

Why Apple saddled the MacBook Air with "gimped" CPUs - pietrofmaggi
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/10/why-apple-saddled-the-macbook-air-with-gimped-cpus.ars

======
mjfern
That Apple is deploying older generation CPUs in its latest generation MacBook
Air is a further sign that the x86 architecture is in the early stages of
being disrupted. Drawing on work by Clayton Christensen, the classic signs of
disruption are as follows:

1\. The current technology is overshooting the needs of the mass market.

Due to a development trajectory that has followed in lockstep with Moore’s
Law, and the emergence of cloud computing, the latest generation of x86
processors now exceed the performance needs of the majority of customers.
Because many customers are content with older generation microprocessors, they
are holding on to their computers for longer periods of time, or if purchasing
new computers, are seeking out machines that contain lower performing and less
expensive microprocessors.

2\. A new technology emerges that excels on different dimensions of
performance.

While the x86 architecture excels on processing power – the number of
instructions handled within a given period of time – the ARM architecture
excels at energy efficiency. According to Data Respons (datarespons.com,
2010), an “ARM-based system typically uses as little as 2 watts, whereas a
fully optimized Intel Atom solution uses 5 or 6 watts." The ARM architecture
also has an advantage in form factor, enabling OEMs to design and produce
smaller devices.

3\. Because this new technology excels on a different dimension of
performance, it initially attracts a new market segment.

While x86 is the mainstay technology in PCs, the ARM processor has gained
significant market share in the embedded systems and mobile devices markets.
ARM-based processors are used in more than 95% of mobile phones
(InformationWeek, 2010). The ARM architecture is now the main choice for
deployments of Google’s Android and is the basis of Apple’s A4 system on a
chip, which is used in the latest generation iPod Touch and Apple TV, as well
as the iPhone 4 and iPad.

4\. Once the new technology gains a foothold in a new market segment, further
technology improvements enable it to move up-market, displacing the incumbent
technology.

With its foothold in the embedded systems and mobile markets, ARM technology
continues to improve. The latest generation ARM chip (the Cortex-A15) retains
the energy efficiency of its predecessors, but has a clock speed of up to 2.5
GHz, making it competitive with Intel’s chips from the standpoint of
processing power. As evidence of ARM’s move up-market, the startup Smooth-
Stone recently raised $48m in venture funding to produce energy efficient,
high performance chips based on ARM to be used in servers and data centers. I
suspect we will begin seeing the ARM architecture in next generation latops,
netbooks, and smartphones (e.g., A4 in a MacBook Air).

5\. The new, disruptive technology looks financially unattractive to
established companies, in part because they have a higher cost structure.

In 2009, Intel’s costs of sales and operating expenses were a combined $29.6
billion. In contrast, ARM Holdings, the company that develops and supports the
ARM architecture, had total expenses (cost of sales and operating) of $259
million. Unlike Intel, ARM does not produce and manufacture chips; instead it
licenses its technology to OEMs and other parties and the chips are often
manufactured using a contract foundry (e.g., TSMC). Given ARM’s low cost
structure, and the competition in the foundry market, “ARM offers a
considerably cheaper total solution than the x86 architecture can at present…”
(datarespons.com, 2010). Intel is loathe to follow ARM’s licensing model
because it would reduce Intel’s revenues and profitability substantially.

In short, the ARM architecture appears to be in the early stages of disrupting
x86, not just in the mobile and embedded systems market, but in the personal
computer and server markets, the strongholds of Intel and AMD. This is
evidenced in part by investors’ expectations for ARM’s, Intel’s and AMD’s
future financial performance in the microprocessor markets: today ARM Holdings
has a price to earnings ratio of 77.93, while Intel and AMD have price to
earnings ratios of 10.63 and 4.26, respectively.

For Intel and AMD to avoid being disrupted, they must offer customers a
microprocessor with comparable (or better) processing power and energy
efficiency relative to the latest generation ARM chips, and offer this product
to customers at the same (or lower) price relative to the ARM license plus the
costs of manufacturing using a contract foundry. The Intel Atom is a strong
move in this direction, but the Atom is facing resistance in the mobile market
and emerging thin device markets (e.g., tablets) due to concerns about its
energy efficiency, price point, and form factor.

