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Intel is now too powerful
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Actually I think right now Intel is in the most danger it's been in years. It's been caught flat footed by the MIDs, phones, net-tops and smaller handhelds. They have nothing that can compete watt for watt with xscales. The Atom has been widely lauded, but it seems like a stop gap measure to me, A line in the sand to keep these other low power processors from creeping up into bigger devices. Atom works fine for Net-tops, but it's way to hot and power hungry for the growing smart phone and mid market.
Interestingly the same market is where windows is the weakest, so we could see some real shakeups in the near future.
Interestingly the same market is where windows is the weakest, so we could see some real shakeups in the near future.
In fact, I knew a few news about Intel, for instance, I just heard Xscale from you, then I searched it by google. The result let me be more surprised.
I don't want to see only a big one in the market, ( for example, many years ago, when AMD and VIA were very weak, I remembered clearly that we had no ways to choose the cpu of PC, on the other hand, we have to choose Intel) others get weaker, such as SGI.
SGI to me is a great story. Why the result of its cpu was over? And yeas ago, the cpu of Sun was better than Intel in the market about server. However, their results are all the same that they have to use Intel's cpu.
Can't remember what its called, but AMD is supposed to have a new chip coming soon, very powerful. Hope so as if it wasn't for AMD, INTEL would still be charging $800 US dollars for a .200 hz upgrade, something they used to be able to get away with before AMD came out with the first 1 Gigahertz Athlon.
Perhaps you're thinking of Intel's Nehalem, which is expected to show up in servers and workstations by the end of this year. In the limited previews so far, Nehalem has been found to be significantly faster than Intel's current CPUs. AMD's Shanghai is also supposed to show up in servers and workstations by the end of this year, and is expected to reach the level of Intel's current products.
Intel still charges hundreds of dollars more for marginal increases in performance. And people still buy the CPUs.
Back when AMD's CPUs were superior, AMD charged more. Intel's Pentium D (dual-core) chips started at around half the cost of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 CPUs.
Different CPUs are better for different things on Sun servers. For integer and few threads it's Xeon; for floating point and few threads and better efficiency it's Opteron; for many threads, throughput, and maximum power efficiency it's CoolThreads.
You are right. But I just have some thoughts about other kinds of cpu, when I use Mac, I always think about it that why is it that Apple is better than Intel and Miro, but the market of Apple is less than them. Mac to me is Art, Windows is Machine. Even SGI is better than Mac in graphical area, I hope SGI continues to use its cpu, at least in graphical area, SGI's cpu is better than Intel, although I know that SGI never goes back.
The DEC Alpha was *waaaay* faster than anything from Intel for many years. That would still be the case today had Compaq & HP not deliberately killed it off. 
Remember, Alpha was fully 64-bit starting in 1993 - that's 15 years ago.
Even today, the latest GS1280 model scales to 128 CPU's, 256 GB of RAM, and 128 PCI slots with more than 200GB/s of I/O capability. There is no intel system on this earth that can match that kind of power and scalability, not even close. But this is a large NUMA system intended for scientific applications, not a workstation or peecee.
HP sold the Alpha chip technology to intel a few years ago, and along with it all the Alpha chip engineers. Why do you think intel has made such huge strides in chip design the past couple of years??? It's Alpha re-incarnated.
Remember, Alpha was fully 64-bit starting in 1993 - that's 15 years ago.Even today, the latest GS1280 model scales to 128 CPU's, 256 GB of RAM, and 128 PCI slots with more than 200GB/s of I/O capability. There is no intel system on this earth that can match that kind of power and scalability, not even close. But this is a large NUMA system intended for scientific applications, not a workstation or peecee.
HP sold the Alpha chip technology to intel a few years ago, and along with it all the Alpha chip engineers. Why do you think intel has made such huge strides in chip design the past couple of years??? It's Alpha re-incarnated.
Looks like IBM will be releasing their new Power 7 chip with 8 cores @ 4.0 Ghz.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/11/ibm_power7_ncsa/
Intel doesn't even come close to that...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/11/ibm_power7_ncsa/
Intel doesn't even come close to that...
People can only dream of having this chip in their Macs, at least the Mac Pros.
This makes no sense to me.
