Technically Speaking

This news comes as somewhat of a shock. Apple will cease to use the IBM chip architecture in their PowerPCs. In actuality, Apple has been preparing for this switch for sometime now, as Jobs explains:

In his speech, Jobs revealed that Apple has been developing all versions of OS X since its inception to run on Intel and PowerPC chips.

“Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life the past five years,” he said.

The move to Intel marks a tectonic shift for Apple, which has used processors from IBM and Motorola (now Freescale Semiconductor) throughout the life of the Mac. However, the company has changed architectures before, shifting in the 1990s from Motorola’s 68000 family of chips to the PowerPC architecture jointly developed by IBM and Motorola.

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The main reason for the switch is that the future of the IBM PowerPC chips has nearly come to an end. They can’t squeeze much more performance out of it and Apple was hoping to have a 3Ghz machine in 2006. With the PowerPC this would be possible.

As for why Apple was making the shift, Jobs pointed both to past problems and to the PowerPC road map, which he said won’t deliver enough performance at the low-power usages needed for powerful notebooks.

Two years ago at the same conference, Jobs introduced the first G5-based Power Macs and promised developers that the company would have a 3GHz PowerMac within 12 months. The company still doesn’t have a machine that fast. “We haven’t been able to deliver,” he said. Nor has Apple been able to introduce a G5-based laptop–something Jobs said “I think a lot of you would like.”

Things weren’t looking better in the coming months, Jobs said, saying that IBM’s PowerPC road map would only deliver about a fifth the performace per watt as a comparable Intel chip.

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With this change, I think that Apple will be able to tap into Microsoft’s market a lot easier. It might even be possible to have machines dual boot Longhorn and Leopard. An interesting thought, heh.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Laptop/PC, News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.