AnandTech: WWDC 2005 – Apple to Move to Intel Processors in 2006
Seems like everyone on the internet is interested in this news today. Apparently, Apple is transitioning from IBM’s PowerPC processor to Intel’s x86 (Pentium) processor. All this does for me is raise more questions.
Why Intel? AMD is widely acknowledged to be superior in the x86 space for most applications. A couple of reasons I can think of includes Intel’s slight lead on many content-creation applications…a market Apple has a large toe-hold in. Secondly, while AMD is overall the performance leader in x86, Apple desperately needs a high-performance platform for it’s Powerbook notebook line which is currently still running on the old G4 processor because the newer G5 is just too hot to shoe-horn into a compact notebook. Intel’s mobile platforms are widely acknowledged as being best-of-breed, so this probably weighed heavily in Apple’s decisions.
Another question that comes to mind is, are some enterprising hackers going to be able to get OS X running on generic PC hardware? While this announcement is about Apple using Intel processors, it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to just go out and buy a copy of OS X to run on the PC you’re running right now. Most likely, Apple will have their own proprietary system architecture, but this move to Intel processors has got to make it easier to port OS X to the PC world.
For those of you not in the know, OS X is considered by many to be superior to Windows XP in many areas, not least of which is it’s user-friendliness. Plus, it’s pretty.
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