Apple turns its back on IBM chips and plans the future using and Intel-based architecture

Rethink IT, July, 2005

Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed the world's suspicions last month, that Apple is about to dump the hugely powerful PowerPC range of chips and shift over to an Intel-based architecture over the next two years for all its PCs and servers and possibly even for smaller devices like iPods.

Jobs announced the deal with Intel at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference and brought Intel CEO Paul Otellini onto the stage to buddy up. No financial details were revealed.

The word is that Apple wanted lower power chips so that its architecture could scale up and down from portable to super powerful computers. Jobs said he was convinced that Intel would eventually win the race to deliver the most computer processing power per watt.

Apple is thought to have been warring with factions at IBM and Freescale over the issue of low power and was getting nowhere. The cynical among us might also think he felt that Apple deserved better discounts.

Whatever the cause, Jobs has now made the announcement and what IBM must have thought was merely a bluff has turned into the loss of what has been its best chip customer for the past 10 years. IBM won't be the first company to find out that you can't play bluff with Steve Jobs and now the company must repent at leisure, given that it had been building up a head of steam behind its Power core chips, especially with the prospect of all three of the next generation of serious games platforms being based on it.

But Jobs may well have been looking a little into the future and perhaps could see that the Cell chip that the Sony PS3 is going to run on, itself a Power variant, could well create workstations that would cut into Apple's lead in mini-supercomputing applications such as rendering for the entertainment industry. He may have not wanted to support a chip that might one day compete with Apple devices.

Jobs told the audience that he had been planning for the eventuality for five years and had opened a lab in Apple's corporate headquarters, devoted to running Apple software on Intel computers that had been bought off the shelf.

When Apple came out with the Mac Mini it raised the prospect of keeping your screen, keyboard and mouse and just replacing your processor and deserting the PC for the Mac. Now it raises the prospect of just throwing out Windows and keeping all of your PC, a notion that cannot please Microsoft especially as Jobs was keen to remind Microsoft that Apple had beaten it to all the good stuff in Microsoft's Longhorn with its current Tiger operating system and will even improve on that before Longhorn ever sees the light of day.

Apple's plan is to deliver models of the Mac using Intel microprocessors by this time next year, and to transition all of its Macs to using Intel microprocessors by the end of 2007. Apple hinted that it was moving towards Pentium and other PC chips, but that might be to throw us off track, and it would also make sense if it was to look hard at the low power xScale chips designed with portable devices in mind, such as mobile phones.

Apple previewed a version of Mac OS X Tiger, running on an Intel-based Mac to the 3,800 developers attending CEO Steve Jobs' keynote speech. Apple later spiced up the conference by pointing out that 2m copies of OS X Tiger had been sold in just six weeks. At $129 a copy, that's a cool quarter of $1bn likely to be added to Apple's next quarter and makes it Apple's fastest selling OS release ever.

Apple also said that hundreds of developers including Microsoft and Adobe have announced support for Tiger and have released more than 400 Dashboard widgets, 550 Automator actions and 40 Spotlight plug-ins already.

Apple also announced the availability of a Developer Transition Kit, consisting of an Intel-based Mac development system along with preview versions of Apple's software, which will allow developers to prepare versions of their applications to run on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs and said it would have a version of OS X Tiger that would do just that, run on either.

And being the kind of charismatic leader that he is, Jobs probably can convert his small hordes of developers to the new crusade, and in record time.

Microsoft stood up with Apple and said that it would produce a version of Microsoft Office that would run on both the Intel and Power PC versions of the Mac.

The Developer Transition Kit is available now and costs $999 and Intel plans to provide development support for Apple later this year, including the Intel C/C++ Compiler for Apple, Intel Fortran Compiler for Apple, Intel Math Kernel Libraries for Apple and Intel Integrated Performance Primitives for Apple.

Apple also announced that it would release QuickTime 7 Player and QuickTime 7 Pro for Windows, which it says is the first mainstream H.264 system for streaming and playback of High Definition (HD) video on the Windows platform. The preview version can be downloaded now and the preview version of QuickTime 7 Pro costs $29.99.