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New Xserve and Xserve RAID

2K views 10 replies 6 participants last post by  dthompson101 
#1 ·
#4 ·
Personally, I think you will see these updates become very slow until Apple makes the jump to either the 970 chipset from IBM or the X86 Chipset from either AMD or Intel.

Just my thoughts on it, but Morotolla is doing next to nothing in the CPU arena as of late
 
#5 ·
dthompson101 wrote:
Personally, I think you will see these updates become very slow until Apple makes the jump to either the 970 chipset from IBM or the X86 Chipset from either AMD or Intel.

I'm sort of surprised that no one's mentioned this, but what if Apple started using Intel Itanium 2 chips? The Itanium is insanely fast 64-bit chip, and probably has more of a "future" than the x86[1]. Granted, it's more expensive than x86 chips, but I'm not sure it'd be more expensive than, say, a Power 970 chip.

[1] I'm still amazed and impressed that Intel has gotten as much life out of the x86 instruction set as it has. From an aesthetic standpoint, though, it's an ugly architecture.
 
#6 ·
Well in the case of the 970, I think apple will adopt that one first as it will handle the ppc code and OS. I think Apple has to prove to the world that it's OS is viable. Apple also likes the PPC chipset for some reason.

I think it would be way to soon to jump ship for the x86 platform chipset before apple had the support of developers. If they left now, I am sure all the developers would dump the platform once and for all.

I am sure they are getting ready to introduce x86 hardware though. They will probably start off in the server arena where they can introduce a new server (since it doesn't need all the popular apps to run on it) with perhaps 4 CPU's since the intels are cheaper in cost than the PPC chips and they can offer more CPUS in a box for the same price as the dual chips right now.

I don't think that they will be intel based chipsets since Apple has spent so many years slamming the Intel architecture. I think they will probably choose an AMD 64 bit solution for their servers since like the PPC chipset, the AMD chipset is the little fish in the pond and is fighting the big intel fish.

Apple seems to like going against the grain, however I do like the RISC chipsets offered by Sun, Apple and SGI compared to those of the generic Intel chips.

Anyways, I am no chip expert here, I just like to throw in my 2 cents from time to time.
 
#8 ·
dthompson101 wrote:
Well in the case of the 970, I think apple will adopt that one first as it will handle the ppc code and OS. I think Apple has to prove to the world that it's OS is viable.

Oh, indeed. Going with the Power 970 is probably the best option for Apple (presuming everything works out with the 970, of course), since most everything will "just work" with the new 970.

I don't think that they will be intel based chipsets since Apple has spent so many years slamming the Intel architecture. I think they will probably choose an AMD 64 bit solution for their servers since like the PPC chipset, the AMD chipset is the little fish in the pond and is fighting the big intel fish.

If Apple was to switch over to x86-based chips, I'd much rather they went with Intel than AMD. I've heard a lot of anecdotal evidence that suggests AMD chips aren't as good as their Intel counterparts due to heat and reliability issues (I know I've had a lot of bad luck with the Athlon line of chips).

Of course, I still think it'd be neat if Apple went with the Itanium line (assuming they switched architectures, of course), since Itaniums are sweet chips, and the instruction set doesn't make me want to cry.
 
#9 ·
On Itanium
Many people just spent cash on a new OS and new Apps
For Itanium you would need new apps again for a new cpu with a different coding.
Its just too much change in too short a time, perhaps itanium for servers only but PPC 970 from IBM should be the answer to apples woes for speed
 
#10 ·
minnes wrote:
Many people just spent cash on a new OS and new Apps

Well, if you bought new Itanium-based hardware[0], you'd get the OS with it, no? As for the applications, Apple would have to ship some sort of PowerPC portability layer (since there's a lot of software that wouldn't make it to the Itanium immediately, if at all), so you wouldn't have to worry about rushing out and buying new applications. Heck, some publishers might let you "cross-grade" from the PPC version to the Itanium version of the same package!

As for the developers, it should[1] be relatively easy to port from the PowerPC to the Itanium; a simple recompile should do the trick.

[0] Presuming, of course, that Apple moves to Itanium (which is a huge presumption).

[1] Lots of things are easy in theory, but hard in practice.
 
#11 ·
From everything I have heard on the relased of the current Mac OS, the NeXT developers took the X86 version and ported it to the PPC Chip instead of using the PPC code they had.

This may be one of the reasons that speculation about Marklar is kicking around the internet that an X86 version of Mac OS X is iminent. I mean you can even download the Darwin binaries from http://developer.apple.com to install it GUI less on Intel Chipset architectures.
 
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