wigblog

I can’t believe how on top of tech news Mr. Briney is! As I’m sure the entire world has heard by now, Apple has announced their intention to replace the touted PowerPC CPU with CPUs from Intel. For my comments/reaction, read on.

Personally, this doesn’t really surprise me. It’s been known for some time that IBM has had trouble delivering (A) the ramp up in chip speed / power that they had promised in their roadmap and (B) sufficient quantities of chips to meet Apple’s demand. This has been going on for some time. Look how stagnant the PowerBook line has become… and same with the PowerMacs. Significant jumps in horsepower haven’t happened in some time… really just incremental bumps.

Not that what they offer aren’t spectacular machines. In fact, I bought the dual 2.3GHz G5 about a month ago as an upgrade to my dual 800MHz G4 and absolutely love the thing. Easily on par with any PC running windoze I’ve used.

That said, I’m actually quite excited about the upcoming CPU change. No longer will a difference in hardware be an arguing point in the “constructive discussions” I engage in with the windoze faithful. Apple will really have to stand on the merits of the superior engineering of their operating system and software, which I believe they will easily be able to do and the platform will continue on as it has for so long now, despite those who insist Apple will be dying sometime soon.

This change does bring up a lot of interesting questions though. Will they have some kind of compatibility library that will allow you to run windoze apps on top of OS X? Or would that be a bad idea and we would see OS X go the way of OS/2? (Why run windoze apps on OS X when you can just run them in windoze?) Interesting the machines will be able to dual boot windoze and presumably Linux as well. That will be exciting.

It’s been fun to see the activity on some of the developer mailing lists as well. It’s amazing to me that those who manage the code bases for some of the most complex, and hardware intensive apps (read: Games) have been able to already port their games to the OS X on Intel platform… sometimes in just a matter of HOURS. Rob Gordon has Unreal Tournament 2004 already running there and World of Warcraft is already running there as well.

This is a real testament to the superior planning and engineering Apple has done with OS X. Like Steve said, they’ve been cross compiling OS X on Intel for 5 years running at this point. I have no doubt they will be able to execute this transition smoothly. The question is, will the app developers be willing and able to press that compile button one more time or even maybe change a few lines of code… heaven forbid! Lotus… are you listening?

I’ll be curious to see how the color model used in Macs fares in the future. Will they continue to use the traditional Mac colorspace which is what has really given the Mac one of its main advantages in the desktop publishing/print market… amazing color fidelity. Or will they forego that to be able to use regular PC compatible video hardware to reduce costs? Maybe they’ll give users a choice…. regular, cheap video cards for most people, but the print shops who need better color fidelity can buy the slightly more expensive cards with the traditional Mac colorspace.

So there you have it… these are some of the things that have been on my mind since this transition was announced. Intel has a better CPU performance roadmap for the future… no doubt about it. I’m just glad my platform of choice is flexible enough to easily manage this kind of a transition. If this doesn’t say something about developing with open standards, I dunno what does.
Here is a good summary from a site I respect: Ars