DREAMS

This morning; at approximately four AM, I awoke; as if from a nightmare. I'm a rather a deep sleeper, especially now that I work full time. I remained alert for a short while, keeping an ear for anything that could have woken me up; while trying to recall if it was a dream that woke me.

Later this morning, I went on my usual trawl of tech sites and was greeted with the news that Apple really are going to switch to Intel CPUs.

In terms of change of ideology, this is no-where near the calibre of the Bungie buy-out, this is more akin to stubbing your toe rather than being knee-capped and kicked in the guts while you're down. This is just an annoyance, an annoyance for developers (I hear a sweaty monkey somewhere in the background,) an annoyance for users (niggling compatibility issues for n-years,) an annoyance for the bean counters (software houses pushing upgrades for optimised software.)

Other than it being an annoyance, it makes sense for the portables; I'd love to see the P-M in Apple's PBs. The G4s are getting long in the tooth, while they remain a vector powerhouse clock for clock, they just don't have the clock speed to have any sort of parity in integer processing. The P-M, while based on the PIII (which the G4 trampled all over in integer and FPU, clock for clock), has a faster bus (with speed bumps on the way,) scales higher and is lower power (which against the G4 is quite an achievement.) Along with those advantages, Apple do own a fair bit of the IP associated with Altivec; I wouldn't be surprised if Intel CPUs end up with some variant of Altivec (it might be too hard to get SSE to be a full 128bit vector engine, and their twin 64bit units kludged to do 128bit work well enough for the moment.) I would cackle if Intel decided to chuck Altivec in their procs and modified the decode stage in their processors so SSE calls are handled by the Altivec unit.

On the desktop side. I don't get it. Intel are phasing out their P4 line (said so them-selves, too hot, not scaling, inefficient) and don't as yet have a clear product to replace it, their 64bit solution is AMDs and not yet implemented in all their lines and on the workstation side; Itanic. Sure the G5 isn't scaling as well as Apple originally expected, but compared to the P4, it's an amazingly elegant solution (I don't want to know what sort of cooling solution Apple designs for an SMT SMP DC P4 PM G6₁.) The P4 is a processor designed with marketing in mind, but it caught up with physics. It is now relying on marketing to push it along, Intel knows that marketing doesn't actually increase performance and are taking steps to improve the performance of their other processor line. I guess we will just have to wait and see what is available by the time Apple completes it's architecture switch.

Other than that, I have work to do...I've already spent too much time on this.

DREAMS

1. Simultaneous Multi-Threading Simultaneous Multi-Processing Dual Core Pentium 4 PowerMac G6
SSE: Streaming SIMD Extension
SIMD: Single Instruction Multiple Data
Altivec: Originally Moto/Apple's SIMD extension (Apple called it the Velocity Engine,) the unit in the G5 is a compatible subset designed by IBM.
G4: Macs based on the PPC 7400 series processors from Motorola/IBM/Freescale.
G5: Macs based on the PPC 970 series processors from IBM.

Anything else?