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Pedantic: The quote from Sculley is misleading "So Intel lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them… (but) we went with IBM and Motorola with the PowerPC." Ap
by gvb 16y ago
Pedantic: The quote from Sculley is misleading "So Intel lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them… (but) we went with IBM and Motorola with the PowerPC."
Apple switched from the Motorola 68000 family to the joint IBM / Motorola PowerPC. I am sure Intel lobbied heavily to get Apple to switch to the x86 architecture, but they definitely did not lobby to have Apple stay with them.
To be more fair to Apple's decision, at the time it was made, RISC was the New Hotness[tm] that was suppose to run much faster than CISC.
What they both missed was that the memory subsystem became the bottleneck, not processor clock rates, so the winner became the processor with the biggest and fastest cache. Intel ended up with the edge due to their fab technology.
- jfb 16y agoAlso, I think that the Intel processor that was in the running wasn't the 486, but rather the i860 (a relatively clean RISC design). Which, although a flop for general purpose computing, was used in the NeXT Dimension graphics accelerator in later NeXT cubes.
- metageek 16y ago>To be more fair to Apple's decision, at the time it was made, RISC was the New Hotness[tm] that was suppose to run much faster than CISC. And everybody, including Intel, believed that CISC was doomed. That's why Intel developed the i860, i960, and Itanium, and MS ported NT to Alpha and PowerPC. Against that background, it would've been really strange if Apple had migrated to x86.