- Jobs did not say Pentium, he said Intel
- Apple said coding should work for Intel if the code worked for the G3 PowerPC. This places the Pentium 4 used in the devloper boxes in the same class as a G3 PowerMac. Making the Pentium a third class citizan in the Mac world. This could roughly be equated as a baseline for the Mactel.
- Coding for the Pentium instruction set is not the same as coding for the Pentium CPU. The instruction set can be emulated by the alpha for instance.
- The Pentium, by ALL accounts is out-of-gas at 4Ghz, this isn’t a future, it the past. any new procesor will have to have either a faster, or a much wider future. 128bit anyone?
- And what of the Altivec thing, such a good idea should not go to waste
2 comments on “Mactel points for Yohan/Pentium/Alpha”
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Apple is not interested in the Pentium 4. The developers machines will be the only ones to ever use one.
Actual Intel-based Macs will use derivatives of the Pentium M (a modernized, high-cached Pentium 3) all across the lineup, from the Mac mini and iBook to the PowerMac and Xserve, where “derivatives” may include special versions such as the Celeron and Xeon.
“Jobs did not say Pentium, he said Intel”
No, but clearly he *was* referring to the Pentium ISA, since the Xcode 2.1 the same day added support for exactly that.
“Coding for the Pentium instruction set is not the same as coding for the Pentium CPU.”
No, but why would he give developers testing machines featuring a Pentium CPU if, in the end, he intends to use an entirely different ISA?
“The instruction set can be emulated by the alpha for instance.”
The Alpha is, for all intents and purposes, dead, just like most other 1990s high-performance ISAs (MIPS, UltraSPARC — still manufactured but won’t ever receive a major upgrade again — , etc.), with the exception of POWER and Itanium (IA-64). While Intel does want to push Itanium, its x86 emulation is uninteresting; encouraging developers to write x86 code would therefore be a pointless move if Apple were to move to Itanium.
“The Pentium, by ALL accounts is out-of-gas at 4Ghz, this isn’t a future, it the past.”
The Pentium 4 is dead, but the Pentium M does indeed have a future. It consumes much less power and reaches higher speed at far lower clockrates. Furthermore, using dual-core, it will reach far beyond the (never-released) 4 GHz Pentium 4.
“128bit anyone?”
Even 64-bit is currently pointless for most types of applications. Its upper limit is 18446744073709551616 Bytes; I cannot see computers reaching that barrier any time soon, so 128-bit seems a term of the 2010s at the very earliest.
“And what of the Altivec thing, such a good idea should not go to waste”
You do have a point here; unfortunately, Intel’s SSE is not only much easier and more flexible to program, it also often accomplishes the same performance AltiVec does. AltiVec is decent for those programmers who actually bother to learn it only.
All good points, Sören. But when I mentioned Not Pentium, or Alpha. I was referring to internal architecture. The Pentium is a Legacy implementation of an 8086 processor. I agree the Alpha is dead, but many of the features of Alpha are included in the Itanium including the hyper threading. The pipeline in the Pentium 4 is too large, the L1 cache is too small. The branch conditional choices poor for a desktop. Hence the reason the Pentium M outperforms the 4, clock cycle for clock cycle. The SSE instructions are also in the Pentium 4, and may be good, but no one seems to be using it, nor has Apple suggested using it. (I’m an Apple developer too) One last thought, the Alpha team is still largely intact and working at Intel.