Apple Goes to Intel (2 comments)
They've gone and done it. Apple has committed to moving their entire line of systems to use Intel processors. I hope it's revealed why they chose Intel since AMD's opteron line seems to be a much better x86 product, especially in multi-processor configurations. At least that's what Anand's tests showed, and Anand is a smart guy.
Regardless of x86 vendor, the primary concern in such a move is application support, and Jobs invited Wolfram Research to stop by and assuage those concerns. Wolfram's representative showed Mathematica running on the x86 version of OS S, after about two hours' work and twenty lines of code. I'd be impressed by that if Mathematica hadn't existed for multiple x86 platforms for years already. It remains to be seen how much trouble goes into porting the hundreds of applications that weren't written with multiple platforms in mind.