What will the Apple Intel deal likely mean for VFX artists? Is this a significant move towards a new work environment or does the type of CPU chip in the Mac not really matter either way these days? – After all Apple is much more of a software company than ever before in its history? We spoke to numerous insiders on and off the record to gather up a take on what this may mean over the next 24 months and beyond, many sources had strong opinions but were ne
8 months ago a leading Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at one of the most secretive and advanced image research labs emailed Fxguide that the media’s obsession with Moore’s Law was missing the point, the real action now was Low Power. The quest for higher clock speeds is really a quest for greater performance to allow “computers to do more – but if you really want computers to do more – they need to consume less power” he explained. Thus it was interest that when the Paul Otellini CEO of Intel and Steve Jobs both addressed this as a major issue moving forward. Apple was somewhat forced to move from the PowerPC – Apple’s Powerbooks for example are falling woefully behind with no G5 laptop in sight, but low Power usage not only effects laptops and battery life. Power use limits bigger systems and system design. It is this power issue, much more than cost that drove the decision. Some have suggested that Apple’s move is driven by the cost of PowerPC chips – but in reality IBM have been very reasonable in pricing – what traditionally makes an Apple box more expensive to build is the host of properity other components in the box.
In talking informally to industry developers and insiders there is little doubt Apple can make OSX run on Intel successfully – for the past 5 years, Apple have had a ‘Just in case” project, that meant that every release of OSX has been compiled to run on Intel processors. ThinkSecret web site is reporting from info coming from developer at the WWDC that the single proc “Intel Mac scored well in both the Quartz graphics and OpenGL graphics tests “almost matching or exceeding dual-2.5GHz G5 score.”
On the negative side, Apple has had 2 major transitions in the recent past, the first, in the mid 90’s moving to the Power PC, the second was the transition to Unix and OS X. In each case they have lost users during the transition. It is hard to see how the new annoucement won’t cause a drop in sales as people wait for the new hardware before updating or buying new workstations. Not that Apple is finanically in danger, it has huge cash reserves and can ride out the storm if in the long term they can open themselves to a wider audience.
Out side VFX, for Apple to expand it must either move into the gaming market more seriously or the Enterprise workspace. While some observers have commented that a valid version of Virtual PC on the new Mac would make the need to develop a Mac OSX version of their game doubtful, – Apple would be well placed to address the Enterprise market as UNIX is such a better platfrom for large networked Enterprise solutions.
But specifically what does this move mean to users in the VFX workspace ?
One of the VFX developers at WWDC conference emailed us that “It is obvious that the change has been in progress for a while. Apple had lots of Intel based machines at the WWDC. There are Intel based machines available to developers in less than 2 weeks. The Intel machines at the show are using Intel reference motherboards. Easily the biggest area where you will see HUGE performance improvements will be with laptops. But conversely the biggest area of concern is for hardware partner manufactures…. Blackmagic, AJA theses people have a lot of work ahead for them.”
From Apple senior users the opinion seems to be that by tying the architecture to Intel, the whole speed battle becomes a non issue. Apple’s Macs will now always be as fast as PCs (unless AMD surges ahead, but it would be a pretty simple transition from Intel chips to AMD if needed in the future, seeing as the architectures are so similar). So the issue will now become quality of experience, software availability, hardware reliability and design – all the things Apple does well at. Speed is one of the things they’ve rarely been good at, no matter how much spin Steve put on it.
IBM will continue to produce the PowerPC chips for dedicated gaming units but the thing about IBM is that it’s too diverse. The PowerPC chips are not their core business – they’re actually a rather small part of it. As one Apple Demo artist commented “Intel lives and dies on the speed and power of their processors. If they don’t keep making them the most kick-ass things on the market, they’ll be out of business overnight. Given that innovation hunger, I could never see IBM’s PowerPC chips matching the performance of Intel in the long run”.
It is worth remembering that the Intel move will also make access to the latest GPUs and graphics boards that much easier. This may make the biggest difference to the VFX community. Having a lag in getting the latest graphics chip sets has been a major annoyance to power graphics users.
The VFX community has also been waiting for PCI Express bus, which should no be a no-brainer. The driver sets for all the PC-supported graphics cards should be a relatively trivial translation, especially for the ones already supporting Linux drivers. In fact it’ll be interesting to see the reaction from the Linux crowd in general, seeing as we’ll now have two major flavours of Linux on Intel architecture. as one insider emailed us ” it should make porting software for both platforms MUCH simpler. I expect that means you’ll see software that was previously available only for Windows, Linux and IRIX now also available on the Mac – can anyone say, SoftImage XSI?”.
What about Discreet, – sorry Autodesk Media and Entertainment Division ? No official word yet – but our sources seem to indicate that Discreet welcome the move – their attitude seems to be in light of Toxik – “great, yet another high powered linux based Intel box!” But while Autodesk seem likely to support the new move, and they think that Apple are doing all the right things to help devs, but do expect them to make a lot of core changes, just to run, – while it is likely they will do it, it could be hard for smaller vendors.
The Intel Macs at the WWDC run Windows fine. According to MacRumors “all the chipset is standard Intel stuff, so you can download drivers and run XP – on the box.” It’ll be interesting to see when the first Mac emulator for plain vanilla PC boxes comes out. Given the similarity of architecture, it should be fairly simple for someone to write an emulator with very little speed loss. Just look at how quickly XBox emulators came out for the PC. So, for the price of the OS, will people potentially be able to run a Mac on any box they want?
