According to live WWDC 2005 coverage, Steve Jobs announced the next transition – to Intel x86 based processors. The first Intel Mac is expecting this time next year, and whole Mac product line will be “Intel Inside” in 2 years.
Steve Jobs claims Mac OS X has a “secret double life”, which it always worked on x86 processors (not surprising). The main reason, according to quite limited keynote transcript, is that Intel processors offer better performance per watt.
WTF??? 2 years ago at WWDC, when the very first G5 tower was announceed, Pentium IV was running at 3.2Ghz, and the last time I checked it has not really improved much – a little bit more Herts, dual core, 64-bit, etc. Neither do G5 anyway – from 2Ghz to 2.7Ghz with nothing changed architecturely. But what about all those advertisement (or should we say marketing hypes) that makes Intel processors look crap in comparison with G5? How are you going to undo what you have done with your reality distortion field? Stronger distortion I guess…
And more performance per watt? Maybe Apple should talk to AMD instead.
It’s a shocking Tuesday morning.
More coverage:
That’s right – just look at the Power Mac Performance page: http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance/ – Is Apple taking a step backwards?
I wonder what will be on that page next year. Manipulated benchmark on G5 out performed by the latest and greatest Intel processor, showing how fast it compiles Darwin’s kernel…
This is actually interesting news really as for the last year or two (since OSX was available), there have been rumours of Apple having an x86 capable version of OSX. It makes sense that they would have, given it came from BSD; however with the amount of work which apparently took place to make it run on the PPC, you could reasonably understand that it didn’t (ie: why write twice the code if you had no intention of releasing an x86 capable version of it).
Bring it on I say.
typo Herts = Hertz
a little bit more Herts