I caught up with the big news a day after everyone else, since I was travelling. When I read it, my jaw sagged open, and I checked the date more than once, on the off chance that it was April 1.
I have mixed feelings about the move. The PowerPC architecture is, IMO, more elegant than the x86 architecture. And I believe that have more than one platform in circulation is good for the industry as a whole. But. There are a couple of big “buts”: Although PPC may be more elegant than x86, Intel seems to be better at actually making their chips run fast. Real-world performance beats out theoretical elegance 10 times out of 10. Also, MotorolaFreescale and IBM both seem to have bigger fish to fry than catering to Apple’s needs. Freescale obviously has had problems pushing the speed limit with their chips. IBM has done better, but apparently would rather make chips for video games than desktops.
Many people have wondered why–if Apple is switching to x86–they aren’t going with AMD. My own take on this is that Intel execs would rape their own mothers if doing so would take market share away from AMD. I would not be surprised if Intel is practically paying Apple to take its chips rather than have Apple turn to AMD. Supply lines, roadmaps, etc, all seem secondary to this.
I also wonder if Apple is going to use Itaniums (Itania?), and give Intel a way to get rid of some of them–they may be technically great, but have sold poorly because they aren’t x86-based. Since Apple is switching to a new platform, there’s no added penalty in switching to Itaniums (other than optimizing another compiler). Then again, Apple has hinted that people will be able to run Windows on their Macintels, which would mean that Itanium isn’t in the picture.