Ian MacLure wrote:
This has been a source of some friction as one of the consortium members has a history of being late for the parade.IBM
Really? That surprises me. When I worked at Somerset, the most irritating part about design was the fact that the Motorola semiconductor process was a factor of 2 slower. The same design that would produce a 133MHz+ chip (we couldn't test any faster than that) out of the IBM foundry barely made a 66MHz chip out of the Motorola foundry.
IBM has indeed had some spectacular failures delivering their most cutting edge products lately (I believe that they had to pay big money to Xilinx). However, I haven't heard of that impacting Apple (who generally won't buy the most cutting edge stuff, thus some friction with IBM).
To be fair, if Apple really is considering this move, it is probably intended as more of a shot at their own hardware team (who writes the Verilog for support chips). By using x86 in their main computers, they can then use the x86 Northbridges and Southbridges and rid themselves of pretty much all internal hardware design.
-a -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
