In case you've been living under a rock for the past 24 hours, Apple has announced that they will be...

The P4 of the development kit is not the intel mac of the future, it is merely to assure clean stable code. You might find its relatives more directly in a Mac Mini.

I'm curious why there doesn't seem to be much discussion regarding the 64-bit XEON MP, which seems to be much more comparable to the G5 than the P4. Apple has really marketing the PowerMac as a workstation since the G5 and OS X and I think the P4 is anything but a workstation-class processor, regardless of what HP and Dell think.

But I have spent considerable time studying the upcoming Yonah and Conroe Chips, and what the Intel Roadmap has even further ahead.

Steve said, its was something he saw in intels future (looking at roadmaps together with pat?), so, if this and the lack of a suitable g5 powerbook has gotten him into this decision, i can understand.

Apple has been struggeling for CPUs for so long I almost forgot when they actually had NOT to ...

I like Yonah I have to admit. Its not a really exceptionally geeky CPU (all really cool CPUs are dead), but its a good one.

We are NOT talking NetBurst architecture here in terms of Apple's move!

Oh, one thing I won't like is little endian. I hate debugging little endian memory.

So when Intel reveals their next Pentium next year and Apple shoehorns it in a Mac, we will have a Mac that is 'hopefully' as fast as a Dell running Windows using the same chip.

I'm quite confident that you'll end up with a Mac that's significantly faster than a Dell running on the same chip. Windows has a lot of cruft, their architecture and API's all contribute to a much slower software experience than could be had on the hardware it's all running on.

Back in ancient history during the Yellow Box days, when we ported our Cocoa (OPENSTEP) app over to Windows, the whole office was just floored when we found that our app, using a lot of the architectural goodness you'll see in OS X for Intel including double-buffered graphics and a "window server" absolutely demolished the native Windows equivalent in speed.

It wasn't just 50% faster. It was more like 5-6 times faster. Now, that sort of architectural difference might start to be minimized with Longhorn and it's Avalon windowing environment, but Windows developers are going to be spending years moving over to the new Windows stuff and the old cruft will persist.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that a lot of the speed you see in Mac OS today has been bought through the toil of Apple first in optimizing its own code (think of the general speed ups over OSX releases) for what has always been a more performance-constrained PPC environment, and by developers leveraging that toil and adding their own

One thing that we noticed back in the day when we moved from 68k to Intel, was that Intel's integer performance (versus 68k's and PPC's great floating point performance) is used to great effect in making the OS run fast. That work that Apple has done over the years to make each iteration of OS X faster than the previous one will very likely show up on the Intel side and act very favorably for the performance of even the first shipping Mac OS X86 PC. The fact that Apple has been quietly working on this all in parallel to OS X development is good reason to expect big things when the switch happens.

-M

So when Intel reveals their next Pentium next year and Apple shoehorns it in a Mac, we will have a Mac that is 'hopefully' as fast as a Dell running Windows using the same chip. But the Dell will, probably, still be cheaper (industrial design, rest of components, mass production, etc).

So we will end up with a machine, that is, at best, as fast as the fastest Windows PC but more expensive. Better looking of course.

Or, Apple could use the motherboarddesign of some PC manufacturer and try to build Macs really cheap. But we will end up with BIOS (According to Apple's documentation the IntelMac does not use OpenFirmware...).

Hopefully they will keep the option of running some version of the MacOS on legacy Intel/AMD hardware, and use it in the future.

Or maybe release a yellowbox environment for win32, so developers can deploy their x86 code on another userbase as well.

Of all the things I've heard, these seem the most important:

- To do a movie version of itunes, and to support H.264 HDTV format, Apple really needs the CPU power.

- People love Apple for reasons other than the PowerPC instruction set.

- Given the same Ghz, PowerPC is slower than Intel.

- Given the same Ghz, PowerPC is hotter than Intel.

- Given the same Ghz, PowerPC is bigger than Intel.

- Each of these can be addressed, but only by making the product more expensive.

Insofar as the only important thing is what the enduser experiences on his monitor, Steve Jobs made a good decision. Without switching to Intel, Apple was set to lose the $1000 Apple Laptop vs. $1000 WinTel Laptop competition bigtime.