BitDepth 508 - January 24
24/01/06 11:21
Apple adopts Intel microprocessors
for their new Macintosh computers. Early weather reports from Hell
indicate frosty weather...
BitDepth#508
Intel opens an orchard
Apple's new
MacBook Pro evolves only slightly on the outside but there's a
revolution inside.
Photo courtesy Apple Computer.
Apple Computer has separated many of its big product announcements from trade shows in recent years, but once CEO Steve Jobs takes the stage, you can bet that big things are in store.
At the Macworld keynote on January 10, Mr Jobs got the crowd warmed up with updates to the company's productivity suite, iWork '06 and its popular media suite, iLife '06, both of which boast useful but incremental changes that may lure current users to upgrade.
The iTunes component of iLife '06 is already available for free download online and has at least one new "feature" that's caused some discussion, an inline advertisement that comes if you're browsing the iTunes Music Store that lets Apple know what you're listening to.
More compelling is the announcement that all these new applications are freshly coded as "Universal Binaries," which, as it turns out, is really useful if you plan to buy Apple equipment during 2006.
That's because Macs have begun their latest transition, from the Motorola/IBM PowerPC chips that's powered the company's systems since 1994 to Intel's processors.
The first two Macs with Intel inside are the company's iMac computer and the first member of the newly re-christened professional laptop line, the midsized MacBook Pro. The MacBook won't be on the market until February but the new Intel powered iMac is out right now.
From the outside, both Macs betray nothing of their new braintrust. The MacBook Pro adds a fraction of an inch on its width and shaves a tenth of an inch off its thickness and introduces a new magnetic connector for the power cable. The iMac's exterior is unchanged.
Inside, however, both Macs use Intel's new Core Duo chipset (code name Yonah), which builds two processors into the profile of a single chip and adds wireless and controller chips into the bundle for computer makers.
Historically, two chips haven't proven to be double the speed of one. Computing overheads associated with making use of both processors have tended to bring multipliers of between 1.5 and 1.75, and PC manufacturers planning for the new Core Duo chips expect real world gains of around 30%.
Mac users can expect parity with current PowerPC systems for now. I've been through two big of these big transitions, once when Apple switched from Motorola's 68000 series processors to the PowerPC chips and again when they moved from the overstretched codebase of Mac OS 9 to the Unix kernel of OS X (2001).
Hard experience from both of these big changes tells me two things about the Intel switch; the change will be reasonably painless and it will take at least two hardware revisions to make a big difference to the average user.
Apple's touting a 4X speed increase for its new laptop, but there is no product available for testing. The system's internal architecture mirrors advancements in Intel's motherboard technology, with boosts to the system bus (the data conduit between RAM and processor) from 167MHz to 667MHz, a much faster PCI Express video interface and a new X1600 video card along with internal drives connected by the faster Serial ATA interface.
Eric Bangeman of Ars Technica found moderate speed gains on the new iMac for Universal Binary software; code that's written to run natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs.
Software that hasn't been updated runs in a "dynamic translation environment" called Rosetta, which translates old Mac code to new mac Code on the fly. Software under Rosetta runs acceptably, reports Bangeman, but some products, such as Apple's own Final Cut Pro won't run at all and the numbers suggest that Photoshop users will want to sit this one out until Adobe ships an Intel-compatible update.
This runs true to the experience of the last major architectural speed bump of the PowerPC chip. It took at least two years for application and OS code to catch up with the new processors and three to four years for all the motherboard hardware to catch up with the new processor technology.
But Apple learns, if somewhat slowly, from its mistakes. Mac OS X has been secretly developed as an Intel compatible codebase for five years now, and the company has skipped the effort of developing a compatibility environment for the now "old" PowerPC applications by purchasing the Rosetta emulation/code translation technology from Transitive, who began working on it in 2001.
It's a good plan, but it's also one that makes Apple a peer with other users of Intel's chips, so the Macintosh maker must execute on both quality and performance to steal attention from the dozens of other laptop makers gearing up to put the new Core Duo chips in Windows compatible computers.
