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Why Apple hasn't used Intel processors before When Steve Jobs announced the plan to move Macs to Intel processors, Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, joked, “The only question I have, Steve, is what took you so long?” |
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Good question! Here's a look at the circumstances that kept Apple and Intel apart until today. At Apple's founding, Steve Wozniac's processor of choice for the first Apple computer was the MOS 6502. The decision wasn't based on the chip's elegance or technology, but rather because it was cheap. The 6502 also powered the very successful Apple II (and the dismal failure of the Apple III), and outside of Apple, versions of it were used in the Atari 2600, Nintendo's NES, and the very successful Commodore 64, among many others. As sales of the Apple II line flourished, the company looked ahead to a future platform with far greater power than something like the 6502 could provide. Apple picked Motorola's 16-bit 68000 processor for use in both the Lisa and Macintosh to give the machines unprecedented power for a small computer. This processor was initially designed with a '32-bit ready' architecture, so while it shipped as 16-bit to save costs, it planned ahead for a future where 32-bit computing would be a reality. Motorola's 68000 was easy to program and offered a very clean memory space, unlike the oddly arcane, but cheap, 6502 Apple had been using. With Motorola's new processor, Apple was ready to change the world. |
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IBM had no dreams of changing the world when they introduced their own PC. Instead, they were interested in creating a product that would fit into the new, blossoming market for microcomputers, without eroding their existing business in minis and mainframe business machines. IBM's very different motivations were reflected in their choice of CPU. Intel offered a 16-bit processor, the 8086, but IBM actually picked the 8-bit version, the Intel 8088. This was partly to position the machine at a lower price point, but also to effectively neuter the PC so it would not eat into IBM's other sales. Compared to Apple's futuristic Macintosh, IBM's PC was old technology striving to be sufficient. For the next decade, Apple used successive generations of Motorola's 68000. In addition to Apple, the 68000 series was used in the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Sun workstations, and later the Sega Genesis and Palm Pilot. Its popularity came from its power and elegant design. With the PC, IBM had established a de facto standard in business computing, but the industry that resulted around copying the PC was stuck with the limitations in Intel's x86 architecture. There was little significant use of the x86 outside of PC clones, mostly because it was an inefficient and antiquated design. Unlike Motorola's flat 32-bit memory addressing, the x86 platform had a clumsy, segmented memory map and other ugly and convoluted workarounds to maintain backwards compatibility with the original IBM PC. It is important to note that, despite the 8088 not being revolutionary, the limitations of PC-compatibles were not wholly imposed by Intel's lack of innovation or capacity to design processors. The PC industry sprang from IBM's deliberately stunted design of the PC; beyond the cheap 8088 processor, there were a number of other critical flaws and limitations. Intel was actually stuck with improving upon the 8088 to feed the PC market. Intel also offered far more modern technology; one example is the i960, a RISC processor Intel pitched to NeXT for the original Cube. It's cousin, the i860, was later used as a high performance graphics accelerator in the Cube's NeXTDimension video card. But for Intel, x86 was where the money was. Part II > The Promise of PowerPC |
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