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I was talking about motherboard chipsets, which is exactly what I said I was talking about at the time.

Apple has a terrible time keeping motherboard chipsets in sync with the rest of the world. The G4 was shackled to an aging memory controller and slow bus speed for a long, long time. The G5 is now shackled to an old pre-PCIe chipset. This isn't debatable.

Basically, what happens is that Apple announces up-to-date chipsets every couple of years with over-the-top marketing (supercomputing jargon, anyone?) knowing full well that the Mac faithful will simply assume that Apple is always ahead of the industry in every respect; hence, they must have the best chipsets. But that's far from true.

However, in the real world its ridiculous for Apple to waste time and money with their own chipsets when the x86 industry _already_ produces better ones at lower costs. With their new deal, Intel will provide chips, motherboards, and drivers which will all benefit from widespread use in x86 PCs. Apple should focus on OS X - that's where their strength lies.

Your points about the BIOS and firewire are partially correct but are not relevant to my argument. However, Intel is drastically reducing startup and power recovery time. Frankly, I have no idea what you are babbling about with 800MHz+ bus speed; Intel's current chips don't really need a 1066 MHz bus, which is why although it's been out there for a while there is simply not much interest in it yet.

I also don't subscribe to the whole "copying is stealing" argument with 800Mbps Firewire. Did Apple steal PCI from Intel? Oh, shame on Apple. And what about multi-button mice? God, Apple is a rapist. Whatever.

And while we're on the subject of system performance, Apple's video cards were abysmal even in comparison to then-current x86 equivalents, which were quickly eclipsed some time ago. Not to mention SLI, the Geforce 7800 cards, and the next generation of ATI's cards which IIRC is shipping this month. And what will Apple do about PCIe RAID cards?

The bottom line is simple: there's no reason for Apple to paint itself into a corner with custom chipsets.

The only things that will improve Mac Platform performance are:

1. CPU (Frequency, cache, cores, Optimizations)
2. Memory Frequency
3. System Bus Frequency
4. Unix compiler Optimization

Graphics Cards are not gonna improve the performance except for gaming which is not justified over consoles when apple hardware could cost >2000 $

Chipsets will not improve the performace that much: Remember the intel 875 to 915 transition they never brought with it any noticable performance to me and to anandtech who just prove it; Chipsets change always brings features more than performance.

"I have no idea what you are babbling about with 800MHz+ bus speed" That's because you lack the knowledge that apple produces motherboards with 1.25 Ghz Frequency while your intel champ produces a maximum of 1.06 Ghz; and as I said before it is a vital factor to performance.

The G4 was shackled to an aging memory controller and slow bus speed for a long, long time.

It still is and will remain so until the 8641 series show up.

The G5 is now shackled to an old pre-PCIe chipset. This isn't debatable.

It's very debatable.
The PowerMacs use a PCI-X chipset which for expansion is up to 2-2.5 times faster than the single channel PCIe slots many PC chipsets have. The AGP port is a bit behind now but that's it.