The x86 architecture is supported by a massive ecosystem of suppliers (e.g.,
Applied Materials), customers (e.g., Dell), and complements (Microsoft
Windows). If Intel and AMD are not able to fend of ARM, and the ARM
architecture does displace x86, it would cause turbulence for a large number
of companies.

I just posted this as an article to HN: "The End of x86?" I'd appreciate an
upvote. Thank you!

~~~
happybuy
Currently Apple relies on Intel for a major component in a key product.
Strategically, Apple doesn't like to have to rely on a single source or
supplier for key products. Apple will do whatever is possible to remove this
reliance.

Hence a prediction: within less than 5 years a Mac will be running on an Apple
designed ARM processor.

How? By slowly, step by step, providing a way towards this.

Step 1. Migrate your OS to the new architecture (e.g. iOS already, OS X not
far behind) - done

Step 2. Migrate your developer base onto developer tools which you control and
can easily change the architecture it targets (e.g. Xcode and LLVM) - done

Step 3. Provide a space where problematic applications which use other VMs or
rely directly on getting too close to the hardware are not welcome (e.g. a Mac
App Store) - announced

Step 4. Change the marketplace behaviour so that you control how the majority
of applications are distributed and can quickly provide updates without user
intervention. Such as an App store.

Step 5. Release a new Macbook with an ARM processor, absolutely killing on
form factor, price and battery performance that Intel cannot compete with.
Encourage your Mac App Store developers to flick a switch in Xcode, to
recompile and upload their new Universal (x86 & ARM) versions of their Apps to
the Mac App Store.

Result: you now control the processor direction and application distribution
mechanism for a key product and no longer rely upon the whims of Intel.

Apple is all about controlling an integrated experience for their customers.
Currently Intel is getting in the way of this for the Mac product.

~~~
iuygthjkllkjnh
And driving all your customers in design, media, print, video, music etc into
the arms of Microsoft?

Or were they intending to pay to port Photoshop, Word, and a bunch of video
and music editing apps to ARM?

~~~
happybuy
Apple didn't pay Adobe or Microsoft to port any of their apps from PowerPC to
x86, and yet it happened. So I don't see why they would pay them to port from
x86 to ARM.

They'd either port and retain a large part of their market, or don't and leave
an opening for competitors to take their customers.

~~~
iuygthjkllkjnh
Apple hadn't at that time just pissed Adobe off by banning flash, and MSFT
didn't see Apple as a threat.

~~~
jinushaun
Thanks to the millions of Apple-loving creative types in the design industry,
Adobe makes way too much money on the Mac to abandon it as a platform.

------
simonsarris
Apple has an amusingly-worded bit about their CPU on their features page:

> MacBook Air weighs less than three pounds, but it’s a heavyweight where it
> counts. Intel Core 2 Duo processors get the work done fast. So you can be
> every bit as productive on MacBook Air — but in more places. Live-blog the
> event of the year straight from the convention floor. Perfect your sales-
> winning presentation from the airport terminal. Cite references down to a T
> from the library stacks. MacBook Air lets you do everything you need to do
> whenever and wherever it needs to be done.

Everything you need to do, such as writing, writing, and writing. Those
examples seem like they would be more appropriate if Apple had chosen an Atom
processor. They don't exactly instill me with 'heavyweight where it counts'
confidence.

~~~
opiuygtfrtghyju
I used to do image deconvolution of the original (flawed) Hubble images on a
Sun Sparc5. Exactly what are you people using your Macbook Air for while
sitting in starbucks ?

Is there a big underground CFD or N-Body scene among the trendy teens that I'm
not aware of? Or is everybody into computational chem and protein folding to
develop the next party drug?

~~~
stcredzero
Right. Folks nowadays carry around an embarrassment of riches in terms of CPU
power. People feel poor if they can only sit with a phenomenal amount of
computing power in their local cafe, as opposed to phenomenal times 3.

~~~
mxavier
While we do have a phenomenal amount of power in our hands, the fact is that
the rest of the industry has grown in step with the hardware in a lot of ways.
Browsing the web (admittedly as a power user) is one of the most intensive
things I do aside from compiling software.

~~~
stcredzero
_the fact is that the rest of the industry has grown in step with the hardware
in a lot of ways_

This tells me that there is a tremendous opportunity in the form of huge
inefficiencies in our computing infrastructure. I think Steve Jobs and others
at Apple went down this mental path when formulating the iPhone/iPad.
Actually, Opera Mini is a powerful demonstration of this idea!

