Apple: Up the Market Without a CPU
From: R420 (radeonr420_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/10/04
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Date: 10 Jul 2004 13:00:48 -0700
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/34994.html
Apple: Up the Market Without a CPU
By Paul Murphy
LinuxInsider
07/08/04 6:00 AM PT
Despite its current misadventure with Linux, Sun isn't in the generic
desktop computer business. The Java desktop is cool, but it's a
solution driven by necessity, not excellence. In comparison, putting
Mac OS X on the Sunray desktop would be an insanely great solution for
Sun.
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For the last three weeks I've been talking about the impact the new
Sony, Toshiba and IBM cell processor is likely to have on Linux
desktop and datacenter computing. The bottom line there is that this
thing is fast, inexpensive and deeply reflective of very fundamental
IBM ideas about how computing should be managed and delivered. It's
going to be a winner, probably the biggest thing to hit computing
since IBM's decision to use the Intel 8088 led Bill Gates to drop
Xenix in favor of an early CP/M release with kernel separation hacked
out.
Sun has the technology to compete. Its throughput-computing initiative
-- coupled with some pending surprises on floating point -- give it
the hardware cost and performance basis needed to compete on software
where it has the best server-to-desktop story in the industry.
No one else does. Microsoft's software can't take x86 beyond some
minor hyperthreading on two cores without major reworking -- and
Itanium simply doesn't cut it. The Wintel oligopoly could spring a
surprise -- a multicore CPU made up from the Risc-like core at Xeon's
heart, along with a completely rewritten Longhorn kernel to use it.
But no one has reported them stuffing this rabbit into their hat. So,
for now at least, they seem pretty much dead ended.
If, as I expect, the Linux community shifts massively to the new
processor, Microsoft and its partners in the Wintel oligopoly will
face some difficult long-run choices. It's interesting, for example,
to wonder how long key players like Intel and Dell can survive as
stand-alone businesses once the most innovative developers leave them
to Microsoft's exclusive mercy.
Wintel's dilemma is, however, a fairly long-term issue. Much closer at
hand is Apple's immediate problem. Just recently Steve Jobs has had to
apologize to the Apple community for not being able to deliver on
last-year's promise of a 3-Ghz G5 by mid 2004. IBM promised to make
that available, but has not done so.
A lot of people have excused this on the grounds that the move to
90-nanometer manufacturing has proven more difficult than anticipated,
but I don't believe that. PowerPC does not have the absurd
complexities of the x86, and 90-nanometer production should be easily
in reach for IBM. The cell processor, furthermore, is confidently
planned for mass production at 65-nanometer sizes early next year.
This will get more interesting if, as reported on various sites, such
as Tom's Hardware, IBM has been burning the candle at both ends and
also will produce a three-way, 3.5-GHz version of the PowerPC for use
on Microsoft's Xbox.
Whether that's true or not, however, my belief is that IBM chose not
to deliver on its commitment to Apple because doing so would have
exacerbated the already embarrassing performance gap between its own
server products and the higher end Macs. Right now, for example,
Apple's 2-Ghz Xserve is a full generation ahead of IBM's 1.2-GHz p615,
but costs about half as much.
Consequences of Apple Decision
Unfortunately this particular consequence of Apple's decision to have
IBM partner on the G5 is the least of the company's CPU problems. The
bigger issue is that although the new cell processor is a PowerPC
derivative and thus broadly compatible with previous Apple CPUs, the
attached processors are not compatible with Altivec and neither is the
microcode needed to run the thing. Most importantly, however, the
graphics and multiprocessor models are totally different.
As a result, it will be relatively easy to port Darwin to the new
machine, but extremely difficult to port the Mac OS X shell and almost
impossible to achieve backward compatibility without significant
compromise along the lines of a "fat binary" kind of solution.
In other words, what seemed like a good idea for Apple at the time,
the IBM G5, is about to morph into a classic choice between the rock
of yet another CPU transition or the hard place of being left behind
by major market CPU performance improvements.
