Apple + Intel = Huh?

So Apple-whose website says that a pair of PPC G5s “blows away” a P4--has decided that a P4 running an emulator running OS X is “fast (enough).”

Disappointing, isn’t it? All weekend there was lots of speculation, including a great page at Wired about how Intel chips, with their talked-up DRM, would make a perfect iMac Mini-TiVo hybrid perfectly suited for a set-top box that would download DVD-quality [H.264] movies from iMovie Video Store with Hollywood’s blessings, but I kinda suspected that Jobs was irritated with IBM’s failure to get the G5 over 3 GHz and that he might take his OS X and walk away. And so he didn’t really promise anything big, other than the chip inside of Macs in 2007 will be from Intel, not IBM: This isn’t going to translate into any real performance gains, but it will require rewrites of some software, and it doesn’t add any features and may remove features, since Intel only makes 64-bit processors in its most expensive Xeons and has said it will not support x86-64bit across its line.

But my biggest question is, how long will it take someone to hack the x86 version of X to run on my DIY AMD box? Apple will never open the hardware platform—and besides, if X were to run on any Intel box, not just Intel boxes from Apple, M$ will stop making Office for MacOS X so fast Steve Jobs won’t be able to say iWork. We’ll see who manages to hack this so I can have a 64-bit, 2+ Ghz AMD "Mac" to OS X and maybe Windows when I have to do some chores.