Games - Apple Intel transition

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	Games - Apple Intel transition

The Apple Intel transition is an announced change in the architecture of the Macintosh platform. At the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs made the historic announcement that the company was beginning a transition from the use of PowerPC microprocessors supplied by Motorola and IBM in their Macintosh computers, to processors designed and manufactured by Intel, a chief supplier for most of Apple's competitors. The new Macs (dubbed "Mactel" or "MacIntel" as a portmanteau of "Macintosh" and "Intel") will run on future versions of Intel's x86 processor architecture.

On January 10, 2006, Jobs announced the first two computers in this series, the MacBook Pro and a new iMac Core Duo, both using an Intel Core Duo chip.

On February 28, 2006, Jobs announced that the Mac mini now also comes with an Intel Core chip, in either the Solo or Duo varieties.

Apple's initial press release indicated they expected to have the transition complete by the end of 2007. With the first generation Intel-based Macintoshes being released in January 2006 instead of June, they appear to be ahead of schedule. Jobs is now claiming they will complete the switch to Intel CPUs by the end of 2006.

Precedents

The Macintosh line underwent a similar transition in the 1990s, when Apple switched from Motorola's 68K series of chips to IBM/Motorola PowerPC processors, developed jointly with Apple and IBM. This took several years, during which Apple produced versions of the Mac OS which could run on either platform, introduced fairly low-level emulation of the 68K architure by the PowerPC models, and encouraged third-party developers to release "fat binaries" that could run natively on either architecture.

More recently Apple has brought the Macintosh line from the earlier Mac OS family to Mac OS X, a Unix-like operating system. This transition also took a number of years (a small percentage of older Macintoshes still run the earlier operating system), and was facilitated by the inclusion of Classic, an environment in which an instance of Mac OS 9 could be run, permitting the execution of programs which had not been ported to Mac OS X, as well as the introduction of Carbon for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, allowing programs to run natively on either system.

A long-rumoured internal project within Apple, rumoured to be called "Marklar," was designed to ensure that builds of Mac OS X remained largely as portable as its predecessor NeXTSTEP, so as to compile for both PowerPC and x86-class processors. Jobs confirmed this, stating that every version of OS X had in fact been compiled for Intel processors as well as PowerPC. It is not known for which other processors, if any, Apple maintains current builds.

Reasons

Jobs stated that Apple's primary motivation for the transition was their disappointment with the progress of IBM's development of PowerPC technology, and their greater faith in Intel to meet Apple's needs. In particular, he cited the performance per watt (that is, the speed per unit of heat generated) projections in the roadmap provided by Intel. This is an especially important consideration in laptop design.

In 2003, Jobs had introduced Macintoshes based on the PowerPC G5 processor and promised that within a year the clock speed of the part would be up to 3 GHz. Two years later, 3 GHz G5s were still not available, and rumours continued that IBM's low yields on the POWER4-derived chip were to blame. Further, the heat produced by the chip proved an obstacle to deploying it in a laptop computer, which had become the fastest growing segment of the personal computer industry. It is rumoured that Steve Jobs has been considering Intel since his return at Apple. However, limited resources and steady speed improvement of the PowerPC familiy (up until the G5) have kept Apple with IBM.

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