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Analysis: Just how different are Intel-Macs from Intel PCs?
Scott M. Fulton, III

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/12/how_different_are_the_new_intel-based_macs/
and
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/12/how_different_are_the_new_intel-based_macs/page2.html

12 Jan 2006 17:01

San Francisco (CA) - The very first Apple computers, distributed nationwide in 1977, had a hood you could pry off to reveal the CPU, the memory, and the motherboard. But almost three decades later, the company that pioneered "open architecture" with the Apple II, even with thousands of admirers looking on, was reluctant to pry the back panel off its new Intel Core Duo-based iMacs and MacBook Pro portables.

It isn't so much that Apple has some secretive technology they don't want us to see, believes Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with the Insight64 consultancy. Instead, he told TG Daily this afternoon, it's more that Apple is a shy and reserved company. Up to now, it's never had to answer questions about what technologies and what chips - other than the PowerPC CPU - goes into its boxes. So with Apple formally entering the Intel realm just this week, he said, the company didn't demonstrate any willingness to change its basic personality. The lid didn't come off the back of the iMac; all that Brookwood got to see was revealed through the front end, where the screen is.

For Apple, Brookwood told us, "Making the decision to use Intel wasn't a change in business models or religion, it was simply a matter of expedience." Apple's existing PowerPC suppliers - originally IBM and Motorola, the latter replaced recently with spin-off company Freescale Semiconductor - simply could no longer deliver the chips Apple wanted, probably at the temperatures that the human race required. "Intel was there and said it could. So Apple is making zero changes in its business practices. It's still a systems supplier, it works with its customers to provide software interfaces, APIs, development tools, external interfaces like USB, FireWire, and doesn't really talk a lot about the pieces that go in its boxes."

There could be another reason Apple continues to be protective about its system specifications: The technology necessary to run a Core Duo-based computer is available to OEMs right now. What is to prevent an OEM or an enterprising system builder from using an existing Core Duo kit to effectively build himself a Macintosh?

If there's anything in the new Macs' hardware components that exclusively enables Mac OS X 10.4.4 - the version released yesterday that Jobs termed "universal" - then it would have to be in the parts Apple doesn't mention much, if at all: One candidate, it seemed when we began our investigation, was the chipset. We asked Intel to tell us the chipset used in the current Mac architecture. An Intel spokesperson confirmed to TG Daily yesterday that the new Macs use a standard Intel chipset, no different than those currently engineered to run Core Duo processors, using the Yonah architecture. But the spokesperson could not explicitly state which one...not because Intel declines to provide specifics, he said, but because he apparently hadn't been told the answer himself. During all the marshaling of Macworld-related news, he said, the question had never come up.

Perhaps it had never come up because it isn't the question existing Macintosh users - who comprise the majority of the target market for future Macintosh users - generally ask. Up to now, the chipset in the Mac motherboard is whichever one Apple exclusively designed for it; the nomenclature was never an issue, because it wasn't made available anywhere else. The only people who might possibly care, could be the sorts of people who aren't attending the show right now anyway.

Based on what information Intel could give us prior to press time, we believe all the new Macs use a standard 945 chipset. The only other potential candidate is the 975, which is typically used in Intel's Extreme Edition PCs, which is one of Intel's exclusive licensing brands. As is the case with Centrino and Viiv, the new Macs don't qualify for these umbrella brands.

The key difference between an x86 PC and an x86 Macintosh, which Nathan Brookwood could tell even without looking under the lid, is the Macs' absence of a key distinguishing PC feature: the BIOS. Instead, he told us, Apple is using Intel's Extended Firmware Interface (EFI), a next-generation bootstrap architecture that Intel had originally designed for use with Itanium architectures, and had been pleading with first-tier motherboard manufacturers to adopt for years, with no luck. Backwards compatibility and support issues were among the reasons for their refusal. But Apple had no such issues, no legacy matters to contend with. So it was an easy decision, said Brookwood, for Apple to go with EFI.

"And just by coincidence," Brookwood remarked, "the fact that their system relies on EFI, and no commodity Intel hardware at the motherboard level supports EFI, means that you can't start their stuff on a commodity board." In other words, Apple might not need fancy code to determine for Mac OS X to determine whether an attempt is being made to launch it in a non-Macintosh system. It could simply try tripping a BIOS interrupt - what developers call an "INT 13h." If it works...then OS X could easily halt itself.

The converse situation may also be true, since most Windows XP installations require the BIOS be present. However, whether an installation of Windows for Itanium systems could be made to work on a Mac Intel platform, remains to be seen.

Could the new Macs' EFI - its own bootstrap code - contain the security features that would disable any other operating system from running, including Windows and Linux? Surprisingly, Brookwood told us, he was told no. "What Apple has said to me directly," he said, "is they are doing nothing to preclude running Windows on their boxes, but neither are they doing anything to facilitate it. So if somebody could come up with the firmware environment to boot XP on those boxes, and create drivers needed to boot the system, then you could do it."

Of course, any Macintosh user reading this has probably already begun composing their response to this suggestion: Why would anyone want to run Windows on a Mac, instead of the Mac OS? And it's a perfectly valid question, especially considering the Mac is still more expensive.

No, the more likely tweak is probably the other way around: the possibility of running Mac OS X on a homemade system. And that's probably going to be much harder, Brookwood was told. "The other thing that Apple has said," he revealed, "is there may be some other things they've done to preclude OS X from booting on non-Apple machines."

