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Apple Switching To Intel Chips In 2006
telstar writes "According to C|Net, Apple has officially decided to drop IBM, and will use Intel processors starting in their '06 line of systems. This change was rumored last month. The announcement is expected Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, at which Chief Executive Steve Jobs is giving the keynote speech." From the article: "Apple successfully navigated a switch in the 1990s from Motorola's 680x0 line of processors to the Power line jointly made by Motorola and IBM. That switch also required software to be revamped to take advantage of the new processors' performance, but emulation software permitted older programs to run on the new machines."
Looks like they will want to snap up a bunch of developers from the PearPC project!
Have you Meta Moderated t
so... OS X86. Maybe it'll be called Chameleon instead of these cat names? crossing platforms, it will be!
Really, this has been on the table many times. When will this rumor die? Oh, and on tuesday, Steve will announce that Disney is purchasing Apple.
WINE is not an emulator! It's a translation layer, it's totally useless on a non-x86 platform.
Thanks for the insight. Did you happen to miss the entire point of this slashdot post?
God Fucking Damnit
you know the world is coming to an end when the best golfer is black, the best rapper is white, apple goes to x86 and microsoft goes powerpc.
good thing i bought armageddon insurance!!
John C. Dvorak actually predicted something that happend!.
I'm scared. Hold me.
if Apple get's it's own chipset
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I'll eat my hat if Jobs announces a switch to Intel chips (and I'll even be there at the Keynote). The most glaring giveaway in the article that this will NOT happen is this:
Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said.
So Apple's going to force their Developers, the people who need to have the latest, greatest and fastest machines, to use Mac Minis to develop their software on? Not in a billion years!
There's no way in Hell that Apple could ever get away with switching low-end Mac Minis first and then top of the line Power Macs a year later. No developer is going to torture himself on a Mac Mini when they could be developing on a Dual 2.7 GHz (or higher) G5. Sure there are those that will say that Apple will let you compile on a G5 and then just test on a Mini - that will never happen either. It would increase development time by at least a factor of 2 and probably more. This would effectively kill the Mac platform.
If Apple would ever consider this (which I doubt, AMD is far better than Intel and I believe the PPC platform has a far brighter future than the x86 platform, just look at all the next-gen gaming consoles) then they would need to transition their high-end machines first if not at the same time as everything else.
Not to mention the fact that SSEx pales in comparison to Altivec. Why does this matter? Because Apple has invested heavily in vectorized libraries, especially CoreImage. CoreImage & Quartz 2D Extreme rely heavily on Altivec when you don't have a graphics card capable of running them. SSE just wouldn't be able to cut it. Also, what's Apple to do with all their engineers that have so much experience with PPC and Altivec? I could go on and on.
It would take 4-5 years or more for Apple to make the transition and optimize OS X on Intel to where it is today (Apple might have a version of OS X running on x86, but I'm sure that it's nowhere near as optimized as Tiger is for PPC). Does Apple really want to give Microsoft that much time to catch up? I think not! They'd much rather run circles around Microsoft. It will be a cold day in Hell before this happens.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Sorry, I just had to follow the trend.
CNet is not a rumor site. If they did not have a very creditable source they would not report it.
Holy Crap! Vijay Singh is black?!!?
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