Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Macs to be powered by Intel processors
Well, who'd have thunk it. turns out Steve Jobs and his merry men have had MacOS X running on Intel right from the very beginning, and have always designed it to be cross platform. Well, cross-CPU anyway - MacOS X will still not run on a Wintel box, thankfully. Some people are getting very nervous about this shift, and no doubt some of more committed mac-philes out there will rally against having hardware from the 'other side' in their precious machines. But ultimately this can only be a good move for Apple. They'll be able to build cheaper, cooler, smaller machines - which I think is what Jobs was really hinting at in his keynote. I wouldn't be surprised to see tablets, handhelds, and other portable devices coming from Apple once the switch to Intel is complete. And that's good. the battle for the CPU hardware has now largely over, and Intel win. But a system is more than just its CPU. I welcome the prospect of Macs and PCs with the same basic core CPUs just so we can stop arguing about whether GHz matters or not. Yes, the PowerPC architecture is technically superior, but they can't make it run cool enough for portables, and that's where the interesting stuff is happening.
Well, who'd have thunk it. turns out Steve Jobs and his merry men have had MacOS X running on Intel right from the very beginning, and have always designed it to be cross platform. Well, cross-CPU anyway - MacOS X will still not run on a Wintel box, thankfully. Some people are getting very nervous about this shift, and no doubt some of more committed mac-philes out there will rally against having hardware from the 'other side' in their precious machines. But ultimately this can only be a good move for Apple. They'll be able to build cheaper, cooler, smaller machines - which I think is what Jobs was really hinting at in his keynote. I wouldn't be surprised to see tablets, handhelds, and other portable devices coming from Apple once the switch to Intel is complete. And that's good. the battle for the CPU hardware has now largely over, and Intel win. But a system is more than just its CPU. I welcome the prospect of Macs and PCs with the same basic core CPUs just so we can stop arguing about whether GHz matters or not. Yes, the PowerPC architecture is technically superior, but they can't make it run cool enough for portables, and that's where the interesting stuff is happening.
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
Atom
RSS