Intel is used by so many manufactures for laptop, desktop, and servers. They have been the dominate CPU maker for years. Apple is a latecomer Intel customer.
no offense but before apple intel was crap - pentium 4? pentium D all little power hogs apple helped them design the Core architecture didnt they? (i think so sorry if im wrong) Like do you see dell or Microsoft going and helping develop the processors that go into there computers? NO! they dont give a crap they just want to make money, but apple cares, apple wants the user to have a decent machine.
im fairly certain apple did not help with the core microarchetecture. intel was going to release it with apple or not lol
Apple worked with Motorola and IBM on the PowerPC architecture.
Unfortunately, the architecture stagnated. Reasons vary. Nonetheless, at the WWDC 2005, SJ announced the change. Rumor has it that SJ made the decision the Friday before based upon a conversation with IBM. It appeared to him, that Intel's long term processor development plan was better.
You might find this articles interesting:
Apple-Intel Transition.
Over the years, Intel has had numerous and very successful processor designs. Here is a partial list of Intel processors:
8088
8086
80186
80286
80386
80486
80586 (Pentium 1)
The Pentium designs such as:
- Pentium Pro
- Pentium II, Pentium II Xeon
- Pentium III, Pentium III Xeon
- Pentium 4, Mobile Pentium 4, Mobile Pentium 4 M, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
- Pentium M
- Pentium D, Pentium Extreme Edition
- Pentium Dual-Core
And of course other processors.
Not all of these processors have been great. Intel has made some missteps along the way -- but not too many though. And recently, Intel has been firing on all cylinders.
So no, while Apple has contributed to Intel's bottom line, Intel is doing what it always has done and that is trying to make good processors. AMD, and others keep Intel on their feet.
What i ment by core architecture is lets say there's an intel processor called the Core 2 duo 00001 now the 00001 you get off the shelf in a retail store for your pc is different the the 00001 that comes in your imac, because apple helped design a 'special version' for your mac. sorry for any confusion
I believe the only one that was created for Apple, per se, was the CPU for the MBA. The CPU was repackaged into a smaller form factor for the MBA.
The only other special situation involves the MacPro. It has Intel Xeon Quad-Core x 2 processors. As I understand, Intel gave Apple exclusive use for 6 months (?) before releasing to the general market. However, the Xeon processors were not designed exclusively for Apple, or with Apple's help.
While not 100% sure, I think that I am in the ballpark. I haven't been following processor development as of late like I did before. Someone might chip in, no pun intended, to add clarification.
I believe the only one that was created for Apple, per se, was the CPU for the MBA. The CPU was repackaged into a smaller form factor for the MBA.
The only other special situation involves the MacPro. It has Intel Xeon Quad-Core x 2 processors. As I understand, Intel gave Apple exclusive use for 6 months (?) before releasing to the general market. However, the Xeon processors were not designed exclusively for Apple, or with Apple's help.
While not 100% sure, I think that I am in the ballpark. I haven't been following processor development as of late like I did before. Someone might chip in, no pun intended, to add clarification.
No Pun taken if indeed that comment was directed at me!
Also please anyone whos going to tell me im wrong please dont be harsh! haha!The "Sandtiger" processor based on the "Bulldozer" core and the "M-SPACE" design methodology. Sandtiger will have 8-16 cores on a 32 nm process, likely with higher clocks than current AMD processors. It also has a new set of instructions called SSE5. It was originally scheduled for 2009 on a 45 nm process, but it appears to have been delayed until 2010 to 2011.
Compared to a K10 (Barcelona) core, Bulldozer is expected to be 30% faster in general applications and twice as fast for HPC tasks. That would make it at least as fast as a Nehalem core.
Not now, but by 2010 (when the POWER7 is released), Intel will have a processor codenamed Sandy Bridge. Sandy Bridge will have 4 to 8 cores at 4 GHz, for up to 224 GFLOPS (compared to POWER7's 256 GFLOPS). And it has been hinted that that Sandy Bridge won't even be the MP server version.
If you're talking about the 3.0 GHz quad-core, that was actually released to places other than Apple as well, but it wasn't widely adopted due to its high TDP (150 W).
I can also recall the "Santa Rosa Special" processors used in the latest iMacs.