I've been reading the spate of messages here and elsewhere concerning the Intel switch with a bit of amusement. I have a different take on it than most people. My idea is that it shows that the personal computer market has matured into a consumer market.
When was the last time you cared about the chip set in your car or microwave oven or television? I don't care at all, as long as it works the way I expect. The same thing has been happening with computers. Look at the stuff inside and outside any recent Mac. It's pretty much the same stuff you find inside or outside any Windows or Linux machine. Remember when you couldn't find the Mac version of anything outside of the catalogs? Now you can walk into Wal-Mart and buy peripherals that work on any machine. It's not the main processor that makes the Mac; it's the software. The look and feel of the Mac can be driven just as well by an Intel processor as one by IBM. Many people have the perception that there will be a performance drop with the switch from G5 to Itanium 3, or whatever 64 bit chip Intel can serve up by that time. I don't think so. Except for a few specially chosen benchmarks, there's not much difference in performance between the high-end Intel chips and the G5. Those outrageous comparisons you see on places like Apple's Web page aren't typical, and you can find similar benchmarks going the other way. For every example using a highly optimized Photoshop plugin, there's a counterexample with SQL databases. During the 90s, there was a lot of hype about RISC versus CISC and how the PowerPC was better because it was the RISC chip, while the Intel offerings were the klutzy old CISC chips. But, both families have evolved, and the newest Intel chips are RISC at the core, while the PPC family has acquired some of the better CISC features. Mac OS X on Intel will probably run a lot snappier than Windows does now because it doesn't have the legacy CISC baggage built into its core. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 2373 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20050608/c6146ae6/attachment.bin
