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First Apple-Intel Macs likely to house Yonah dual-core chip - sources

10:10 - Wednesday 15 June 2005 by Wolfgang Gruener - source: Tom's Hardware

Chicago (IL) - Apple is very secretive when asked about upcoming products and we expect nothing different over the course of the next 11 months when the firm designs its first Intel-based computer. But if we believe our sources, then Apple aims at using Intel’s first dual-core Pentium M in its products. Performance gains however will be rather evolutionary than revolutionary for the Apple crowd.

The decision to abandon the PowerPC architecture as the heart of Mac hardware does not sit well with many Apple users, even if Jobs delivered a somewhat convincing performance to justify the switch. According to Jobs, Apple intends to get the "best" computers to their customers and IBM apparently was not able to offer the right mix out of speed and power consumption in its processor roadmap. While it has not been specified by Apple, which Intel chips will be used for the new "Mactels", sources told Tom’s Hardware Guide that it is most likely that the company will jump on the next generation Pentium M processor - the Yonah chip.

Yonah is currently heavily promoted by Intel - for example during its recent Mobility Day or the Mobile and Wireless World Conference - as the company’s first 65nm dual-core chip. The processor is planned to enter production in Q4 of this year and will become commercially available in Q1 of 2006. According to Intel, Yonah will bring significantly more performance, especially in multimedia and multitasking environments, and keep power consumption at the level of today’s Pentium M processor. Clock speeds have not been revealed, however, demonstrated Yonah notebooks currently integrate a 2.0 GHz chip.

The fact that Yonah is aiming primarily at notebooks will not keep Apple from using the chip across its product line, at least until the release of "Conroe", a desktop processor that is expected to cut down power consumption from the current Pentium 4/Pentium D generation. Intel itself indicated that Yonah may be much more than a notebook processor when it showed a Mac mini clone at this year’s spring developer forum. If Apple sticks with Yonah, its customers will receive pretty much the most advanced processor in Intel’s lineup. On the downside, Yonah will be one of the very few Intel processors that do not support 64-bit applications.

Despite the switch to a new-generation processor with dual-core technology, Apple will most likely not have access to the fastest application performance on the market initially : The simple fact is that Apple will use Rosetta a software-based platform translation layer - partially based on technology provided by Transitive - that allows native MacOS applications to run on Intel’s x86 chip.

In a conversation with Tom’s Hardware Guide, Transitive CEO Bob Wiederhold declined to comment his firm’s participation in the Apple project, but said that the virtualization solution typically has an effect on the system’s performance. Compared to an application’s speed on a native platform, a Transitive translated version usually reaches about 80 percent of the original computational performance, Wiederhold said. Take into account the speed improvement the Pentium M will offer over the PowerPC architecture, and Mac users are likely to see about even performance levels. Industry sources told Tom’s Hardware Guide that an increase in performance will be rather evolutionary for users and speed increases will be more visible over time.

According to Wiederhold, the Transitive software however does not affect graphic and interactive performance as well as features. "Users will not see a difference in how they use their system, it’s like running a different engine. It is very important that the experience is totally transparent."

Transitive will also support digital rights management (DRM) mechanisms of hardware platforms. Wiederhold declined to comment on features that are specific to the Apple implementation, but agreed that certain software could be prevented to run on a target platform. Such a feature, if integrated in the Pentium M, would allow Steve Jobs to limit the use of MacOS to Apple-designed computers.