Perhaps this is the long term future for Apple – to be a rival OS for Longhorn. If Apple was to become a valid Enterprise alternative to Windows, it would mean a huge potential revenue for Apple, but would Steve Jobs be willing to run a software company and not a hardware company? Jobs has always been a hardware guy, – according to Alan Deutschman in his book The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, – Jobs had this chance once before at NeXT. NeXT OS was so advanced that IBM and others wanted to licence it for normal PCs. This would have been a huge opportuntiy – and it came at a time when the NeXT boxes were simply not selling – the only problem was that the companies that were interested required NeXT to no longer build their own PCs and compete on hardware. In the end the deal collapsed and NeXT eventually folded into Apple. Deutschman credits this deals failure on Jobs desire to make systems and sell boxes. If the same opportunity arose again it would be an interesting play to watch unfold, – certainly OSX on any PC would be serious competition to Microsoft, who currenly not only support the move to Intel chips by Apple – but own shares directly in Apple.
Currently it could be argued that the PC community only really has Sony producing hardware that claims product design innovation as a market differentiation (VAIO) , so perhaps Apple will just become the luxury producer of cool PCs.. a BMW of Intel boxes … it must be said that Apple’s award winning industrial design is a major part of the company’s appeal.
For the VFX community – Adobe, Autodesk, Maya, and of course Final Cut, Shake and all the other Apple Pro apps seem safe moving forward on OSX, so the potential for Apple Hardware to be more widely used is certain, it remains to be seen if Apple has yet more tricks to be annouced to cover the next 24 months of transition, and just how badly current sales will be effected.
UPDATE Sun 12th June
Luxology, the creators of modo, a leading subdivision surface and polygonal 3D modeling platform, emailed us at fxguide to say that modo�s already compatibility with Apple�s new Intel Processor-based Macs. “modo�s highly adaptable architecture will enable Luxology�s customers to access this advanced technology as soon as it�s released”, they stated
�We had a programmer working on this immediately following Apple�s announcement and within 20 minutes modo was not only compiled as a universal binary but actually running on the Intel-based Macs,� said Brad Peebler, president of Luxology. �modo�s development structure means there is no migration path to an Intel-based Mac. We�re already there.�
UPDATE Mon 13th June
We spoke to a former Intel Executive who pointed out a few aspects that our initial story missed.
The first is 64 bit. Apple made a great fuss about moving to 64 bit – but current WINTEL solutions are nearly all 32 bit. In fact there is a feeling that Microsoft isn’t innovating and pushing to show why people need to upgrade to newer computers – something Intel clearly wants. At fxguide we can’t see Apple pushing back from 64 bit to 32 bit, so the new Apple system is likely to be 64 bit. AMD did a great job in Europe and to a certain extent the USA in beating Intel up about being mainly 32 bit. Intel has 64 bit solutions but not at the desktop level (SGI uses them however very well at the high end supercomputer end of the market) and Microsoft has yet to produce innovative new killer aps that need or use 64 bit. In all the Apple annoucments Apple did not say which chip they would be shipping with – they certainly did not push Pentium 4s (P4). The P4 is growing older and is nearer the end of its life cycle than the beginning. fxguide has been told that Intel’s next batch of chipsets include a 32 bit/64 bit hybrid. This means the VFX communtiy is likely to be using non Pentium 4s with a 64 bit MAC OSX , which may make dual booting the machine as a Windows box not as easy as it is now on the developer “P4-Tower” Mac.
The second point is that there is a third area other than the two we mentioned above that might make Apple very appealing to Intel. We stated that Apple could look to expand via Games or Enterprise, neither of which is actually likely to be vastly interesting to Intel as Apple has a 3- 4 % market share in desktop systems. This isn’t a huge growth area potential for Intel and in ennterprise systems Intel already has a reasonable postion. The third option is expanding Apple’s consumer digital home play. Apple’s success with ipod has shown its ability to push ahead vastly better in this area than Microsoft or Sony.
Making Apple a bigger consumer digital home play offers a huge opportunity to Intel. Our ex Intel source points to the huge commitment that Intel has made to mobile computing (not mobile phone but low power laptop/consumer level chip sets). Intel believes that desktop system sales will be matched 1:1 by laptop/portable sales within about 5 years. Intel believes low power chip sets -just as powerful as desktop chip sets is the future. Apple has lead in this area with AirPort and AirPort Express. For Intel, growth is not really about gaining market share anymore since they have a HUGE market share already. It is about expanding the market. Microsoft did this with Xbox. Instead of just pushing to increase market share in its traditional space it moved over to the huge gaming station space – but interestingly not using Intel chips! The Apple – Intel digital home sales play would allow Intel to grow the pie and make the market bigger over all. Intel sees in Apple a company very skilled at producing highly desirable new consumer level expensive computer opportunities. It is this that makes Apple so appealing to Intel. Some web sites has suggested Intel via Apple wants to attack Microsoft, but perhaps its target is much more Sony, Toshiba, and companies like LG. And while much discussion is centered on the possible OS desktop battle, Intel wants Apple to commoditise and believes the ipod not Microsoft Media Centre / Portable Media Center holds the key to home wide scale expansion.