Intel's Core Duo health causes PC industry pain

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Yawn, Vily, you have a problem

You've got some kind of brand hatred thing going on.
My G3 Powerbook was twice as fast as my Pentium II notebook and the Pentium had a faster clock. How do I know, I loaded the same linux kernel on both, and timed the two with various self-written benchmarks.
Also, when I assembled a huge bunch of benchmarks for various risc processors, and Intels, the same story was true. The processor that did the most work per cycle was the HP-PA RISC.

However that was a few years ago now, and Intel keep developing.

Apple's position is and has been that they've been frustrated in getting a sufficiently good performance per watt in the newer G4 technologies.
Sure you can get the raw performance, but it doesn't play well in small or mobile situations.

I beleive Steve Jobs when he said the Intel Core Duo flies. My Mac mini is G4. It's good.
No-one ever said what I buy now will stay performing relatively well in two years time.

I think the real reason for the problem between apple and IBM comes down to the Sony PS3. The 3.2Ghz CPU in the Xbox360 is one thing, but the Cell is a real stomper CPU, and I imagine Apple is prevented from accessing it by contract.

Essentially the XBox360 and PS3 disenfranchise both Apple and Intel, so it's in both their interests to team up.
Apple are apparently going after the home multimedia market as well, so it looks like the home multimedia war is:

IBM (cell) + Sony.
IBM (powerPC) + Microsoft Xbox360.
Intel + Apple.

Microsoft is the first off the blocks, but they've tied their sneakers together by insisting on hooking to a multimedia PC (why ALSO have a multimedia PC when you've got a 3.2GHz console??).
It's a poor show at the moment, with a bad games lineup, patchy compatability with XBox1, no high definition form of DVD. (not necessary at the moment, but having it is a sales plus).

Apple might be next off the blocks with an Intel based mac mini. This is a very strong contender because it fits right in with (video) iPods and iTunes which has 80% of digital media sales.

The final one off the block will probably be Sony PS3. This has killer advantages of (a) totally leveraging the massive PS2 back catalogue.
(b) the stompiest CPU ever.
(c) a high definition DVD so if you ever could afford that 72 feet long plasma, you could see the nose hairs of Tom Cruise.
(d) hooks in with the Sony PSP. Which I guess is Sony's video iPod on heat. Apparently the games are slow loading, but very very good. You can watch video off memory sticks. So I guess you could buy video/songs through PS3 (or direct through PSP wifi), download to the PSP and watch.
Also you can already surf the internet on the PSP.

It seems to me that Microsoft is in the weakest position here. Despite owning the desktop PC market, and the market for PDAs, something isn't gelling with all this. And they've screwed up by trying to tie Windows Media PC to the XBox360.
By comparison, the PSP can work on it's own: you don't HAVE to have a PS3. (but many will).
Apple's lineup will be stunning I guess, however they won't have the games. But then a lot of people aren't into games!

Posted by: hipparchus2001   Posted on: 01/29/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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