Posted on 06/10/2008 6:23:21 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
You can call this a success, ignore the wise decision of Jobs to dump IBM as their chip provider, and hope IBM eventually develops some way of better accessing the multiple cores on their own chip, but right now the fact is Apple is soaring and if they develop a way of better programming multiple cores than IBM has been able to despite all the endless Cell hype, IBM will have even more egg on their face. And considering HP has already blown past them as the biggest computer company in the world, despite IBM's ballyhooed partnerships with Chinese and Japanese, they're already wearing quite a bit.
My entire history on this board shows I appreciate quality and advanced engineering. I don't really care who makes it. Despite your claims, I've even praised Microsoft where praise was due.
You mean IBM's partnership with the Chicom government?
Like Intel's? Like Cisco's? Like Microsoft's? Like HP's?
Apple is in another league from Lenovo, anybody knows that but an IBM pimp.
Which is probably why you usually see me praising Apple's personal computers and laptops, and not saying much about IBM/Lenovo's. I specifically remember comparing the Air and Lenovo's competition, and stating the Air is better.
Not the Cell.
You are the one condemning all of IBM, not me. Microsoft's Xenon processor was designed by IBM, and essentially consists of three of the Cell's PowerPC units. But Microsoft decided to have a company from Singapore manufacture it instead of IBM, which probably would have made it with American workers in Fishkill, New York.
Nobody but Sony is using that, and they posted a 1.24 Billion dollar loss last year because of it.
Quite true, and I see you're Googling the subject again. I told you they were taking a loss on every PS3 made. They put an extremely over-powered processor in a game machine for the time. However, the Blu-Ray diode's initial cost is responsible for a lot of that loss. But things have picked up: the diode price went through the floor and the Cell has helped make the PS3 the most flexible and future-proof Blu-Ray player on the market, responsible for a large percentage of all Blu-Ray player sales.
Things have gotten so desperate they even sold their Cell chip plants to Toshiba LOL
Sony has been looking to get out of the fab business for years, long before the PS3. Fabbing is just too expensive to do when it's not a core component of a business. The game division troubles probably helped push it to happen though. Also remember that Microsoft ran billions in the red for years over the XBox. IIRC, Microsoft would have recently gone green if not for having to take a billion dollar charge to account for the poor design and manufacturing of the XBox 360.
I can hear Jobs laughing now.
Why would he? Not everybody is as hateful as you are.
Here's an honesty challenge for you: Use the same vitriol to describe the situation with Microsoft and the XBox. They've lost about $4 billion so far, and were hoping to finally be profitable in 2008, over six years later. Producing poorly designed, tested and manufactured 360s didn't help the picture much.
Meanwhile, Sony's gaming division losses are being cut dramatically due to much lower hardware costs and massively increased sales. The PS3 will pay off a lot faster than the XBox may eventually pay off for Microsoft. Sony's initial problem was only that the PS3 was too advanced for its time, and thus it was far too expensive to manufacture and produced sticker shock among the consumers.
You're on record saying you wish the iPod was made by Sony. Deny it? I have the link, and you've been reminded before.
Like Intel's? Like Cisco's? Like Microsoft's? Like HP's?
None of those companies sold a $10 billion/year business to the Chicoms for a measly $1 billion. Nor do they have a vested interest in China's dominance of any market like IBM hopes the Chinese dominate the PC market.
You are the one condemning all of IBM, not me.
No I'm not, I'm just pointing out their flaws despite your blind devotion to the Cell processor, which is the poster child for poorly utilized cores.
the Cell has helped make the PS3 the most flexible and future-proof Blu-Ray player on the market, responsible for a large percentage of all Blu-Ray player sales.
LMAO! Now you're so desperate you're even trying to credit IBM for Sony's sucess with their proprietary Blu-Ray technology. FYI Sony sells Blu-Ray players and PC's with Blu-Ray drives, and none of those use the Cell, nor are there any plans for them to use the Cell. But don't let facts get in the way of your endless sales pitch.
Typical distraction attempt from you to change the subject, but I've never supported Microsoft entering the console hardware business and don't now. A computer can not only play games but do a lot more, and that's where Microsoft should be concentrating, on their software for computers. Using a chip that was incompatible with Windows on their console was ignorant as well. So, you failed, again.
Bring on the link, and I will yet again show you how you are twisting my words.