~~~
GBond
>This tells me that there is a tremendous opportunity in the form of huge
inefficiencies in our computing infrastructure.

VMware has benefited from the CPU race. ESX is an easy sell for fotune 1000
datacenters that have huge amount of idle cpu horsepower.

------
jdietrich
The Air is in a completely different league to netbooks, for a number of
reasons. Even the slower CPUs in the 11-incher are 30-60% faster than
comparable Atom parts, but consume 30% less power. CPU performance of the
11-inch model is comparable to the 2006 Macbooks and the 13-incher to the
2007/2008 Macbooks.

The big performance story is the GPU and SSD.

For the majority of Air buyers, their new machine will feel quicker than any
computer they've every used, by simple merit of the SSD. Cold boot times of 15
seconds are being reported and programs will load with similar haste.

The GPU is a big deal, both for graphics performance and OpenCL. OS X has
always leaned heavily on the GPU. With the introduction of Snow Leopard, the
vast floating point performance of the GPU is available to the whole system.
If you've been following the Folding@Home project, you'll know how big a deal
that is. Of course third-party developers are proving fairly slow to make use
of it, I will bet lumps of my own flesh that iLife 11 will be heavily
optimised for OpenCL.

We've already mostly dispatched with the megahertz myth, but we're going to
have to confront the idea that CPU speed is a relatively minor part of real-
world computer performance. The old Air felt miserably slow, mainly due to
hard drive throughput. The new one will feel very fast indeed, in spite of a
relatively modest CPU.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
I think you misread the article. The power difference stated is between the
11' and 13' processors. Atom processors use around 2.5w, which is 4 times less
than the 11' processor in the air.

[http://www.intel.com/products/processor/atom/specifications....](http://www.intel.com/products/processor/atom/specifications.htm)

~~~
jdietrich
The low power Atom parts aren't remotely comparable in terms of performance
performance, so I didn't compare them - the 2GHz Atom Z550 at 2.5 watts TDP
has a Passmark score of just 386, compared to 964 for the 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
Thanks, I wasn't aware there was such a large performance difference.

------
zdw
TL;DR Summary: Intel's newer CPU's are physically larger and thus harder to
fit into the form factor, use somewhat more power, and their integrated GPU's
don't support OpenCL and are lacking in performance.

~~~
protomyth
So the headline could have been "Apple chooses form factor, power usage, and
OpenCL performance over newer generation CPU in MacBook Air". The words
"saddled" and "gimped" probably get more page views.

~~~
cobralibre
Except that your leaden, verbose headline would have been terrible from an
editor's perspective. Their headline is far more succinct and uses language
that speaks to the Ars Technica audience, which tends to both specs-obsessed
and a little puerile.

Besides, the use of scare quotes ought to suggest to any reader that the
headline is tongue-in-cheek.

------
jamesteow
Since Apple typically caters their decisions to the majority of their buyers
(as opposed to those power users who look specifically for the most up-to-date
tech specs) this decision makes a lot of sense. Having more battery time is
rather large plus.

~~~
beej71
So right. Out of all this stuff listed in the article, the only thing that
matters to the _average_ Mac consumer is the battery life.

~~~
kscaldef
Heat management also matters for at least two reasons. Directly, people don't
want to be burned by their laptops. Indirectly, overheating tends to lead to
component failures, and people care about reliability.

------
maercsrats
Here is a conspiracy theory I've got, and I think this article and Apple
releasing the app store for mac backs it up: Apple is going to drop Intel
chips in the next 3 years. My time may be off but I really think this is
what's going on.

All of this fighting between Intel and Nvidia is really only hurting
customers; namely Apple. So what can Apple do? Create an app store that makes
devs standardize on an API and shift the underlying arch. An arch that 67% of
their product sales are using.

Don't get me wrong, this is going to be a difficult transition, I think apps
like Steam are really going to get screwed, but this is Apple's end game. They
control not only all the software but also all the hardware.

~~~
unexpected
I was thinking about this yesterday as well. I know Apple bought their own
processors for the iPhone. I'm not sure they'd run their desktops off an apple
A4 chip - but I mean - look at AMD. Market cap is $5 billion. Apple has $50
billion in cash.

