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Apple on Intel
nihilist:
Haha, AMD is 18 months ahead of Intel for dual core servers? Wow. That just made me laugh.
mosfet:
not to mention AMD dual cores are truely dual core, and don't behave like two seperate cores on one die talking by going outside the CPU to the FSB like Intel chips.
Maybe we'll see some AMD PowerMacs, and those spiffy dothan based powerbooks, ibooks, eMacs, Mac Minis? That'd be nice.
Theres been quite a few articles on the possible effects on Mac Gaming, but it appears to be just as important to Mac Apps as well.
http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/view.php?ID=357
ThinkDifferent:
Gaming is a special case because so many games come out for the PC that never come out on the Mac, the biggest example being the Half-Life series. There's arguments that this could revive Mac gaming because it would make it easy for PC game developers to release Mac versions. There's opposing arguments that nobody would develop games for Mac anymore because they can just develop for Windows and have Intel Mac owners.
Personally, I have more faith in Mac game developers than to think they'd just abandon all the PPC Macs out there. The major Mac game developers (Aspyr, MacSoft) have already gotten in line behind the Intel move. I'd assume Blizzard would follow suit. In the end, I think the move will be good for Mac gaming. Half-Life probably still won't come out on the Mac, but future games that wouldn't have been ported to PPC might come out for Intel Macs.
Outside of gaming, I think there's no problem at all. Apple has made it ridiculously easy to port PPC apps to Intel, as long as you use Xcode. The gap between the range of apps available for Windows and the Mac OS is nowhere near as large as it is for games. Sure, there are more apps out for Windows than Mac, but a lot of them are duplicates and the Mac OS has a large shareware/freeware community. Those small developers will make the switch with little trouble, I'm sure.
-sam:
The only thing the switch to Intel will do for Mac gaming is make running VirtualPC quicker. The stumbling block in porting is dealing with DirectX, that will not change regardless of the processor inside the Mac.
Personally I'm vaguely looking forward to a dual-booting, Yonah core powered Powerbook
-sam
mosfet:
Apparently, asside from the direct-X/OpenGL performance issue, theres a big byte re-ordering issue that seems to be one of the biggest pain in the asses to porters.
So Direct-X/OpenGL is the performance issue.
and Byte-Reordering is a big time to port issue. (and pain in the ass)
The switch to intel may significantly decrease time to port games and apps, but graphics performance may still suffer. Although the article also says the time to port will actually increase 30% at first before it decreases, because of the need to port for both PPC and intel macs.
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