Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s senior vice president and chief technology officer, feels (not surprisingly) that Apple should have chosen Intel chips to power upcoming Macs instead of using IBM processors for the due-soon G5 line.
“I think Steve Jobs has made the wrong CPU choice for 20 years, he just added a few more years to the life of his bad decisions,” Gelsinger said in an Edmonton Journal interview. “Steve’s not an illogical guy, he’s passionate and opinionated about the directions he wants.”
However, he thinks that choosing the IBM chips “is a poor path for the company as well as a poor path for the users.” Gelsinger told the Edmonton Journal that Intel chips would help Apple “find ways to open up more applications for themselves, a broader set of products.” He said that Intel also has a line of Centrino mobile products that are “stunningly good.”
“I don’t think it’s [IBM processors] a good decision for Apple or for their customers, but they’ve done a good job of turning the company back around at the same time, so you can’t discount all the things that they’re doing and all the decisions they’ve made,” Gelsinger said.
When asked how he’d compare the Apple vertical market to Intel’s horizontal, he said there was no right or wrong, but that Intel sees “the extraordinary innovative power of the horizontal industry.”
“At this point, in Apple’s 3 percent of the market share, people say they can’t innovate when they (Apple) control the hardware or the software,” Gelsinger said. “In our horizontal market anybody at any layer can largely and independently perform independent innovation. Now when you add up those two models, at the end of the day, the horizontal one wins most of the time and that’s what we’ve committed ourselves and our industry to. “