Re: Hot Chips: Intel's dual-core Pentium 4 a rush job

Peter Hayes wrote:
> <imouttahere@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Peter Hayes wrote:
> > > <imouttahere@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Nasht0n wrote:
> > > Long term, I see either an Apple takeover of Intel,
> >
> > huh? INTC is 5x the size of AAPL. While I think AAPL has some
> > significant upside in the next few years, I think its historical peak
> > of 10% marketshare is all we can hope for...
>
> Apple are a company on the up, Intel have had a lot of difficulties
> recently, like the 4/5/6GHz P4's that have been abandoned.

Those were projections. Only one line has been abandoned AFAIK,
"Tejas". Good riddance to trash, but the Pentium-M looks to be an able
replacement.

> AMD have overtaken them in the 64 bit space.

Largely if not completely meaningless.

> The vast majority of 64 bit laptops
> I see are AMD based, and this is the area Jobs wants to address.

What value does 64-bitness give you for a laptop? Nothing I can see.

> > > AMD is a much more Apple like company, and their product line is more
> > > suited to Apple's core market, 3D, Photoshop, etc.
> >
> > The tech differences between AMD and INTC are irrelevant.
>
> If, as seems likely, MacTel machines will be able to run Windows/Linux,
> we'll see benchmarks that'll show AMD's advantage in 3D, Photoshop, etc.
>
> Red face for Jobs?

Will these differences be meaningful? I haven't seen anything to show
AMD's "advantage" in workstation apps. Consumers don't need that
performance, so I think the Pentium-M will be more than sufficient for
consumers.

And frankly, I want to see Apple focus more on consumers than the
high-end. If the high-end totally went away I would not shed a tear
(but of course now that Intel is handling Apple's hardware R&D this
won't be a necessary move).

> > If going Intel saves $20 on the cost of a mini, the move will have been worth
> > it.
>
> AMD chips are substantially cheaper, if any savings are to be made,
> they'll be made using AMD products.

Bull***. AMD and Intel have similar fab technologies, but Intel has
10x the sales to amortize R&D and fixed costs over. The reason AMD
chips are "cheaper" is because AMD is not making any money from them.

> AMD based PC motherboards are as competitive as Intel based m/b,
> certainly there's no cost penalty in employing them. Apple will have to
> do some R&D anyway.

Not much. While an AMD/NVIDIA/Apple collaboration would have been cool,
Intel's got the sheer mass to make this transition pay off immediately
for Apple.

I think Apple's only real concern is getting OS X locked down to Apple
hardware. The Macintosh platform is largely commodity parts anyway
(USB, AGP/PCI, 1394, HT) that changing the chipset and FSB isn't that
big a deal.

> > Anyhoo the future is belonging to low-power low-heat. Pro desktops are
> > a declining market with zero upside potential.
>
> This is true to some extent, but desktop machines will always have the
> edge in performance, and a pile of laptops running a render farm or
> server cluster doesn't seem to make sense economically either.

Both of those are marginal uses and not what Apple is about, *personal*
computing. Apple would rather sell 20,000 laptops to a school district
than 20,000 boxes to a renderer farm, since there's little platform
lock in server clusters and rendering.

.

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