD Apple "ROMs" solution means having custom motherboards (more expensive), and slowing processing down (as programs "hit" the ROMs). As experience has shown in the past (Shapeshifter), ROMs can be emulated in software - and thus OS/X could be pirated.

x86 solutions don't work well for running the old PowerPC software - and Apple has shown its "great" ability to create emulators before (NOT). So to move to a new "cheaper" mac, users will have to BUY more software - thus killing the value proposition.

SPARC is an interesting chip idea for Apple - but its just not fast or cheap enough. Only InHell, AMD, and IBM are capable of producing cheap CPUs - and AMD and InHell are equal in the eyes of Apple (and IBM sux).

Here's my idea - InHell has a chip that they could deliver today that has a "cult" following like the G4/G5 macheads - its called Alpha(AXP?). Making no changes to the Alpha die except to shrink it to 90nm, could/would bring the performance up to G4/G5 levels. InHell could make them cheap enough (no design costs), and macheads could once again have an "exclusive" on CPUs. The Alpha chip has a "downloadable personality" capability, which I believe allows you to download your own byte code - thus you could run those PPC programs with a minimum of emulation (not sure if DEC used this to run Windoze).

Will the Alpha rise again? I believe it would be the salvation of Apple - and a big bonus for InHell.

Posted by: Roger Ramjet   Posted on: 08/02/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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