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Why Apple hasn't used Intel processors before: Part II The PowerPC Promise |
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In order to keep parity with Motorola, who had started with a better design, and yet still maintain compatibility with the 8088, Intel had to design increasingly complex processors. This effort was worth it for Intel, because there was a booming demand for faster PCs, and the money generated from x86 sales far outweighed the development costs of trying to mitigate the flaws in earlier versions. Intel started facing competition in developing successive versions of the x86. Both Cyrix and AMD began undermining Intel's monopoly of the PC processor industry by offering x86 compatible processors that rivaled Intel's. The x86 world was actually growing so fast that Intel faced more competition at home in developing x86 than they did in keeping pace with Motorola. The fifth generations of the two processor families resulted in Intel's i586 Pentium and Motorola's 68060. While the Pentium found great reception in the PC world, few of Motorola's customers were interested in the '060. Some, including Apple, held out for the new RISC technology in Motorola's upcoming 88000. PC sales funded increasing x86 research and development on a scale that began to overshadow the rest of the world, causing Apple to worry that Motorola would not be able to keep up in the technology race alone. Somewhat ironically, Apple decided to partner with IBM in designing a new family of processors, using some of the 88000 technology Motorola and Apple had started work on, and adding in a scaled-down version of IBM's 64-bit POWER architecture. |
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The resulting PowerPC processor caught the attention of the entire industry. Microsoft announced plans to port Windows NT to run on the new PowerPC, joining Apple's Mac OS and IBM's OS/2. NeXT, which had been manufacturing computers using the same 68040 processors as the Mac, also began efforts to port NeXTSTEP to the PowerPC. The BeBox also used the PowerPC in the development of an entirely new BeOS platform. |
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PowerPC was a clean, new design with lots of potential. Like Motorola's 68000 a decade earlier, PowerPC was a forward looking (64-bit) design scaled down to fit the present market (32-bits). By comparison, Intel's Pentium was a 32-bit design built on top of 8/16-bit predecessors, and carried a lot of legacy baggage. It required larger dies to manufacture, and it generated more heat. Intel's next-generation P6 technology was initially released as the Pentium Pro.; it was an even larger processor than the Pentium, more expensive, and had disappointing performance for Windows 95's existing 16-bit software. The PowerPC family performed better on many levels. It matched Pentium performance while running at lower clock cycles and using far fewer transistors, allowing for higher manufacturing yields and therefore cheaper chips that ran cooler and more efficiently. But Apple didn't just benefit from the PowerPC's initial lead; Apple needed PowerPC to in order to survive. System 7 was closely tied to the old 68000 architecture because much of it was originally written in low level assembly for performance reasons. Fortunately, 68000 code could run well in emulation on the PowerPC, so it was an easy, rewarding move for Apple to migrate from 1980 68000 CISC technology to the RISC PowerPC of the 1990's. Attempting a move to Intel's processors would not only have been a far more difficult technical effort for Apple (because the Pentium was abysmal at emulating the 68000 fast enough), but it would have been a difficult business case to make as well. Intel's latest designs weren't even performing well in the PC world, and it looked like the x86 architecture was running out of steam. Part III > Two Roads, One Destiny |
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