Linked by Craig Dooley on Wed 8th Jun 2005 19:01 UTC
With the announcement that Apple is switching to Intel, the computing world has been thrown a curve ball. Speculation will run rampant for the next year. We obviously won't know what's going to happen until it happens, but I see a bright future coming out of this. I see Apple with more headroom for the future to create better, faster designs. I see much more opportunity for the hacker community to work with this also.
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....is really a moot point. What's become more important is the compiler.
Just look at SSE and Velocity Engine/VMX. They are fairly similar in most respects. However, there is one major and important difference: GCC can't generate vectorized code well at all for SSE/VMX, while Intel's compilers can optimize for SSE/SSE2 extremely well.
As for Legacy support, it's all in the BIOS anyway. A PC's bios is 16-bit, so the 16-bit modes of IA32 are still used to access VESA (which is a DOS thing, really), etc. Gate A20 is a hack to work around 16-bit address limitations. Also, option roms for SCSI cards have a severe size limit. This is all so DOS will boot on your Athlon64. Since Apple has no need for 16-bit support, 90% of the legacy goes out the window right there.