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The next Apple CPU?

Pentium M: Merom: “Intel expects to launch the Merom core in the second half of 2006. Merom will support the EM64T instruction set, and will serve as the basis for a new desktop core, Conroe.”

So it is official. Apple is switching to Intel chips within the next 2 years. How does this make me feel as a long time Apple user? It sucks, but not for the reasons that you might imagine. Personally, I couldn’t care less if my computer has a G5, Intel Merom, or an RCA Cosmac 1802. As a programmer, I care very little for the underlying architecture and instead live in the realm of the API. OSX provides a slick API and Objective C is sharp, but I have not been compelled to utilize either to their fullest. Instead, I find myself more and more drawn to the cross-platform GUI solutions like Wx and platform agnostic languages like Ruby, Python, and Java. Sure performance is a big deal-breaker for me, but I simply cannot tell a lick of difference between a 3.4 GHZ P4 and a 2.0 GHZ G5 for 99% of the tasks that I perform. The only real time that I notice anything is when my chess program Hikeeba
crunches only 534,211 positions per seconds as opposed to 562,809… either way it still kicks my ass. No the heartburn for me in this decision is that I have already watched it unfold over ten years ago during the legacy of NeXTStep and OpenStep. Maybe Jobs has figured out where he went wrong last time, and maybe he really knows what he is doing… but I remain skeptical. In any case, I do not plan on selling my G5 (at the moment), and will in fact make it a Linux-only box whenever Apple decides to stop supporting running OSX on it.

-m