No I'm not, I'm just pointing out their flaws despite your blind devotion to the Cell processor,
Thank you for making my point, that I praise or damn technology on its own merits or lack thereof. IBM's other flaws have nothing to do with the technological achievement of the Cell processor in this discussion. You, with your blind hatred, of course tried to drag all that in.
Now you're so desperate you're even trying to credit IBM for Sony's sucess with their proprietary Blu-Ray technology.
Nice try, but no dice. Sony has made a lot of other Blu-Ray players, many stuck at 1.0 or 1.1 of the specification (I can see you Googling furiously now to find out what that means). In part because of the power of the Cell, the PS3 has easily progressed from 1.0 to 2.0 of the spec, and can easily go to 3.0, simply through software updates. Adding a secondary audio and video decoder to achieve profile 1.1 was just a software update, the Cell can easily handle the extra load. Too bad, everybody who bought a regular 1.0 player.
FYI Sony sells Blu-Ray players and PC's with Blu-Ray drives
Blu-Ray playback can be a PITA on a PC, and you have to get a pretty decent PC to do it, more expensive than a PS3.
BTW, can any of those PCs show me 48 full-motion SD videos shrunk to thumbnails on the fly at the same time, so I can select one to play? How about six 1080p HD videos? Didn't think so.
I didn't quite catch the vitriol and glee over a company losing billions of dollars in that post, like you did against Sony. Come on, let's see you be honest for once. All I saw there was simple disagreement.
Using a chip that was incompatible with Windows on their console was ignorant as well.
They lost their first billions with a Pentium III chip in the original XBox. The 360 and other 360-related products are actually selling extremely well, and would have turned the game division to a net profit by now if not for Microsoft rushing it to market.
IBM is “clearly on the decline?”
You obviously haven’t the slightest glimmer of a clue about which you’re mouthing off. A company that grows its earnings 25% year-over-year, as IBM did in the last year, isn’t “on the decline.” A company that has over 10X as many employees, about 5X the revenue of Apple, that produces the number of bleeding-edge patents as IBM does (over 3,000 last year) isn’t about to decline any time soon.
Apple’s decision to not use the Cell processor makes no difference to IBM’s plans for Cell or other Microelectronics division. It was the next generation, the future direction of the PPC product line towards creating a “standardized CPU” for products of interest to IBM’s partners - Sony & Toshiba. The Japanese have plans in a lot of products for a range of Cell chips - not just the game consoles. You’re quite clearly suffering from tunnel vision, thinking that the desktop market is the be-all, end-all indication of the success of a processor product. This is as silly (and stupid) as I would be if I insisted that the Pentium line was going to flop because of how many times we at cisco rejected Intel’s latest product offerings. There was nothing wrong with Intel’s products, they just weren’t a fit, they cost too much for our application and they spent too much die space on features we didn’t need (eg, floating point).
For Apple, it was smart to go with Intel’s Core line - doing so allowed them to use virtualization at native speed and remove the Windows software compatibility issue as a barrier of entry into the corporate desktop market. IBM had reached an inflection point in their PowerPC product and they wanted to go in the direction of many cores on one die instead of playing the catch-up game against Intel. The larger number of cores on a single die is a good idea for video, signal processing, military applications and so on. This is a market that no one else is addressing.
There’s plenty of applications for this type of product, just not on the desktop. There’s a huge embedded CPU market out there, and Motorola used to (NB the past test) to own this. Moto has fallen on really hard times, Intel never really understood this market well, so IBM has (rightly, IMO) decided that they could pick up quite a bit of business by creating a standard library of chip designs, coupled with a CPU architecture. The Cell CPU isn’t the beginning of this product effort, and it won’t be the last, and IBM has plenty of other plans in this area which I won’t disclose because I don’t know whether they’re still covered by the NDA’s I’ve signed.
Now as to Jobs “never switching to IBM chips in the first place.” Again, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
IBM wasn’t the source of chips for Macintosh computers when Apple shifted from the Motorola 68K family to the PPC. Moto had licensed the “Power” architecture from IBM. IBM has held the patents on the “Power Architecture” since the first RISC machine, the 801. If you trouble yourself to actually study computing history, you’d see that the PowerPC’s instruction set and RISC architecture bears a very close resemblance to the 801. Where it differed was mostly in the memory management and FPU, because there was no IEEE floating point back when the 801 was designed.
