8 ms·

Why was it a non-starter for Intel and what made Apple use it? I'm curious because I don't know about computer architecture.

neppo 10y ago
Apple has control over the chip and the OS, whereas Intel only makes the chip
- gaius 10y ago
  Again that is how it was back in the day, CPU and supporting hardware, OS, compiler, standard libs etc all co-engineered. Tho' in the case of the Amiga the CPU was part of the supporting hardware, the heart of the system was something else that farmed work out to the CPU or a co-pro as appropriate...
  - walterbell 10y ago
    Is there a good online reference for this design?
    - gaius 10y ago
      There is an excellent book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-ebook/dp/B007V5BVJG/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1474733494&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-... http://bogost.com/writing/blog/the_future_was_here/ http://bogost.com/writing/blog/the_future_was_here/
_ph_ 10y ago
Intel seems to be captured in its own x86 world. There were no big changes to the instruction set for ages, even the x64 extensions were designed by AMD. So while Intel still excels at manufacturing, the few projects for breaking out of their box failed (Ithanium, Larrabee). And also: why are there no Intel chips yet who include all the nice things USB-C can offer to the market? E.g. Thunderbolt, newest DisplayPort.
- qznc 10y ago
  Intel added for example: FMA (3) with Haswell in 2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiply%E2%80%93accumulate_operation#Fused_multiply.E2.80.93add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiply%E2%80%93accumulate_op... SSE4.2 with Nehalem in 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture) AES in 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set SHA in 2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions
  - MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
    Intel even added customer specific logic to its server class CPUs, which are only usable by them to speed up certain operations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11875255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11875255
    - userbinator 10y ago
      That seems more like a vague rumour than anything, at least until someone leaks some more info. (That it hasn't occurred, makes me somewhat doubting. Maybe the various undocumented instructions which have been found over the years are part of this...)
      - gaius 10y ago
        This approach was common in mainframes - you would buy a box that contained everything, but only the parts that you'd paid for would be accessible. If you wanted more, you could just apply an unlock code that you'd bought, and new features would come online, that were lying dormant all along. Even up to the level of more CPUs.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  >Intel seems to be captured in its own x86 world. Eh, no. >even the x64 extensions were designed by AMD. AMD (not working solo) has published the spec in 2000, AMD, Intel, VIA and a few others have a pretty different implementation of that spec, Intel's x64 extension is drastically different than AMD's implementation. Intel has been adding new extensions with virtually every generation, just look at how many generation of virtualization support extensions we've had. >the few projects for breaking out of their box failed (Ithanium, Larrabee). Itanium died because the industry didn't want to take a "RISC" (;)). Larrabee isn't dead, in fact it is very much alive it is just inside your CPU, the AVX extension set and the silicon that supports are Larrabee's vector processing units. Intel just more or less had the insight to see that Larrabee won't go anywhere really and they can shrink it and implement it into every CPU within a few years. Larrabee was interesting but it was not here and not there, Intel went to implement the good parts of it into each of their own CPU's and for HPC/GPGPU like computing it went a different way by releasing the Xeon-Phi. >And also: why are there no Intel chips yet who include all the nice things USB-C can offer to the market? E.g. Thunderbolt, newest DisplayPort. This just shows your utter lack of understanding of the technology landscape. I was tempted to cynically ask you about what version of Thunderbolt you have on your non-Intel machine to see if you fall for it, but alas I don't want to spread misinformation. USB-C doesn't bring Thunderbolt not Displayport to the market, USB-C can be mechanically compatible with those 2. Thunderbolt is Intel's proprietary technology and its upto the system integrator to decide if they want to implement it or not, don't buy cheap ass laptops get the latest thunderbolt. As for displayport could you please tell me what is the "latest"? if it is 1.4 there isn't a single desktop GPU that "technically" supports it yet, even the GTX 1080 is only certified for 1.2 (and in theory can support 1.3/1.4 but ink on the specs isn't dry yet and the certification process is well meh). Thunderbolt 3 is the only current interface that is actually certified for DP1.3, it should probably support DP1.4 but the spec was only finalized in march this year so....
bluedino 10y ago
Apple used Motorola because they were cheap compared to intel
- mattnewton 10y ago
  Because intel said no originally; they didn't think there would be the volume to justify the expense of a custom chip at the price apple was willing to pay. http://m.imore.com/intels-outgoing-ceo-explains-how-they-turned-down-original-iphone http://m.imore.com/intels-outgoing-ceo-explains-how-they-tur...
headShrinker 10y ago
One important aspect to apple's position is it had a new set of limitations other processor designers weren't dealing with; power consumption and size. Yes there were small processors and there were processors that didn't use tons of power, but they weren't fast. Apple had a very specific set of needs and apple being apple, was able to completely costomize its design and supply chain
mattnewton 10y ago
My speculation: Intel doesn't want to threaten it's core buisiness in the pc market (which is heavily dependent on backwards compatibility), and the experience with itanium in the hpc market probably left a bad taste in their mouth.

