Will Apple stick with Intel for the long run?

[dave_c]

Will Apple stick with Intel for the long run? I was surprised when I first heard that Apple will use Intel processors, a company very very commonly associated with PC market, or are they just using Intel Microprocessors for the meantime, have they got a new state of the art G6 up their sleeves and what are their plans for future?

[fo3nix]

Macs are PCs. There's no difference. The only thing is that Apple make both hardware and software, unlike Microsoft, Dell etc. Hence they create one complete package, and don't have to worry about as many driver issues etc. as Microsoft does, so their software tends to run smoother out of the box. It's also now got a more solid foundation, in the shape of freeBSD, than Windows has.

They'll be with Intel for a good while longer. At least 10 years.

The Gx processors were good, but they consumed too much power and gave off far too much heat. Since Apple wanted to create faster portables, they needed a processor design that beat the G4. The G5 would never fit into a laptop without it overheating all the time, and hence they switched to Intel, which has a roadmap including many processors specifically designed for mobile platforms.

[OBonio]

Also, I think the new idea of running windows programs under a Mac needed an Intel processor for it to perform reasonably (ie, Windows programs are compiled for x86 platforms, so the code is optimised for x86 and so would need to have been mapped to Gx instructions at runtime if they didn't use an x86 CPU).