Replies to post #52525 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

Re: Apple was dying a death ( like Sun Sparc ) until IBM rescued them with the PPC chip. Apple quickly became a new fresh Apple again.

I would owe much of Apples recent success to iPod, rather than IBM and PowerPC.

Re: I consider that there are some parallels between AMD's AMD64+HTT architectural lead over Intel's somewhat ageing architecture to Apple's jump from MC68xxx to PPC.

Apple's decline happened over the space of nearly 10 years, over which Motorola's PowerPC development fell increasingly behind in competitiveness. Intel is very far from being like Motorola. In fact, speculation on a newer, Pentium M derived micro-architecture in 2007 tells me that the end of Intel's underperforming Netburst based chips will be before another two years are up. In the mean time, Intel has the prospects of being feature competitive with AMD this year (with EM64T, XD bit, VT, and dual core all being implemented this year), and having the advantage of a 65nm process next year. While these may not give Intel a huge advantage, they do close the gap in both features and performance that Intel felt in 2004, to a point where comparing Intel to Motorola is just silly.

Re: Sun's choosing of AMD is making a BIG statement to the business world : Flying the AMD64 flag at it's highest .

I think it could just as easily be interpreted as, "We don't know what we're doing, but maybe sticking it to Intel might help."

[The Duke of URL]

Interesting trip down memory lane. And you are right there seem to be several very significant similarities in apple/IBM and sun/AMD.

The only difference, and it turns out to be a very significant one is that PPC was a very different architecture than Intel.

Apple's OS and apps would not run on Intel. BUT when sun is finished, it will be in the software business and Solaris will be ported to everything including toasters.

Apple and sun used propriety hardware to sell software, or vice versa, which ever you prefer. Apple just changed it's proprietary hardware subcontractor.

Solaris will not be propriety at the end because sun eventually will have no interest in selling AMD processors.

They will make the transition to having Intel and AMD and who ever else wants to, make their processors. Other than the AMD that sun sells direct, AMD gains nothing from its relationship with sun. It still will be alone in its battle against Intel.

True, Sun could "standardize" around amd much like dell standarizes aroung Intel, but there are a number of reasons that make this seem unlikely.