Intel opens an orchard
Apple's new
MacBook Pro evolves only slightly on the outside but there's a
revolution inside.Photo courtesy Apple Computer.
Apple Computer has separated many of its big product announcements from trade shows in recent years, but once CEO Steve Jobs takes the stage, you can bet that big things are in store.
At the Macworld keynote on January 10, Mr Jobs got the crowd warmed up with updates to the company's productivity suite, iWork '06 and its popular media suite, iLife '06, both of which boast useful but incremental changes that may lure current users to upgrade.
The iTunes component of iLife '06 is already available for free download online and has at least one new "feature" that's caused some discussion, an inline advertisement that comes if you're browsing the iTunes Music Store that lets Apple know what you're listening to.
More compelling is the announcement that all these new applications are freshly coded as "Universal Binaries," which, as it turns out, is really useful if you plan to buy Apple equipment during 2006.
That's because Macs have begun their latest transition, from the Motorola/IBM PowerPC chips that's powered the company's systems since 1994 to Intel's processors.
The first two Macs with Intel inside are the company's iMac computer and the first member of the newly re-christened professional laptop line, the midsized MacBook Pro. The MacBook won't be on the market until February but the new Intel powered iMac is out right now.
From the outside, both Macs betray nothing of their new braintrust. The MacBook Pro adds a fraction of an inch on its width and shaves a tenth of an inch off its thickness and introduces a new magnetic connector for the power cable. The iMac's exterior is unchanged.
Inside, however, both Macs use Intel's new Core Duo chipset (code name Yonah), which builds two processors into the profile of a single chip and adds wireless and controller chips into the bundle for computer makers.
Historically, two chips haven't proven to be double the speed of one. Computing overheads associated with making use of both processors have tended to bring multipliers of between 1.5 and 1.75, and PC manufacturers planning for the new Core Duo chips expect real world gains of around 30%.
Mac users can expect parity with current PowerPC systems for now. I've been through two big of these big transitions, once when Apple switched from Motorola's 68000 series processors to the PowerPC chips and again when they moved from the overstretched codebase of Mac OS 9 to the Unix kernel of OS X (2001).
Hard experience from both of these big changes tells me two things about the Intel switch; the change will be reasonably painless and it will take at least two hardware revisions to make a big difference to the average user.
Apple's touting a 4X speed increase for its new laptop, but there is no product available for testing. The system's internal architecture mirrors advancements in Intel's motherboard technology, with boosts to the system bus (the data conduit between RAM and processor) from 167MHz to 667MHz, a much faster PCI Express video interface and a new X1600 video card along with internal drives connected by the faster Serial ATA interface.
Eric Bangeman of Ars Technica found moderate speed gains on the new iMac for Universal Binary software; code that's written to run natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs.
Software that hasn't been updated runs in a "dynamic translation environment" called Rosetta, which translates old Mac code to new mac Code on the fly. Software under Rosetta runs acceptably, reports Bangeman, but some products, such as Apple's own Final Cut Pro won't run at all and the numbers suggest that Photoshop users will want to sit this one out until Adobe ships an Intel-compatible update.
This runs true to the experience of the last major architectural speed bump of the PowerPC chip. It took at least two years for application and OS code to catch up with the new processors and three to four years for all the motherboard hardware to catch up with the new processor technology.
But Apple learns, if somewhat slowly, from its mistakes. Mac OS X has been secretly developed as an Intel compatible codebase for five years now, and the company has skipped the effort of developing a compatibility environment for the now "old" PowerPC applications by purchasing the Rosetta emulation/code translation technology from Transitive, who began working on it in 2001.
It's a good plan, but it's also one that makes Apple a peer with other users of Intel's chips, so the Macintosh maker must execute on both quality and performance to steal attention from the dozens of other laptop makers gearing up to put the new Core Duo chips in Windows compatible computers.
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