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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PowerPCs are found in all three next-gen game consoles. We're looking at 100 million+ units here, or the equivalent of 20 years of Mac computers. IBM didn't "blow" anything.
That's a great market for any chip maker, because you don't have to worry about performance and yet still have high volume. They pump out 100 million units without needing to increase performance for years at a stretch. An XBox bought the day they are released will have the same speed processor as the processor in a unit built and sold 2 years later.
The desktop/workstation market requires performance increases almost every quarter to remain competitive, and IBM just wasn't coming through. No cool-enough G5 chips for laptops, no 3 GHz G5's, and strings of production delays. While the G5 is great on paper, the execution is enough to make it undesireable for Apple for the desktop market.
IBM, of course, probably doesn't care that much, even happy to have a pushy customer off their back. They can continue to maked PowerPC embedded processors (where they need to be cool but not fast), server processors (which don't have the same concerns about cooling as laptops). It'd be interested to see Apple use Power5 for the Xservs, where they could probably still be a good idea, but I doubt it.