So Apple, when they got the word from Moto that the 68K was reaching the end of the line, they stuck by their agreement and partnership with Motorola, went with Moto’s PowerPC products, the core design of which was licensed from IBM. At cisco, we were using 68040’s at the time and we got the same word, and we instead went with MIPS CPU’s, starting with IDT’s R4400 version of the MIPS R-4000. cisco still runs a lot of IDT/MIPS chips today for general purpose CPU’s on CPU boards in the mid-range and high end. The low-low end uses the PowerPC “QUICC” “system-on-a-chip” products.
Fast forward to the late 90’s and early 2000’s: Motorola decides that their future is in cellular phones, and following the fad at the time, they decided to spin out their Microelectronics division into Freescale Semi. Freescale announces to all and sundry that they’re no longer going to do bleeding edge CPU development, they’re going to concentrate on mass-market, low-power embedded products, especially embedded “system-on-a-chip” products.
Well, now Apple is in a lurch. They need to do one more spin of the Mac on the PPC. They needed a faster machine without changing the target architecture. So Apple has to go back to the only CPU house working on PPC architectures, and that’s IBM. Apple works with IBM to create the chip used in the G5. IBM was also the only game in town to fab the chip, and that’s how Apple ends up with IBM as a CPU supplier.
For all that effort, tho, it is pretty clear that the PPC has lost the edge in ultimate price/performance as a desktop/laptop CPU because of some very clever things that Intel’s Israeli design group did with the Pentium-M and the follow-on Core products. Once Intel did this, the prime advantage of the PPC architecture, the greater efficiency of the instruction set per clock cycle, was largely lost.
IBM wasn’t able to deliver a CPU at the price points for Apple, because Apple would have been one of the very few buyers of a CPU line with multiple chips (ie, a hot one for desktops, a low-power chip for mobile apps, etc) because everyone else was going to Intel or AMD’s 64-bit products. In chips, volume means lower prices, which means margins. Low-volume chips are margin killers, unless you can price your product in a very narrow market.
As long as Apple has been around, they’ve been fighting the “clock speed comparison” between their non-x86 CPU’s and x86 PC’s. By going to the same sort of CPU that commodity PC’s were using, all the issues of trying to explain the difference in useful throughput to customers were gone. Apple could just say “We’ve got a X GHz CPU clock” and that is that.
And that’s how Apple arrived where we are today, on Intel’s Core architecture.
re: your claim that IBM sold off the Cell. Bullcrap.
IBM has not sold off their Cell chip plants. They licensed the first Cell product to Toshiba to produce for the market. IBM has just announced (this spring) that they’ve shrunk the Cell design down for their 45nm fab. That’s not exactly something that a chip outfit does if they’re selling off the product completely. As I said previously, IBM is one of the two bleeding edge fab lines in the world. The significance of that clearly went sailing over your head at Mach-1+. When you have IBM’s bleeding edge fabs, you don’t piss away your resource pumping out commodity chips. You do what IBM now does - you produce bleeding-edge chips, and you license the older stuff to companies with less advanced fab lines. IBM and Intel’s bleeding-edge fabs represent investments of billions of dollars, and they have to be kept running at maximum capacity on chips that have the profit margins commanded by being produced at the highest speeds and highest gate densities.
As for HP: HP is noe nothing but a hollowed out shell of what they once were. The truth is that HP is a printer company that makes PC’s as a hobby. The printer line has been been HP’s real profit cow for years, and looks to remain such until one of the lower tier PC manufactures goes out of business. Did Fiorina get what she wanted? Yes. But she destroyed one of the top-of-the-line R&D and product companies in the market to turn it into a commodity PC manufacture. They’re now riding high. Big whoop. So did Dell once. Before they became a commodity PC company, they were at the top of their markets for decades, and they had a diversified product mix in computers, printers, test equipment, medical equipment, etc that allowed them to weather the various cyclical downturns and spending shifts that happen in the computing industry. HP survived the shift away from minicomputers (like their 1000’s and 3000’s) to PC’s - because they had a base of the test/medical/graphics equipment to fall back upon. No more. The next time there’s a shift in the market, they’re going to be going through the same problems as Gateway or Dell. And since they’ve lost much of their bleeding-edge R&D staff by becoming a commodity company, they have very little prospect to create completely new technologies. They’re now in a race to the bottom against the Chinese to see who can create the cheapest PC.
