Apple Computer plans to announce Monday that it's scrapping its partnership with IBM and switching its computers to Intel's microprocessors, CNET News.com has learned. Apple has used IBM's PowerPC processors since 1994, but will begin a phased transition to Intel's chips, sources familiar with the situation said. Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said. The announcement is expected Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, at which Chief Executive Steve Jobs is giving the keynote speech. The conference would be an appropriate venue: Changing the chips would require programmers to rewrite their software to take full advantage of the new processor. Read the article at News.com.
This comes on the heels of many embarrasing benchmarks that make Mac look like a pretty lackluster server. Apple's known about this for a while. In related news, the guys over at Anandtech very recently did a comparison of OS-X/Mac/G5 vs Linux/Xeon/Opteron, and the results were devastating. The Opterons dominated nearly every benchmark, followed by the Xeons, and on some tests the Linux/Opterons were actually 10x more efficient than the OS-X/G5... ouch. Much of this probably has to do with the way Linux vs BSD/OS-X handles forking (BSD = slow / Linux = fast)... but still, if you had to choose, doesn't seem like much of a comparison to me. -AT
I think it's a step in the right direction, though I don't like osX very much. I did like it at first, now I just hate it. Too slow and not very stable. Apple should have gone AMD.
I can understand that they need new CPU manufacturer for servers, but they should have gone for the Opterons for servers and maybe use Intel for the dekstop range. Wouldn't it make sense?
