Some slightly related from Technorati and Google.
[Armwood Technology Blog] What's Really Behind the Apple-Intel Alliance - New York Times: As it happens, Intel's was not the only alternative chip design that Apple had explored for the Mac. An executive close to Sony said that last year Mr. Jobs met in California with both Nobuyuki Idei, then the chairman and chief executive of the Japanese consumer electronics firm, and with Kenichi Kutaragi, the creator of the Sony PlayStation.
[West of the Expressway] The Apple-Intel Thing (Updated): The core UNIX-like OS layer, Darwin, has already been ported to run on a very narrowly defined Intel platform (the 440BX chipset), so porting the upper layers of the OS would just need a recompile: only apps which touched on assembly-level instructions would need significant rewriting. Both Apple and NeXT managed architecture switches in the past;
[iici! (sendai)] DREAMS: The G4s are getting long in the tooth, while they remain a vector powerhouse clock for clock, they just don't have the clock speed to have any sort of parity in integer processing. The P-M, while based on the PIII (which the G4 trampled all over in integer and FPU, clock for clock), has a faster bus (with speed bumps on the way,) scales higher and is lower power (which against the G4 is quite an achievement.) Along with those advantages, Apple do own a fair bit of the IP associated with Altivec; I wouldn't be surprised if Intel CPUs end up with some variant of Altivec (it might be too hard to get SSE to be a full 128bit vector engine, and their twin 64bit units kludged to do 128bit work well enough for the moment.) I would cackle if Intel decided to chuck Altivec in their procs and modified the decode stage in their processors so SSE calls are handled by the Altivec unit.
[Tuaw.com] The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW): All the sales growth is in notebook computers - and Apple has been stuck with the G4 there because IBM can't get a portable version of the G5 to work (nor do they have much motivation to do so, because their own uses for processors is exclusively servers). The Pentium M is far better than the current G4 - lower power consumption and more powerful than anything Apple's got today. By switching to Intel chips, they get a better foundation upon which to build their great hardware.
[Cnet.com.au] Apple on G5 PowerBook: Not so fast: News: The computer maker is well aware that Mac fans want a G5 PowerBook, and technically, the company could offer one now. But given the relatively power-hungry nature of the IBM PowerPC 970FX processor -- Apple has dubbed the 970FX and its predecessor, the 970, "G5" chips -- a G5 PowerBook would require compromises in size, weight and other aesthetics such as noise production. Apple, and likely most of its customers, wouldn't be willing to live with that.
[Macbiblioblog.blogspot.com] The Macintosh Biblioblog: Apple is 'Switching': Apple announced today that beginning in 2006, new Apple computers will run not on IBM's Power PC chip, but on Intel's chip. The transition is brought about by IBM's failure to deliver higher speeds (the 3gig G5) and more importantly Intel's development plans that produce more productivity with lower power wattage usage--think powerbook. They actually confirmed that Marklar exists-from the beginning, OS X has been written to compile on both PPC and Intel all along.
Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Mac, Love The Mac
