Steve Jobs has accomplished at least one thing recently: all eyes are on his company as industry aficionados give themselves migraines trying to figure out what’s going on over there. So much so, IBM’s new multicore Power PC chips becomes a conversation speed bump serving only to redirect comments toward a confounding Apple business move.
The assumed reasoning behind Apple’s pivotal switch to its old enemy Wintel, um, I mean, Intel microchips was IBM’s inability to deliver the goods on 3 GHz speedy and less power consuming processors for the next generation of Macs.
But that explanation is coming up a bit squirrelly in light of IBM’s new release seemingly saying, “see, we told you he was full of it.” IBM says it had more to do with pricing quarrels and other insiders think it was the result of some bold leveraging on the part of Jobs, intentionally designed to move his company into new ground.
If Apple wanted speedier multicore processors consuming less power, then IBM has delivered, a month after Apple’s shocking Big Blue drop. The PowerPC chips were presented at the Power Everywhere forum in Tokyo.
The dual core version of the Power PC 970FX, the 64-bit 970MP, runs between 1.4 and 2.5GHz, with 1MB of L2 cache. The series has a high bandwidth processor bus that can deliver up to 7.1 GB/sec. The core delivers five instructions per cycle, one instruction per cycle to each of its ten execution units, with two fixed point, two floating point, two load store, two vector and two system units.
Each core can be set to “doze,” a power-saving mode that allows operation from only one processor.
IBM also announced low-power sub-20 Watt extensions that allow an operating power of 13W at 1.4 GHz and 16W at 1.6GHZ.
Admittedly, these impressive chips aren’t the 3 GHz chips Apple was demanding for the G5 notebook. But they are impressive low power offerings, especially since some say that 90 nm 3GHz low power chip is unrealistic without majorly time consuming and costly revisions IBM wasn’t willing to make. Rumor has it that Apple was also offered the Cell processor used in the upcoming Sony PlayStation game console.
It really sounds like IBM could have delivered, if they really wanted to.
There are a couple of questions to ask here. Why wouldn’t IBM devote time and energy for Apple’s request? Did Apple really dump IBM, or did IBM just allow things to dissolve because they had other, more lucrative interests?
From some insider reports that seem to fall into IBM’s side of the debate, Apple was low-profit prima donna–high maintenance and more trouble than they were worth. Apple would negotiate to have a processor custom made for them, a chip useless in any other system-i.e., only Apple could use it.
IBM would have to be careful calculating how many chips to produce, as any overestimate of sales would cause the Apple-only chips to just sit in storage until Apple decided they needed them. Then Apple would go so far as to let the chips sit for a while in order to get a price break on the specially designed processors.
With other customers willing to pay up front for non-customized processors, Apple would quickly become a high-powered nuisance. After all, Apple hasn’t had the best sales record until the release of iPod. So why would IBM be eager to please a company with no guarantee or a good history of Mac sales that seems to abuse their most key business relationship by ordering parts and then squatting on them trying to drop the price?
More salt in the wound comes from Apple’s complaint that IBM can’t deliver-when it may be more of a case that IBM won’t deliver because Apple can’t be trusted.
And even still, others question that the switch had anything to do with IBM at all. The contention that a switch to Intel improves Apple’s market positioning for a transition into a multimedia-centered future is still pretty tantalizing.