neppo 10y ago

Apple has control over the chip and the OS, whereas Intel only makes the chip

gaius 10y ago
Again that is how it was back in the day, CPU and supporting hardware, OS, compiler, standard libs etc all co-engineered. Tho' in the case of the Amiga the CPU was part of the supporting hardware, the heart of the system was something else that farmed work out to the CPU or a co-pro as appropriate...
- walterbell 10y ago
  Is there a good online reference for this design?
  - gaius 10y ago
    There is an excellent book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-ebook/dp/B007V5BVJG/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1474733494&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-... http://bogost.com/writing/blog/the_future_was_here/ http://bogost.com/writing/blog/the_future_was_here/

_ph_ 10y ago

Intel seems to be captured in its own x86 world. There were no big changes to the instruction set for ages, even the x64 extensions were designed by AMD. So while Intel still excels at manufacturing, the few projects for breaking out of their box failed (Ithanium, Larrabee). And also: why are there no Intel chips yet who include all the nice things USB-C can offer to the market? E.g. Thunderbolt, newest DisplayPort.

qznc 10y ago
Intel added for example: FMA (3) with Haswell in 2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiply%E2%80%93accumulate_operation#Fused_multiply.E2.80.93add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiply%E2%80%93accumulate_op... SSE4.2 with Nehalem in 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture) AES in 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set SHA in 2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions
- MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
  Intel even added customer specific logic to its server class CPUs, which are only usable by them to speed up certain operations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11875255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11875255
  - userbinator 10y ago
    That seems more like a vague rumour than anything, at least until someone leaks some more info. (That it hasn't occurred, makes me somewhat doubting. Maybe the various undocumented instructions which have been found over the years are part of this...)
    - gaius 10y ago
      This approach was common in mainframes - you would buy a box that contained everything, but only the parts that you'd paid for would be accessible. If you wanted more, you could just apply an unlock code that you'd bought, and new features would come online, that were lying dormant all along. Even up to the level of more CPUs.
dogma1138 10y ago
>Intel seems to be captured in its own x86 world. Eh, no. >even the x64 extensions were designed by AMD. AMD (not working solo) has published the spec in 2000, AMD, Intel, VIA and a few others have a pretty different implementation of that spec, Intel's x64 extension is drastically different than AMD's implementation. Intel has been adding new extensions with virtually every generation, just look at how many generation of virtualization support extensions we've had. >the few projects for breaking out of their box failed (Ithanium, Larrabee). Itanium died because the industry didn't want to take a "RISC" (;)). Larrabee isn't dead, in fact it is very much alive it is just inside your CPU, the AVX extension set and the silicon that supports are Larrabee's vector processing units. Intel just more or less had the insight to see that Larrabee won't go anywhere really and they can shrink it and implement it into every CPU within a few years. Larrabee was interesting but it was not here and not there, Intel went to implement the good parts of it into each of their own CPU's and for HPC/GPGPU like computing it went a different way by releasing the Xeon-Phi. >And also: why are there no Intel chips yet who include all the nice things USB-C can offer to the market? E.g. Thunderbolt, newest DisplayPort. This just shows your utter lack of understanding of the technology landscape. I was tempted to cynically ask you about what version of Thunderbolt you have on your non-Intel machine to see if you fall for it, but alas I don't want to spread misinformation. USB-C doesn't bring Thunderbolt not Displayport to the market, USB-C can be mechanically compatible with those 2. Thunderbolt is Intel's proprietary technology and its upto the system integrator to decide if they want to implement it or not, don't buy cheap ass laptops get the latest thunderbolt. As for displayport could you please tell me what is the "latest"? if it is 1.4 there isn't a single desktop GPU that "technically" supports it yet, even the GTX 1080 is only certified for 1.2 (and in theory can support 1.3/1.4 but ink on the specs isn't dry yet and the certification process is well meh). Thunderbolt 3 is the only current interface that is actually certified for DP1.3, it should probably support DP1.4 but the spec was only finalized in march this year so....

bluedino 10y ago

Apple used Motorola because they were cheap compared to intel

mattnewton 10y ago
Because intel said no originally; they didn't think there would be the volume to justify the expense of a custom chip at the price apple was willing to pay. http://m.imore.com/intels-outgoing-ceo-explains-how-they-turned-down-original-iphone http://m.imore.com/intels-outgoing-ceo-explains-how-they-tur...

headShrinker 10y ago

One important aspect to apple's position is it had a new set of limitations other processor designers weren't dealing with; power consumption and size. Yes there were small processors and there were processors that didn't use tons of power, but they weren't fast. Apple had a very specific set of needs and apple being apple, was able to completely costomize its design and supply chain

mattnewton 10y ago

My speculation: Intel doesn't want to threaten it's core buisiness in the pc market (which is heavily dependent on backwards compatibility), and the experience with itanium in the hpc market probably left a bad taste in their mouth.