Intel Inside... Macs

[gekko]

Apple's WWDC keynote is still going on, but thus far we know...

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will be released late 2006 early 2007. Longhorn timeframe, well, the new dumbed-down Longhorn or XP 2, whatever you want to call it.

Apple will be switching to Intel chips. they plan to ship the first Macs running on Intel chips this time next year. Why? Simply put: When you stand in front of the world and promise a 3ghz G5 chip, and here we are two years later with a 2.7ghz G5. I'd be pissed.

The reason he gave:

Intel processors provide more performance per watt than PowerPC processors do, said Jobs. "When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PoweRPC gives us 15 units of perfomance per watt, but Intel's roadmap gives us 70. And so this tells us what we have to do," he explained.

How about compatibility? Well, it works, already. there were rumors that Apple was working on a x86 version of Mac OS X, and it's true. Every version of Mac OS X shipped in the last 5 years was compiled for both PowerPC and x86 chips. So guess what? It already works, as Apple showed by running 10.4.1 on a 3.6ghz P4.

Apple is releasing Xcode 2.1 today, which supports compiling one build that works with both processors, so all software released after today will work, and that gives your software a year to be compatible before the new systems are released.

Also had Methematica developers up there, showing it only took about 2 hours of work and 20 lines of code to make it run on Intel.

Rosetta is a PowerPC emulator, for the software that isn't changed. Ran Photoshop CS 2 and Office on it.

iTunes supports PodCasting now.

And my comments...

Macs are getting even faster, how can anyone complain? This is awesome. so when I buy my new Mac in 07, it's going to be running fast as hell on Leopard. Beautiful.

Though, I'm shocked they didn't go with multi-core PowerPCs, which obviously IBM can do after seeing Xbox 360. But then again, IBM pissed Apple off pretty bad. Start out with the fastest desktop PC in the world, and then can't deliver an extra ghz in two years. Ouch.