Just my two cents worth, based on nothing but observation and guesswork.
Will apple switch to sparc? Could be, if they do, they'll probably go
back to ppc and wrok the conversion from there. It would have made
sence for them to make this switch in the first place instead to
intels, since as the article mentions, sparc archetecture is much
closer to ppc than is intel. This is why the intel announcement took
so many folks by surprise.
The sparc one really doesn't surprise me, though it does beg the
question,
Why waste all that time porting to intel just to throw it away and go
where they should have gone in the first if they really were looking
for a processor switch?
I'm thinking Apple is feeling a bit lost. Their performance gains
weren't what they expected for the switch to intel (thus all the dual
core chips put into the macs, to bring performance up where they
wanted and expected it to be in the first place)
Will sparc give apple more bang for the buck?
Well, yes and no.
Sparc processors certainly will help the speed of the machines, but
the price of the sparc processors is probably a considerable chunk
more than intel processors of similar speeds. This isn't going to
make macs any cheaper, and in fact, will probably close to double
prices.
Add the memory used in sparc machines (I don't remember what kind it
is, but it won't fit in a pc running an intel motherboard) and you've
got a price crunch waiting to happen.
It may be the right thing to do, but I don't believe it's the smart
thing to do at this point.
Apple should hang on to the intel crowd for a couple years, to boost
confidence in it's product lines. Give it 3-5 years first, then make
the sparc transition.
This won't help apple become the undisputed leader in quality
graphical processing they've had for years, but it will bring them a
lot closer to the mainstream, and probably win them a large number of
converts. Then when the new switch happens, a nice segment of the
new converts will be happy to come with them. Making such a change
now is going to alienate a *lot* of users who were looking forward to
the intel compatibility side of macs.
This is a very poor business decision on apple's part at this point
in time.
I have more to say, but I'll cut off the rant here, to prevent
elaboration that really isn't necessary anyhow. The essential points
have been covered.
