[Jeremy Garchow] "Apple has always favored "system stability" over raw power."
I disagree with this statement for three reasons.
First, stability and power are not opposing sides of a tradeoff. Not only is it possible to engineer for both, it's almost always necessary -- what high-performance system can sacrifice stability?
Second, Apple does offer raw power. Apple has twice gotten earlier access to faster Xeon CPUs than was available to the competition (the 3.0 GHz quad-core Xeon Clovertown that powered that 2007 Mac Pro, and the Nehalem Xeon 35xx and 55xx series that powered the 2009 Mac Pro). Apple has also offered top-tier Xeon processors with each new generation of Mac Pro. Every Mac Pro has been very competitive, both in terms of absolute CPU power and cost, at the time of its launch.
Third, Apple has done some really interesting work in advanced computing, especially related to clustering (XGrid and QMaster) and symmetric multiprocessing (early multiprocessor PowerPC systems and today's Grand Central Dispatch).
I could certainly agree that Apple does not prioritize performance, as they consistently fall behind the competition on mid-architecture updates, as well as continuing to tolerate their often-noted GPU and PCIe deficiencies, but they do have a long history of (pardon the pun) power computing.
Walter Soyka
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