Apple could buy them and REALLY control the computer, end-to-end.

~~~
bsk
This is not as easy as it sounds. AMD will loose it's x86 license if acquired
without Intel permission. Designing an efficient parser for a different
instruction set can take years.

~~~
wtallis
I'm pretty sure that the patent situation between AMD and Intel is one of
mutually assured destruction, given that AMD created the 64-bit extensions to
x86. Intel could complain a lot and file some lawsuits, but if they seriously
tried to block the acquisition of AMD, they would be putting their whole
patent portfolio at risk and opening themselves up to billions of dollars of
punitive fines from antitrust regulators.

~~~
bsk
Not really: "However, the agreement[43] provides that if one party breaches
the agreement it loses all rights to the other party's technology while the
other party receives perpetual rights to all licensed technology."

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/X86-64>

[http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.com/operations/ip/802.htm...](http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.com/operations/ip/802.html)

~~~
wtallis
That sentence doesn't seem to be supported by the citation as redacted and
posted online, or I just can't find the relevant language. It looks to me like
the list of sections that survive the termination of the agreement doesn't
include section 3, which is the actual cross-licensing section. I'm not a
lawyer, though, so please point me to the section that has that effect.

Even if the agreement _does_ stipulate that AMD's patent license to Intel
becomes perpetual upon termination due to change of control, I really doubt
that it is legal in the US, since it basically means that a third party can't
buy their way in to the market unless they bribe both AMD and Intel to weaken
the duopoly. That would seem to amount to a cartel.

------
brudgers
11.6" Air + Mac App store = iPad with a keyboard (approximately)

That's why core2 is fine.

~~~
rodh257
would be interesting if they could make the screen swivel around and be used
like an ipad (like Dell and some others are doing). Would be hard to get the
hinges on such a thin device though.

------
yason
It's been almost a decade since I had a CPU on my personal computer that
seemed so slow somehow that I would have been considering an upgrade
specifically to a faster CPU...

~~~
jonhendry
Same here. It was a 2001 white iBook. 500 MHz G3.

With modern machines, I think the main cue isn't slow perceived performance,
but the sound of my laptop's fans ramping up, indicating that it's working
hard.

That said, my boss' MBA is awfully leisurely at times. That may be due to the
OS throttling or halting the CPU in order to keep the temperature down.

------
code_duck
I have a desktop with a 1.8 Ghz Core Duo. I have absolutely no problems with
performance. Of course, I'm only running browsers, email, Gimp, etc... but
what are people going to use a 11" MacBook Air for? Probably not games and
professional Photoshop work. The processors in these machines are more than
adequate and were probably chosen to balance speed with heat, weight and
battery life.

------
semipermeable
Note the coincident announcement about the Mac App Store... I bet the software
you can get there will run snappily enough.

------
aidenn0
If Intel doesn't either make the Atom line higher performance or the Core line
more portable friendly then I could see Apple switching to ARM. The high-end
ARM chips aren't quite there yet in terms of performance though, so I figure
Intel has at least one more rev to the Core line before that's a danger.

~~~
jrockway
Why? There are already Core i3/i5 ULV laptops around that get 12 hours of
battery life. It's only Apple that cares about that extra 1% less size; the
rest of the industry is just fine with Intel's new gen.

~~~
MrFoof
If I recall correctly, Arrandale does not yet have support for OpenCL. It's in
the works, but it's not there yet. In terms of raw performance, Arrandale is
competitive with the 320M (maybe a wee bit slower). Overall, Arrandale will be
attractive to Apple with OpenCL support, since they no longer need two chips
-- just the CPU package which has _everything_ it needs (graphics, memory
controller, etc). That allows space for better thermal solutions, more memory
or SSD storage, a larger battery, or other functionality.

Hence the decision to stay with the current nVidia 320M and Intel Core 2 Duo
-- once Arrandale supports OpenCL, we'll see Apple transition. Not only for
the MacBook Air, but also likely in the MacBook, low-end MacBook Pro SKUs, and
the Mac Mini.

~~~
wmf
_they no longer need two chips_

Today they have C2D + 320M; in the future they'll have Sandy Bridge +
southbridge. It'll still be two chips. I also wouldn't bet on Apple ever using
Arrandale in the low end, since it's going to be obsoleted soon anyway.