There’s a reason why the HP employees were dancing in their hallways when Fiorina was tossed out by the board. If McCain were to pick her for a VP candidate, you can pretty much write off McCain’s chances.
Back to the discussion at hand: antiRepublicrat brought up the Cell as an example of what can be done with the multi-core, specialized architectures of chips that are like GPU’s today. That’s all he did. You accused him of flacking for Cell, which upon re-reading the thread, is clearly an invention of your imagination. AR did no such thing, he was merely carrying on a side-discussion about the Cell as an instance of parallel processing chip with special purpose side-processors. You equate the entire computing market with the success or failure of IBM in the commodity PeeCee/Windows market, which is a profit sinkhole for any company that wants to maintain higher profit margins. IBM was smart to get out of that market, because there isn’t anywhere to go but down for profit margins in the market, and there is no point in trying to slash margins to compete with the slave labor of third world countries in slapping together commodity PC’s.
And now I’m done with you. I’ve done my best at educating you with the facts. It is up to you if you want to continue to ignore them.
Great, it's always fun watching you try to weasel your way out of this LOL.
Let's first go back to what you said on this thread, in post #104, just above:
"My entire history on this board shows I appreciate quality and advanced engineering. I don't really care who makes it."
You don't? Then explain why you've admitted you'd prefer to have a portable music player from Sony:
“As far as name goes, I’d prefer to have a portable music machine bearing the name Sony”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1358645/posts?page=657#657
I can sum it up [why I like Apple products] in two words: superior engineering. As far as name goes, I'd prefer to have a portable music machine bearing the name "Sony" but then they don't have a good product in this market. I love the Creative brand, and have owned several of their products over the years, but their players are also not as good.
Ta da! Name takes a back seat to superior engineering in my book, right there in the link you sent me from over three years ago. Nope, really don't care if the engineering isn't there. Won't buy a Sony player even if I like the name because the the product is not as good. Same for the Cell, the technology sells it for me, not the name.
Did you really think I'd ask you to post the link if I didn't know you were falling into a trap of your own deceit?
Clearly, since you're apparently out of the loop. HP has blown by them as the largest computer company in the world, by income, yet makes very little on software and service compared to IBM, whose server sales are declining, significantly, as I already linked above. IBM is trying to transition to a services company, ask the CEO if you doubt it. It may work out it may not, but they are desperately trying something, and now for basically the first time in recorded history, IBM is NOT the largest computer company in the world. They clearly have lots of supporters, but this is a dark time in their history, whether you're willing to admit it or not.
Apple’s decision to not use the Cell processor makes no difference to IBM’s plans for Cell or other Microelectronics division.
Hilarious, only about 10 million Mac CPU's per year, and how many iPhone CPU's is IBM potentially missing out on now too, another 10 million? Where is IBM even competing in such markets? They aren't. And they have no plans to, since all their chips are power hogs.
Now as to Jobs “never switching to IBM chips in the first place.” Again, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
LOL what? Jobs wasn't even there when they started getting their chips from IBM, who are you trying to fool? Gil Amelio tried to sell Apple's soul in 1994 by announcing the partnership with IBM, which almost destroyed the company. You must not have been there but these companies hated each other. The board ousted him and Jobs returned to what was left. His only mistake since was not switching to Intel earlier, and IBM is now left selling chips for nintendo's.
re: your claim that IBM sold off the Cell. Bullcrap. IBM has not sold off their Cell chip plants.
I never said they did, again, what are you talking about? Go back and READ, if possible, I said SONY sold their plants. More than once.
As for HP: HP is noe nothing but a hollowed out shell of what they once were.
Yeah, it must really sting you IBM guys to watch your company ditch PC products completely just in time to watch HP ride of wave of them to become the largest computer company in the world. IBM has even had to revive their old printer division once again to try to keep up, and they're having to supply their workers with Lenovo's now too LOL. That must be one depressing place right now, and I feel sorry for the good people who work there. They need new leadership just like Apple did, propoganda on a message board isn't going to help.
You can claim you meant whatever you want, but this is what you said. You'd PREFER to have your products from Sony. This is where your true heart shows itself. This is where truth kills. Yes, you admire Apple for superior engineering. But, you'd PREFER to get your products from Sony.
So maybe you are not lying, maybe you are not deceitful. Maybe you didn't post the context showing engineering is paramount even above a name I liked because you were incapable of understanding it even when the text is right there, surrounding the small snippet you posted.
