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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rackhir" data-source="post: 2314018" data-attributes="member: 149">Reading some of the after action reports, it's looking increasingly like the motivation for the switch wasn't so much the PPC now as a year or two down the road. IBM is getting geared up to make chips for the next gen consoles, since all of them are running off of one of their chips or a variation there of. Which means that they are going to be focusing on producing tens of millions of chips for those systems and not on producing the kind of PPC chips Apple needs. Their efforts in that realm obviously already having been inadiquate.So basically what it looks like things have come down to is that Apple couldn't get anyone to continue investing in the kind of chips they would have needed to keep with the PPC platform. Motorola, gave up on that several years ago and IBM would be increasingly distracted by the chips for the consoles. That doesn't really leave Apple anywhere to go but X86. Now you can speculate as to why Apple hasn't gone with AMD rather than Intel, but I suspect its a simple matter of marketing and economics. Intel has vastly greater resources for marketing and has been wooing Apple for decades. So it seems likely that they've offered Apple some significant inducements to go with them and Apple will be able to benefit all the marketing hype behind "Intel Inside". In other words, going with Intel is probably calculated to help get them through the transistion period. I suspect that we will see Apple dabbling at least in using AMD Chips in about 2 years once the transition has been completed. They won't need Intel as much at that point. Of course it's fairly pointless to speculate on what the chips will be like by then. An entirely new generation of chips will be out by then, quite possibly quad core chips or something like that. The system architecture will likely be as important or more important than the processors at that point, since the more processors you put into a system the better that system has to be designed if you are going to get the full benefit from them.</blockquote>

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