Silverthorne
Here’s bits of the article:
The two firms have been rubbing the sticks ever since the Spring of 2005, when Apple agreed to use Intel’s desktop and mobile class processors to further the development of its Mac product line, leaving behind an ailing relationship with PowerPC chip supplier IBM.
In the months that followed, Intel went on to form an internal ‘Apple Group‘ comprised of engineering and sales staff who serve to aid Apple’s engineers in Intel-related product development, while pitching to the computer maker new technologies from its own internal skunkwork operations…
By last March, the two industry heavyweights were admittedly on to something when Deborah Conrad, vice president and director of Team Apple at Intel, told a group of CNet reporters that Apple’s way of looking at the world was making Intel “think different” about its own business…
More specifically, those same people say, Apple has taken a liking to the upcoming 45-nanometer (nm) “Silverthorne” chip, agreeing to use it in not one but multiple products currently situated on its 2008 calendar year product roadmap…
The chip is expected to be as fast as the second-generation of Pentium M processors, but use only between half a watt and 2 watts of electrical power — about one tenth as much as a typical notebook chip…
Phew! Setting aside the hype larding this “exclusive” – there could be some fascinating hardware coming down the pike.
yep,
sell us OLD tek in a smaller form and charge us double…
DUH.
It’s not “OLD tek” if it extends battery life in portable products by a few magnitudes.
Very exciting to see x86 technology that once required laptop size cases (for thermals and integration) now likely to be found in much smaller handheld size devices.
I can just see the next Apple iPhone have the same x86 technology as that found in their laptops. Wow – a full copy of OSX in your handheld!!
I also hope Aple comes out with a better (cooler) version of the iTV with this chip.
Eventually, everyone wants to stay from IBM.
#2,
Thats like saying the C64 hand helds that do 1-20 games ARNT commodore 64’s with the OLD 8bit software…
@#3 – Yep, old tech for sure… hope they’ll update it to Prescott’s speed 🙂
Man, a chip as fast as a 2nd gen Pentium M (that’s the precursor of the the core duo, not the P4…) sucking half watt to 2 watts… and that’s not a good thing? What’s on your desk? Four way Quad Xeons?
If this is really possible, the implications are enormous. If they have found a way to increase the amount of computations per watt by several times, then the technology will eventually move over to mainstream processors.
Moore’s law just got another 5 year reprieve. Well maybe if AMD can get off their duffs and push them a bit.
I don’t think this has anything to do with the Apple Intel marriage, other than they will be the first OEM allowed to use the new tech in mainstream products. This is just Intel R&D. AMD has awakened a slumbering giant, and now we are going to get to see it rumble across the tech landscape. Next years TOC will be very interesting.
Intel secretly admires Apple. Can you imagine a company having so many masochistic but loyal customers.
Don
#5
IBM???
This hasnt been related to IBM since the 286-386 era..
#9
Didn’t IBM manufactured the PowerPC processors for the powermacs?
Apple’s “new and better” flavor of the year.
Watch the Mac fanboys cumm’a runnin, because Apple tells them that there is something new and better. There isn’t an Apple user that wants to be seen with last years device, hence the dummies that have 5 iPods because their old music player was just that.. old (like a year?)
Frankly I’m surprised that Apple didn’t pull an early switcharoo to another incompatible chip, so all Apple users have to give up their two year old hardware and start over, like with the OS/9 to OSX ‘transition’, or to a great extent the PowerPC to Intel switch.
Leopard.. gotta have it… it has 300 new features… count them… 300… see how the trash can has a different icon… wow… I just have to have that new feature!
On the other hand, PC users see Vista, say it’s pretty but who cares and go on with their lives.
10,
Motorola DID, until about 3-4 years ago..the 68000-series, WHICH the Amiga used in parallel processing.
According to the picture… Motto: Your money should never be bigger than your computer.
12, slight correction friend. Amigas used the 68000 series chips in single chip processing, but with a pre-emptive multitasking operating system, years before Microsoft adopted its own idea of multitasking for Windows. That said…
I don’t think the real news is that Apple decided to use this Intel chip. But that Intel allows their chips to be used by any other platform, other than PCes. I’m pretty certain that there was an exclusive arrangement, via Microsoft. So Apple couldn’t get hold of the Intel chips until after the DOJ case against Microsoft. And if Amiga could have gotten Intel chips for their later models, it might have survived as a viable platform. But isn’t it telling that only PCes used Intel and AMD, and all the others used Motorola’s chips. Even when Motorola dragged its feet on chip improvements?
The question should be, what did Apple have to do (or pay) to get Intel to supply them? Or was it merely a case of old PCes glutting the market, and Intel finally seeing Macs as an untapped market. There must have been a reason why Apple had an x86 version of its operating software for years, but didn’t switch long ago.
Anyway, the upside of this Intel/Apple marriage will probably be that Intel finds it now dealing with real innovative engineers from Apple. Rather than just those chunk-heads from Microsoft, who are more interested in bottling up the innovation genie, if they can’t control exclusively it. But that’s just my opinion.
#13
Being a student of why non-microsoft operating systems all failed, I am looking at why the AmigaOS release around 1990 failed, and it is quite clear. It failed because it wasn’t actually an operating system at all. From the looks of the arcitecture, I am not even sure it deserves the status of shell, lacking even basic shell like OS services.
On the other hand, Apple was still futzing around with a TSR like multitasking system, and a really clever shell to launch applications, but still missing all of the features of what we would call an “Operating System”, with features like.. File IO still being built into individual applications, and table like structures to communicate with the “host OS”… if you could call it that.
At the same time, Unix still only ran on minicomputers or greater, I am not sure of the dates, but I don’t think Linus had written minix yet.
While at the same time, Microsoft was less than a year away from launching what would be the first ~real~ operating system to run on a personal computer. With an actual designed multi-tasking system, file services, and the first abstracted GUI, that didn’t require it to be built into the applications.
#13 said: ” Rather than just those chunk-heads from Microsoft, who are more interested in bottling up the innovation genie, if they can’t control exclusively it.”
err…Apple are the biggest control freaks in the whole industry!
15,
In 1990, commodore was dead, the corp ran off.
Go back to the Amiga 4000 and OS 3-3,5..
13,
But the video chip DID its own work, it was independent of the system. the video also, and then linked with a Timer for video. The CPU was generally used as a traffic cop, and thru the processes at the areas they were designed. Pics and grphics went direct to the video chip, and the chip DID the work. they also had direct access to ram.