When I was growing up Sony always made the best portable music players. I grew to associate the name with quality and engineering -- the quality caused the like of the name. I expected them to come out with the first good mp3 player, not Apple. I expected to own another in a long line of Sony players, not my first Apple hardware. Now Apple is causing me to like the name because -- you didn't guess it -- quality and engineering. Their name will be mud with me as soon as they stop producing. Same with IBM, with whom I was disappointed when they didn't get the 970 up to speed (the Cell earned the respect back). No, I don't really care about name.
You showed your true colors, a peek into your heart. You’d quote PREFER to use products put out by Sony, even if Apple’s are better quality wise. This tells us what we need to know about you, who you really are, and explains why we basically never agree, because in my heart of hearts I put America first. Not technology, and certainly not foreign companies like you.
Wow, that statement is exactly the opposite of the plain meaning of what I posted. That is lie # ... never mind, I lost count. For reference:
I can sum it up [why I like Apple products] in two words: superior engineering. As far as name goes, I'd prefer to have a portable music machine bearing the name "Sony" but then they don't have a good product in this market.Of course in keeping with your pathological need to lie, all you posted was the following:
As far as name goes, I’d prefer to have a portable music machine bearing the name SonyIn your heart of hearts you put hatred first, and neither fact nor truth in front of your face can keep you from spewing the same lies over and over.
It’s clear as day, you’ve admitted you’d quote “prefer” products made by Sony. There is no denying you said this, and it matches your behavior perfectly. Calling me a liar for simply posting your own admission shows there’s no end to your deceit. Have a nice day.
Taking my text out of its immediate context to lie about what I said matches your behavior perfectly. You have been doing it for years, all cases proven.
Where is IBM even competing in such markets? They aren't. And they have no plans to, since all their chips are power hogs.
IBM has had a wide range of low-power PowerPC chips widely used in high-end embedded applications. Until 2004, IBM had a series of very low-power chips for smaller applications (IBM sold that off). IBM was touting processing power per milliwatt while Intel was turning their chips into frying pans. It is only when the PPC970 hit that the PowerPC became a power hog, and that is because the PPC970 is based on IBM's POWER4 mainframe CPU.
Jobs wasn't even there when they started getting their chips from IBM, who are you trying to fool? Gil Amelio tried to sell Apple's soul in 1994 by announcing the partnership with IBM, which almost destroyed the company.
True, Jobs wasn't there. Apple was at the time getting its chips from Motorola. But the 68K line was getting old so Apple partnered with Motorola and IBM to come up with a new chip, the PowerPC. That chip made Macs much faster than their PC competition for years and was a reason for the company's survival. I had a friend with an early 90s PPC Mac who could play DOS games under emulation faster than I could on my 486. You also don't seem to know that Apple got its chips from Motorola, IBM and Freescale, not just IBM.
In fact, it was Motorola that disappointed Apple in the late G4 years by not being able to increase its performance enough. IBM was not supplying that chip. IBM extended the PowerPC's life at Apple by introducing the much higher-performance PPC970 (G5), but its power consumption and heat dissipation wasn't acceptable for laptops. Jobs needed one line of chips that could work across the board (the G4 and G5 architectures were compatible, but very different), and the PPC manufacturers couldn't provide it. Unlike you, Jobs is running a company, so can't afford to make decisions based on petty things such as hate.
and IBM is now left selling chips for nintendo's.
Only 25 million sold, each at a profit (Microsoft and Sony take a loss on each one sold).
They need new leadership just like Apple did, propoganda on a message board isn't going to help.
We finally agree, they need new leadership. So does Microsoft. But what is the difference between propaganda and talking about an industry-changing chip in a tech thread? It's already created the fastest supercomputer, is going into mainframes, made Folding@Home the fastest distributed computing project ever, is running this generation's most powerful game console, and is being integrated into high-end consumer electronics. That's quite a wide reach.
I haven't seen one demo of the Cell that wasn't impressive in every way, and neither have most industry analysts. I don't care what your ideology is, the Cell using only six of its eight SPEs to decode 48 simultaneous MPEG-2 streams, and one other to scale it all on one screen is impressive (yes, it did that with one SPE sitting idle).
Of course I know your difference between propaganda and talking a product's merits. If it's a company you like, it's merits. If it's a company you don't like, it's propaganda. You forget that we here think merits, while you and Stallman think ideology. That is probably why I can't get along with either of you.
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