Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
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As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
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Capitalist Lion
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Tal G in Jerusalem
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Monday, May 10, 2004

14:09 - A bloodless coup
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,119299,00.html

(top)

My God!

Remember how not two years ago, conventional wisdom still held that nobody�not Motorola, not IBM, not even AMD�would ever catch the mighty Intel or even trim its insurmountable lead in desktop CPU speeds?

Remember how Phil Schiller's speeches on stage illustrating the "Megahertz Myth"�attempting to justify why Apple's computers had lower "megahertz" numbers than their PC counterparts, yet Apple had the gall to charge more money for them�were mocked and ridiculed as so much hot air from a doomed and failing company with a moribund platform?

Remember how only a year ago, as the G5 was being readied for release, pundits left and right were confidently predicting the doom of Apple (yes, still), the bleak future of the G4-powered Mac line, and the need for Apple to take the obvious sensible step and move to the unbeatable Intel x86 architecture?

Well, my my: time sure has a way of shaking the crud out of the sheets of public discourse, eh?

Intel Corp. (INTC) , the world's largest chip maker, has scrapped plans for two new products and is shifting focus to making chips that contain the cores of two microprocessors, a spokeswoman said Friday.

The chips being canceled include the fourth-generation�Pentium 4 chip (search), code-named�Tejas (search), which was to be sold next year. Also being dropped is a new�Xeon processor (search)�for low-end computer servers, code-named Jayhawk and believed to be based on a similar architecture to Tejas.

Instead, Intel plans to introduce "dual-core" chips for desktop computers in 2005 and plans to start shipments of dual-core chips for notebook computers the same year, spokeswoman Laura Anderson said.

In other words, Intel has sadly concluded that Prescott�the current generation of the P4�is effectively stillborn, and adding more pipeline stages and more on-chip cache just isn't going to get them anywhere; in all likelihood it'll start making the chips slower. So if I'm reading this right, the x86 platform is being entirely scuttled for all high-performance models, leaving only the Celerons and low-power portables.

Instead, Intel is going to dual-core, Itanium-like chips�with short pipelines, low megahertz numbers, high internal bandwidth, and native multiprocessor functionality.

Just like the Power4 series and the G5.

Yeah, Intel's still huge�but this kind of massive retooling means they're putting themselves on a pace to be well behind the curve once they're ready to release anything new. It's a ballsy move, but a necessary one; this is the kind of painful uprooting that I just said Microsoft needs to find the courage to do. Yeah, it's hard. But it has to be done. Even if it means adopting your hated rival's strategy and placing yourself grumbling in his rear-view mirror.

Oh, but I'm sure Apple is still doomed, somehow. And Intel's still right.

(Via CapLion.)

UPDATE: Matt writes to clarify that Intel will be focusing on the x86-based Pentium M for its desktop processors (currently tuned for mobility, but versatile anyway), and that the problems Intel is having fabricating chips at 90nm is something all chip manufacters are running up against�we're actually getting quantum effects causing significant power drain and state loss down at that feature size. So it's not quite as earth-shattering as the news story sounds, but things ain't looking too rosy for Intel no matter how you slice it...