Well it's official, today at the WWDC, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that OSX was transitioning to Intel x86 chips. He even did the entire demo using a Powermac running a 3.6ghz Pentium 4. Everything seemed smooth. All the major Apple apps were working fine.
I'm still quite a bit stunned at the prospect of it all.
Pros:
1. Parity in processor speeds. This will finally decide the "which is faster" debate, since OSX and Windows will both be running on the same chips.
2. Economies of scale. Intel makes ALOT of processors. Compared to a G5 processor, an x86 chip will be MUCH cheaper. Does this translate to cheaper system? It's too early to tell.
Cons:
1. Intel hardware. Among the OSX people there's always been a disdain for anything PC (that's where the whole "zealot" name came out of). Pentium 4's have an unbelievably deep pipleline, this is what enables them to run at 3+ GHZ clock speeds. This also means it takes many clock cycles for an instruction to finish, and that branch prediction errors are very costly. How this will affect OSX, is again, too early to tell.
2. Migration: Some software will just not work. Especially some of the "Classic" software that people are using just will not work on Intel hardware. Period. This can also mean that many developers might give up on the platform.
Since everything is so early, there's no way to know how things will play out. But I do know that Apple hardware sales will be down this year.
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