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June 8, 2005
Apple and Intel
Everyone's excited about the prospect of Intel microprocessors in Apple computers, and with good reason. Steve Jobs made it very clear in his WWDC keynote that this move is all about performance-per-watt: in other words, it's all about the Pentium M, the core of the Centrino mobile platform. Pentium M is an amazing chip, beating out Pentium 4 on the latest benchmarks and leading to rampant speculation that Intel will move to Pentium M-like products on the desktop within the next 12 months. Who wants a Powerbook built on a Pentium M? I know I do, and I'm pretty happy with my IBM Thinkpad T40 (which, thanks to deep Harvard-negotiated IBM discounts, is a near-ubiquitous accessory on campus).
Despite worrying in the NYT and on Wall St. to the contrary, the keynote shows that this will be a remarkably painless transition. Mac OS X is already ported and running (and has been since its introduction), and the recompile of third-party applications is promised to be relatively painless, producing a single so-called "Universal Binary" that will run on (what will be) both types of Macs, those based on PowerPC, and those based on Intel chips. Applications that don't make it over, perhaps because their developers have disappeared or because they're older versions, will run under binary translation (called "Rosetta") which is (it has been confirmed) based on technology from Transitive, and to my amazement actually got demonstrated in the keynote, Jobs running both Photoshop and MS Office under binary translation on the keynote's Pentium 4-based presentation machine. Both Adobe and Microsoft, for what it's worth, promise to support Intel-based Macs with Photoshop, Pagemaker et al and MS Office.
Meanwhile, the best analysis of what this all means comes from the British rag The Inquirer:
Apple's receipts from its 76% dominance of the MP3 market plus Intel's cash mountain gives them the financial clout to take on Microsoft and Dell. Luckily for the Apple-Intel team, they have superior technology too. Granted, Intel's latest processors are dogs but the main event is eighteen months out, when Microsoft ships Longhorn, so Intel have the interim to get their act together. The next revision of Mac OS X, named Leopard, will be launched then too....Eighteen months and counting. Eighteen months and the choice will be simple: buy a solid operating system running on a PC designed by the coolest computer company ever or buy something of dubious ancestry out of a car boot.
The pieces have been set in motion; the PC world will look very different in eighteen months' time.
Posted by David Richmond at June 8, 2005 10:53 PM EDT
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