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June 6, 2005

"A Two Year Transition"

They actually did it.

You can watch for yourself, if you like - the stream from Steve's WWDC keynote is now available. (QuickTime required, natch).

Steve is calling this move to Intel processors a "two year transition", meaning that we're starting today (all PowerPC, and a promise of what's to come) and ending at the end of 2007 (all Intel, and much back-slapping and high praise for the hard work).

Broadly, the strategy is this: by this time next year, Apple will be (or plans to be, more properly) shipping Macintosh computers that are powered by Intel processors. These Intel-based Macs will be sold alongside Macs that are powered by traditional, PowerPC chips. By the end of 2007, Apple will have all of its machines running on Intel kit, and will no longer be in the business of making new PowerPC machines.

This last point is important. Just because Apple is going to start shipping Intel-based Macs (or "IBM" for short, which is a hysterically funny initialism, given the circumstance) does not mean that it is going to forget about its installed base. Indeed, given the amount of love and kisses showered on the PowerPC customers during the SteveNote, it's a safe bet Apple will be building for the PowerPC until 2012, at least.

So that's the news - and Gruber was right.

Apple's solution to the transition is for its developers to create something they call a "Universal Binary" - basically, a smart bundle of bits that feature both X86 and PowerPC code. The appropriate code is invoked depending on your platform. No fuss, no mess.

And we were right, by the way, about the Transitive bit. Apple has an emulator in their Intel machines called "Rosetta" that will allow un-updated PowerPC applications to run - with a slight performance hit - on the Intel hardware. Interestingly, Daring Fireball pored through Apple's "Universal Binary" documentation and found that Classic, along with other types of processor-specific function (AltiVec, anyone?) is not supported by Rosetta. Rosetta was shown off during the SteveNote by launching PowerPC-based Word, Excel, Photoshop (with plug-ins!) and Quicken. They Just Worked(tm).

So, let's see ... "fat binaries" (excuse me, "Universal Binaries") and a processor emulator built in at the operating system level.

Oh my God. It's 1994 all over again.

I kept waiting for the missing piece in all of this, the thing that connects the dots and makes me go, "aha"! But it didn't come out, at least not explicitly.

I mean, yes, Steve talked about how, "as we look ahead, we don't know how to build the products we want with the PowerPC roadmap" and how Intel has a power-consumption edge. Apple is (apparently) a big believer in "performance per watt" (the image at the top of this entry is the PPW chart for PowerPC and Intel, respectively - longer bars are better), and they say Intel does it better.

But ... is that enough? I mean, this essentially feels like Steve is saying, "We're gonna bet our entire Mac franchise, and, therefore, our company, on Intel. And we're doing it for the sake of a few more megahertz, and a slightly-less-heat-intensive set of processors."

That seems like insanity to me. So I say this is not the whole story.

One thing that struck me as odd is that the entire presentation reiterated that Apple is "moving from PowerPC to Intel." But this makes no sense. PowerPC is a processor family, while Intel is a company that makes processors. It's kind of like Mazda saying, "We're moving from Wankel Rotary Engines to Toyota."

Huh?

Apple, therefore, has not publicly committed to a specific Intel architecture. Yes, the machine Steve showed on stage was a Pentium 4. And yes, the demo machines Apple is selling to the developers as a "Developer Transition Kit" also feature Pentiums. But - interesting tidbit - Apple wants those Transition Kit machines back at the end of 2006.

My bet, here, is that Intel is supplying a 64-bit chip to Apple that isn't shipping yet - one that will be available about a year from now. And I have no idea what the performance characteristics of that chip will be, except to say that it might be X86 compatible, and it might not. If it is X86 compatible (which I suspect it will be), X86 performance will almost certainly be a secondary characteristic.

So maybe we're building on X86 systems in the same way developers for the Xbox 360 are building on Power Mac G5 systems.

I'm still not satisfied. Steve is up to something grander, here - he has to be. So I did some digging through my e-mail (and found where I still owe Khan a dinner from losing my 'Apple is going to Intel' bet in '02), and found an I, Cringely article:

"The Power of X: How the Best Thing for Apple, for Users, and Even for Microsoft, Would Be an Intel Version of OS X"

Steve said something really, really interesting at the end of the presentation. I've transcribed it verbatim because I think it's so important:

"...Because more than the processor, more than even the hardware innovations that we bring to the market, the soul of a Mac is its operating system. And we're not standing still."

Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") is due "around the time Longhorn ships" at the end of 2006.

Makes more sense now, huh?

UPDATE, March 12, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at June 6, 2005 10:02 PM. Posted to Apple.

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