Today’s the big day folks – today is supposedly the day that Apple will announce the switchover of PowerPC chips to Intel processors. We’re all waiting to hear what Mr. Jobs has to say at the WWDC 2005 Keynote. You can read the text descriptions of the conference here.
This is big news indeed folks. Apple managed to make a successful transition from the Motorola 680xx line of processors to the current PowerPC processors back in the early 90′s. Making this move to Intel x86 will be no small feat indeed. They will have to convince developers to recompile/rebuild their apps for x86 and at the same time support the older processor line as long as they can. Other issues arise – will consumers now wait on purchasing new Apple hardware while they make this transition to the new platform? Sales will surely be affected one way or another.
One another interesting note – Apple’s decision (if it turns out to be true) to use Intel CPU’s as opposed to AMD CPUs. This is no small feat in itself since AMD CPUs have been outperforming Intel processors for some time. What factors could have lead to this decision? I believe three things – price, resources, and the Pentium M processor.
Pricing is an obvious thing – Intel can easily underprice the Intel processor and chipset lineup to Apple and make it hard for AMD to compete. Resources are another obvious factor. It’s just hard to compete against the multitude of fabs that Intel owns. AMD has a couple but they also outsource some of their fabs too. The final factor is the Intel Pentium M processor. For some time, we’ve seen Apple use the PowerPC G4 processor for their Powerbooks. Whatever happened to the G5 processor? Well – it was basically too hot to run on a portable platform like the Powerbook and we all know how important the mobile market is these days. There have been reports that laptops are now outselling desktops. Why? People want mobility and people now use laptops as their desktop replacements. Apple can’t afford to lose out on the mobile market and hence the only other processor which made a lot of sense would be the Intel Pentium M processor. The processor performs well and has wonderful power management capabilities. It’s the perfect processor in many ways for Apple’s mobile market.
So let’s continue to wonder what lies ahead for Apple over the next few hours.
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