Wow. As far as geeky news goes, this is about as big as it gets. C|net is reporting that Apple will announce a switch from IBM to Intel as the source for their processors. Now that doesn’t mean that you’ll be installing OSX on your homebuilt x86 machine on Tuesday, but it’s a pretty huge shift.
A lot of processor geeks have been pointing out that the G4 Powerbook is getting a little long in the tooth, and Apple may have been running into trouble trying to get its latest G5 PowerPC chip shoehorned into a laptop form. Intel on the other hand has a recent winner with the low-power, high performance Pentium M range, which they may be able to replicate in a RISC format solely for Apple. After all, the Pentium M has a RISC-ish core at its heart (surrounded by x86 transcoding ugliness).
Interesting times. I wonder how long it will take for hackers to reverse engineer the new Apptel BIOS to run on x86?
