Keola Donaghy's Culture Hack

Tuesday, June 7, 2005

The Intel is coming! As always, Scott offers his unique insight into the impending violation of the Macintosh motherboard by Intel chips. I actually chatted with a buddy via iChat as he was using one of the Intel-powered Macs running at WWDC, and he was blown away by the performance. Actually, Scott's right - it's just a chip. All the end user cares about is cost and performance. Developers who do machine code might get religious about the chipset choice, but most who program in higher-level languages probably won't care much one way or the other.

Posted at 5:16:27 PM

comments [] trackback []

WWDC: Freedom of architecture Like many Macintosh afficionados, I've been following the developments at Apple's World-Wide Developer Conference as reported in the blogosphere. It's funny that the most talked about development is Apple's impending move away from Motorola's PowerPC chips to Intel's x86 chips. The possibility has been discussed for years, and for that reason many did not believe the rumors until they were actually confirmed by Steve Jobs. He finally acknowledged what had also been rumored for years - that Apple had been secretly running OS X on an x86 chipset since Mac OS X 10.0 shipped. My favorite quote is from my old friend Rainer Brokerhoff:

Now, suddenly, the handed-down wisdom is that the Pentium still sucks - but it sucks much faster than the current G5 does. The mobile varieties suck less power while still sucking faster than the aging G4. The dual-core Pentium sucks doubly well while the dual-core G5s are still in IBM's and Motorola's labs.

How's that for a backhanded compliment