Tech Industry
10/09/2003, 7:45am, EDT
Thursday, October 9th[::FROM::] [::SiteName::]
Sculley: Apple should have used Intel chips
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Apple should have used Intel's chips when it had the chance, former chief John Sculley said Tuesday: "In the late-1980s, when Apple was using Motorola Inc. 68000 series chips and considering its next step, Intel co-founder Andy Grove tried to convince the company to migrate to Intel chips, Sculley told a standing-room-only crowd at the Silicon Valley 4.0 conference, held at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, Calif. An experienced team from Cupertino, California-based Apple studied the idea but turned it down. Apple concluded that Intel's CISC architecture ultimately would not be able to compete against RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processors, which had a more advanced instruction set, he said. Apple later adopted RISC."
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posted by MacNN.com Reader
Keyword -->different
On the bright side Apple is starting to learn how to "innovate" by appropriation, just like Microsoft.
posted by MacNN.com Reader
He should have spent his life selling sugared water to kids.
posted by MacNN.com Reader
At the time, Motorola really was putting out better chips that Intel. The 68000 was a 16-bit chip, with some 32-bit characteristics; the 68020 was fully 32-bit. At the time, IBM PCs running on Intel chips were 8- or 16-bit. When the PowerPC came out, it, too, was certainly a better chip than the 486 chips that Intel had at the time, and the original Pentiums that followed.
It really wasn't until the G4 that Motorola, and consequentially Apple, fell behind Intel. This prompted all the speculation that Apple would go Intel, and I suspect its also what is prompting Sculley's current statements.
Now that the G5 has arrived, Macs are once again processor competitive with Intel-powered PCs. And next year, the G5 and Mac could very well decisively surpass what Intel has to offer.
There's no way Sculley could have known then what would have happened nearly two decades later with the G4, and there's also no way he can know how the PowerPC vs. Intel situation will play out going forward.
posted by MacNN.com Reader
Jobs=Success
nuff said
posted by MacNN.com Reader
There were so many problems with Intel, and some still exist, why would anyone say that it was a good idea. Chips catching fire, the die being so huge, as well as chips that couldn't add. Are we so stupid that we don't remember the real history. And RISC is still better than CISC. US Military and Defense are using PowerPC G4/G5 chips like mad to do things like missle guidance. Why didn't they go Intel. You do the math (just not using a chip that can't add)
posted by MacNN.com Reader
posted by MacNN.com Reader
Didn't even really get major money for it, jerk off.
windoze only has a GUI because of Mac OS and it was sculley who made it happen.
Kinda like the US feeding bin laden against the russians, and look what happened, it created a monster
of bad things.
posted by MacNN.com Reader
To make matters worse, Apple was selling uninspired and ugly products like the 610, 6100, 6200, and 8100 series of gray boxes.
posted by MacNN.com Reader
I think he is going to eat his words in a few short years. With IBM backing the G5, things could get interesting. I wonder if we will ever see a Power4 or Power5 based xServe... Now that would be interesting...
posted by MacNN.com Reader