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I think what many people have said, and what has become pretty apparent, is that the switch was all about the laptops. IBM was focussed on server chips and embedded chips, but not a cool, low-power notebook chip. Intel's making some good headyway in solutions for laptops (including both the processor itself and accompanying chipsets), and last I heard, Apple's laptops were a key part of their business.

And yes, they've released a dual-core processor, but no, they still haven't reached the 3Ghz mark that was promised for, what is it now, 2 years ago?

And yes, they've released a dual-core processor, but no, they still haven't reached the 3Ghz mark that was promised for, what is it now, 2 years ago?

Why do idiots keep bringing this up? 3GHz G5s was speculation from Jobs, not a promise from IBM.

Just to put it in perspective, Intel did promise 4GHz P4s... so where are they?

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Intel's making some good headyway in solutions for laptops
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Intel Centrino might be good, even I have to admit that. But OSX is 64-bit. And Intel sucks (in quality, speed and power consumption at 64-bit) there. For now, not even one decent 64-bit CPU came out of Intel, do not even think about laptop 64-bit Intel CPU.

So if they are not going back to 32-bit, Intel is the worst choice possible. AMD Turion on the other hand is 64-bit.

Only the BSD subsystem of OS X ships with 64-bit support. In order to have a graphical program utilize 64-bit addressing it needs to be broken into a 32-bit client (UI) and a 64-bit server (data processing) and use IPC to perform operations on its large data sets. The amount of 64-bit software that is used on the client is thus relatively small, leaving the performance of such things largely a matter of concern for server farms. That is unless you're genuinely concerned about the overall performance of Mathematica at operating on datasets >4GB.

That said the processors Intel will be shipping to Apple for inclusion (post-Merom) will support x86-64. The quality of that implementation is indeterminate at this point (or at least I know nothing about it), but it'll certainly be more than sufficient. Even Intel's current x86-64 offering is sufficient, even if inferior to AMD's.

Road map was but ONE consideration; the other was the crappy supply issue; like I've said before; anyone remember the XServer fiasco where by the top of the range one had waiting times of WEEKS because IBM couldn't keep up with demand from Apple?!

Please; Motorola couldn't keep up and IBM can't either; the fact is, Apple is growing at a phenominal rate; IBM would rather get instant gratification via their Cell processor than spend time looking at the long term - but hey, this is IBM; bitch to the short term invester with the loudest, most uneducated mouth at the shareholders AGM.

Notebooks didn't need a G5, what it needed as a G3 750GX coupled with Altvec, 533Mhz FSB - it would give them the low power, the decent level of bandwidth, and it wouldn't require re-inveting the wheel, it would be merely a sucessor to an existing product they have - a product that could pay for itself, not just via Apples purchase but others in the embedded market.

"Notebooks didn't need a G5, what it needed as a G3 750GX coupled with Altvec, 533Mhz FSB"

Well, what about a G4 then? The 8641 springs to mind. It has a fast FSB, a big 2nd L cache and consumes only low energy and scales up to two cores with a clock frequency up to the 2 ghz range. Those just announced PA6T based processors seem to be good for such a job too, but they will appear most likely a while after the 8641. Thus, the 8641 will be the next big step for low energy high performance ppc computing, the PA6T will follow that route.