On Jun 6, 2005, at 1:30 PM, Bill Holt noted: > Crazier things have happened, I guess, but I'll be astonished and > alarmed if it turns out that Apple will be wearing an "Intel > Inside" warning label.
Well... it is true. Apple just announced that all new Macs will be transitioning to Intel processors by the end of 2007. Somebody at IBM must have done something to really annoy Stevie. Apple has apparently been keeping separate builds of Mac OS X on Intel processors since the beginning, so the operating system has basically already made the move. Now, the problem is dragging along the rest of the software. Apple claims that developers who are already using Apple's Xcode development environment will be able to painlessly make the switch. For others, there's an on-the-fly translator that will take PPC code into Intel code. I think the big push was the fact that Intel has come out with good chips for laptops, and IBM wasn't moving the G5 in that direction. Powerbooks are Apple's other big profit center, and they can't afford to fall behind in that market. I can see advantages and disadvantages to this, and there are a lot of questions that need answering. The immediate downside is that there are a lot of developers who've spent a good deal of time optimizing their programs for the G4 and G5. This painstaking optimization can't be translated because the architectures of the two families are very different. (Little-endian versus big-endian, for example.) The eventual upside is that it will make translations between Windows and Mac OS X easier because many optimizations done for Windows will carry over. So, expect to see more Windows-only companies pushing their products to the Mac. Also, the Windows emulators should start running at close to full speed under Mac OS X. I think the biggest question in the whole thing is how generic the Apple/Intel hardware will be. If Apple produces generic Intel spec machines, then they've doomed themselves to being just another hardware company competing with Dell and the herd of nameless Chinese dwarves who make commodity PCs. It's a pretty warm day here in Louisville, but Hell did freeze over. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be May 24. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
