On Jun 3, 2005, at 9:24 PM, Rad Craig wrote:
A friend just sent this to me, thought ti might interest those of you who haven't heard about it yet: http://news.com.com/Apple+to+ditch+IBM%2C+switch+to+Intel+chips/ 2100-1006_3-5731398.html?part=rss&tag=5731398&subj=news
Yeah, this strikes me as total BS. No way would Apple shoot itself in the foot like this. This iss't shooting themselves in the foot, even, it's aiming for the head with a Mac-10. (the OTHER high-powered Mac ;-)
Regardless of how easy it would be to recompile OS X for X86 chips, that would create a catastrophic gulf between PPC macs and Intel macs. Apple's switch from 68000 to PowerPC was an evolutionary change; PPC and 68K were guided by the same design principles and were related, however distantly, sort of like a donkey and a thoroughbred. This is why 68k apps ran so well under emulation. PPC to Intel is like trying to go from a thoroughbred to a whale.
A slow whale, since moving from the G5 to the Pentium is a step BACK from a 64 bit CPU to a 32 bit one.
If Apple were ever to partner with an X86 vendor, it would far more likely be AMD, anyway..at least they have a shipping, inexpensive high-speed 64 bit CPU in wide production, the Opteron.
No intel Mac could run anything ever written for the Mac in the past. Any company who wanted to serve the Mac market would have to stock *two* versions of software, and frankly, I think most of them would say 'fsck it, I'm outta here. It's not worth it.'
This is either fantastically poor reporting on Reuter's part, and un- thinking parroting on Cnet's, or it's a rumor designed to find the leak in Apple.
If we can get someone close enough to 1 Infinite Loop this weekend, we'll know by the blood-curdling screams from the offender...
All this said, there's ONE Mac line that would transition quite nicely to X86 processors: the XServe.
This doesn't HAVE a vast supply of application software to be ported, OS X clients won't care what CPU their server's running, and Apple provides 90% of the software running on XServes anyway.
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