Look at this from IBM's perspective and things couldn't be better.
Motorola's microprocessor division -- now Freescale Semiconductor --
is mostly out of the picture, despite having created the PowerPC
architecture. Thus, if Apple tries to stay with the PowerPC-Altivec
combination, it can either be performance starved out of the market or
driven there by the costs of maintaining its own CPU design team and
low-volume fabrication services.
If, on the other hand, Apple bites the bullet and transitions to the
cell processor, IBM will gain greater control while removing Apple's
long-term ability to avoid having people run Mac OS on non-Apple
products. Either way, Apple will go away as a competitive threat
because the future Mac OS will either be out of the running or running
on IBM Linux desktops.
Apple-Sun Partnership
I think there'll be an interesting signal here. If IBM thinks Apple is
going to let itself be folded into the cell-processor tent, it will
probably allow as many others to clone the new Cell PC as it can make
CPU assemblies for. If, on the other hand, IBM thinks Apple plans to
hang in there as an independent, it might just treat the Cell PC as
its own Mac and keep the hardware proprietary. Notice, in thinking
about this, that they don't have to make an immediate decision: There
will be CPU assembly shortages for the first six months to a year if
not longer.
So what can Apple do? What the company should have done two years ago:
Hop into bed with Sun. Despite its current misadventure with Linux,
Sun isn't in the generic desktop computer business. The Java desktop
is cool, but it's a solution driven by necessity, not excellence. In
comparison, putting Mac OS X on the Sunray desktop would be an
insanely great solution for Sun while having Sun's sales people push
Sparc-based Macs onto corporate desktops would greatly strengthen
Apple.
Most importantly, Sparc is an open specification with several fully
qualified fabrication facilities. In the long term, Apple wouldn't be
trapped again, and in the short term the extra volume would improve
prospects for both companies. Strategically, it just doesn't get any
better than that.
Some Important Footnotes
I am not suggesting that Sun buy Apple, or Apple buy Sun. Neither
company has adequate management bandwidth as things stand. I'm
suggesting informed cooperation, not amalgamation.
The transition to Sparc would be easier than the transition to Cell.
It might look like the bigger change, but the programming model needed
for cell is very different, whereas existing Mac OS software, from any
previous generation, need only be recompiled to run on Sparc.
In particular, the graphics libraries delivered with the Cell PC will
likely focus on Gnome-KDE compatibility to make porting applications
for them easy, but Apple would have to redo its interface-management
libraries at the machine level -- something it would not face in a
move to Sparc where PostScript display support is well established.
In addition, existing Sun research on compiler automation suggests
that multithreaded CPUs like Niagara and Rock could automatically
convert PowerPC and even MC68000 executables to Sparc on the fly --
meaning that "fat binaries" would not be needed, although a Mac OS 9.0
compatibility box would probably still make sense.
Sun's Throughput-Computing Initiative
People I greatly respect tell me that Sun's throughput-computing
direction isn't suited to workstations like the Mac where
single-process execution times are critical to the user experience.
The more I study this question, the more I disagree. Fundamentally
this issue is about software, not hardware.
Consider, for example, what could be achieved with the shared-memory
access and eight-way parallelism inherent in the lightweight process
model Sun is building into products like Niagara. This won't matter
for applications like Microsoft Word, where the 1.2-GHz nominal rate
is far faster than users need anyway, but can make a big difference on
jobs like code compilation, JVM operations or image manipulation in
something like Adobe's Photoshop.
Given the much higher cache hit rates and better I/O capabilities
offered by the relatively low cycle rate, theory suggests that truly
compute-intensive workstation software could hit somewhat better than
85 percent system use -- meaning that an eight-way Niagara-1 running
at 1.2 Ghz would easily outperform a Pentium 4 at 8 GHz.
Making that happen would, of course, take serious software change, but
if the preprocessors now thought to be under development at Sun work
as expected, most of that would be automated -- thereby greatly
reducing the barriers to effective CPU use on the Mac for PC-oriented
developers like Adobe.
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