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IBM comfirms PPC970 work in Macs a bad thing?

hvfsl

hvfsl

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 9, 2001
1,870
187
London, UK
I just thought I would start a thread looking at the down side to the statement by IBM that its PPC970 chips will work in Macs. This is because Apple gets very angry (though this is mainly just SJ) if a company makes an anouncement about upcoming Macs. ATI did this a few years back and now Apple is switching to Nvidia even though Nvidia's chips are not always the fastest.

To me it sounds like Apple is not using the chips at the moment and IBM wants them to, so IBM are giving hints that the chips will work with Macs in an effert to make Apple start using the chips.

Also while it is obvious that Apple can't keep on using Moto, they could be doing a deal with AMD or even Intel to produce new PPC chips since the Athlon and Pentium are basically RISC chips that have units that covert CISC instructions to RISC and back again. Apple tries very hard to make sure leaks dont occur about upcoming products, so maybe the less of a comfirmation there is on a rumour, the more true it is.
 
I just thought I would start a thread looking at the down side to the statement by IBM that its PPC970 chips will work in Macs.
Click to expand...

I don't think IBM ever said such a thing.
 
at this point it's not really too bad a thing. it might be actually better for apple. people have been wondering and wondering what the hell is going on with apple. are they goping wintel proc on us are they staying with moto. this is sort of a nudge from apple for the public to sort of say ....
"look people we got's some good sh!ets coming out, just watch us now."
and ibm say...
"yeah sho-nuff.... our shiznits work with them boyz"
and so on and so on.. so the public can rest assured that apple is doing the right thing and apple can rest assured the the public is hooked.
 
It is a remarkable statement, isn't it?

"IBM did not confirm it was building a chip specifically for Apple, but it does say its new PowerPC chip will work on Apple platforms"
Click to expand...

Its chip will "work on Apple platforms". (1) What is an "Apple platform"? (2) How would the chip work "on" (not "with", or "in") it?

Obviously the wording was not written by a technical person, but a marketing person.
 
I think the ATI issue might have been because ATI made a press release before the show which stated faster powermacs were coming; taking the wind out of Steve Job's sail sort of to speak.

IBM has not confirmed that Apple is a customer for the 970, but it is a PPC chip - pretty much identical to the 750, which IS used in the iBooks. Since the BusinessWeek article was from an analyst trying to show why Apple stock is going up this year he obviously made the pointed question to IBM, who responded something like "yeah technically, sure, why not?". Big difference.

There's a great article on ArsTechnica (actually part 2)
http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1052900773.html

and the best argument I've seen as to why the 970 is for Apple. Who else would want AltiVec? Surely not IBM.

In order to compare the ATI incident, IBM would have to make a press release before WWDC saying something like "Apple adopts IBM's 970!" - and yes, that would probably piss Steve Jobs off. Of course, Apple doesn't have much of a choice since, unlike video cards that refresh every 6 months or so, cpu lifecycles are years long.

Unless there's a leak with photo proof, we'll all expect the 970, but be uncertain up to the announcement.

I'll admit, if Apple doesn't announce 970 support in Panther or something equivalent, the future for Apple in desktops would look awfully bleak.

-Wyrm
 
I think that any support of Macs by a very good new processor is good news whether or not it makes Apple happy that they announced it...
 
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