Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 07:21:03 -0400 From: Stuart Krivis <ipswitch@apk.net> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: So what happens to FreeBSD now? Message-ID: <2515701.993712862@[192.168.1.60]> In-Reply-To: <20010628103439.C9802@lpt.ens.fr> References: <200106260901.AA23134284@stmail.pace.edu> <20010626084126W.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> <p0510031eb75e868cb1bd@[194.78.241.123]> <2425994267.20010627160101@163.net> <p05100337b75fdc404cc5@[194.78.241.123]> <20010628103439.C9802@lpt.ens.fr>
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--On Thursday, June 28, 2001 10:34 AM +0200 Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> wrote: >> >> Mac hardware has become much less expensive in the last few >> years, and in my experience tends to be pretty price competitive for >> the same amount of performance (witness the fact that the closest >> competing laptop to the new iBook is almost $1000 more). > > Where did you get that figure? It seems to me that you can get a > laptop from Dell, with comparable or better features, for a price > lower than the cheapest iBook (say $1200). I've been looking at the iBook and it sells for $1299. It includes more for that money than anything I've seen in the x86 world. >> My best bet is that Apple will take some or all of this money and >> buy out Motorola's participating in the PowerPC chip consortium, or >> at least buy themselves the rights to design their own PowerPC chips >> and then have Motorola, IBM, or some other company actually handle >> the fabrication. I don't see this happening at all. Apple does need to quit pissing off Motorola, but I don't see that Apple has the expertise to design a CPU. > > Chip design needs a quite different kind of expertise from assembling > machines or writing operating systems. Does Apple have it? > Especially to keep up with the gigahertz wars between Intel and AMD? Why do they need to keep up with the "gigahertz wars?" A 1 GHz Intel chip does not do the same amount of work as a 1 GHz PowerPC chip, or even a 1 GHz Athlon. Chip speeds are for marketing only. Since that's the case, Apple just needs to figure out how to come up with something like the "PR" that AMD and Cyrix were using. It might look like a 766 MHz PPC 1.5 GHz P4 rating. There's got to be _some_ way of getting across the idea that you can't go strictly by the clock frequency of the CPU. Maybe they should start writing it as 766,000 KHz. That sounds bigger than anything Intel has. :-) > > However, it seems IBM continues to be interested in PowerPC, and > certainly has the expertise. I'm not sure Apple needs to get its > hands dirty with that. This assumes that IBM actually cares about a PPC that is suitable for a desktop machine. I don't think they are. They aim the PPC at SPARC, PA-RISC, MIPS, and Alpha. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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