We had been wondering for quirte a while whether a certain implementation of Intel's long-awaited Trusted Platform Module, known as LaGrande Technology (LT), would be making its premiere in the new Macs. Such a system, with its well-buried cryptographic keys, could make it easier for Apple to protect its intellectual property - both its operating system and the media components a user may download from iTunes. But we know that the 945 chipset does not carry LT. If it is the 945 that's running the Macs, this means that TPM won't play a role in 32-bit iMac and MacBook Pro architecture, at least for the next six months or so. If Apple truly does have something unique to hide beneath the lid of its new systems, this apparently isn't it.

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The Intel 64-bit Macintosh: A lost opportunity?
We've known Apple was going to be supporting Intel for quite some time; what we did not know until yesterday was Apple's itinerary. It's possible that Apple itself didn't know that itinerary until quite recently.

While the new iMacs and MacBook Pros will be delivering dual-core processing with world-class graphics, the one key modern-day technology they will not be adopting yet is 64-bit processing. Last August, it appeared likely that Intel's upcoming 64-bit Merom architecture, with its cooler operating temperatures more suitable for notebook systems, may have been what won Apple over to Intel in the end. Since the latest "Tiger" edition of MacOS X is natively 64-bit anyway, one of the new Macs' more ingenious tricks is being able to run the OS in Apple's 32-bit compatibility mode. Nonetheless, Tuesday's announcements featured the 32-bit Yonah architecture, for obvious reasons: Sources tell TG Daily that Merom chips won't be publicly available until this September, at the earliest.

"If Merom had been available now," said Insight64's Nathan Brookwood, "[Apple] would have jumped on it now. So they had to make a tradeoff: Do they want dual-core, power-efficient performance in a 32-bit platform today, or do they want to hold off until mid-year before coming out with 64-bit platforms? I think it's clear that they decided sooner was better."

Tuesday afternoon, we spoke with IDC analyst David Daoud, who told us his company's data going back six years indicated that Apple tends to make upgrades to its Macintosh platforms every six months. With some of the new MacBook Pros probably not publicly available until early March, a September timeframe for a big upgrade seems about right.

However, Steve Jobs did provide a little bit of a hint on Tuesday that his company could be rethinking its marketing scheme, even at the high end. Referring to the reasons for the notebook name change from "PowerBook" to "MacBook Pro," he told the crowd, "We're kinda done with 'Power,' and we want Mac in the name of our products.

Jobs also stated Tuesday that Apple will complete its entire product migration to Intel platforms by the end of the year. No replacements for the PowerMac G5 systems were announced at Macworld Expo, though what had been stated to be the last new G5 upgrades - the double-dual-core PowerMac G5 Quad series - were released last October. It may be as academic a matter as it was to replace one G5 with one Core Duo for the new iMacs this month, to replace two dual-core G5s with two Core Duos this fall.

When that happens - when we can finally stack Apple's highest-performing Intel-based system against the highest horsepower Intel PC we can find or build - what will distinguish the two systems from one another most? And more importantly to the builder, will the extent of that difference be enough to prevent her from constructing a high-performance Macintosh herself? Historically, Apple has distinguished Macintosh not by its hardware, but by its software - specifically, using the "ease of use" argument. "It just works" continues to be an Apple user's motto. But couldn't it just work somewhere else?

Nathan Brookwood reminded us of perhaps the greatest single unspoken distinction between Windows and the Mac OS: Windows is designed to run on a variety of systems, with an incalculable number of permutations. By contrast, a Mac tends to be a Mac. "Part of the complexity of Windows," he told TG Daily, "is due to the fact that there are so many more choices available to you. Windows is an environment where you have more players participating, [and] those players need to have some sort of more interfaces between their product so they can interoperate, and that flexibility is a strength of the Windows environment. I'm amazed every time I install Windows XP on a new box, how most of the time, it works right. You consider the thousands of different hardware options, that it works at all! It's just a miracle to me, because I lived through all this junk when it didn't work. Apple has always had a more restrictive set of options, but if you are willing to live within those constraints, you do have an easier user experience. I don't think that's likely to change."

If Mac OS X were to try to run on just any Intel-based system, the challenge before it would be to drive whatever hardware is built into it. Windows knows how to do this; Mac OS probably doesn't.

However, Apple's shift to Intel, Brookwood believes, may mean that the company doesn't have to invest so much time and money building the hardware necessary to maintain its hardware: "Now that they are on the Intel platform," he said, "they have dramatically reduced their need to develop the hardware pieces of their system. When they were doing PowerPCs, who was making core logic for PowerPC chips to use in Macintoshes? Apple. So every time there was a new PowerPC, or they needed a new bus, 'Hey, call the core logic guys and get them to develop a new chipset.' That's not a trivial expense, especially when you're only going to sell a couple of million copies of the chip, compared with Nvidia or Via who sells a hundred million of them."

With Apple out of the core logic business - and maybe, it's rumored, out of the motherboard business is well, if Intel is indeed providing that feature - Apple's R&D expenses may have dropped dramatically, Brookwood believes. Some of that cost may have been offset by what's believed to be the higher per-processor price of the Core Duo versus the PowerPC G5. But still, Apple's declining costs and reduced headaches may enable the company to focus on the part of Macintosh that continues to distinguish it from its competition: the abilities of its software.

Meanwhile, we might have just ascertained what it is Apple doesn't want you to see that's lurking beneath the lid of its systems. It could very well be one or two more bright, new, swirly logos than you thought you'd find.