According to News.com, Apple plans to make an announcement on Monday that they are discontinuing their relationship with IBM and will slowly begin fading in Intel processors. Steve Jobs is expected to make the announcement as part of his Keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference.
The conference would be an appropriate venue: Changing the chips would require programmers to rewrite their software to take full advantage of the new processor.
Apple has been using the IBM PowerPC processor since 1994. By 2006, most lower-end Macs, such as the Mac Mini, will be using the Intel processors, with PowerMacs and other high-end systems switching over by 2007.
This might be obvious and I may have just missed it, but would intel be playing into the Apple instruction processes and architechture? Or would Apple play into the existing x86 intel processors?
I can only imagine it would be the former, just to keep Apple “pure.”
This would be an interesting development though. And I’m wondering if it may be a boon for AMD if Intel gets sidetracked into full on Apple processor development.
gosh, has it already been two weeks since the last stupid Apple switching from powerpc to intel/amd rumor?