Wired News: Jobs Drops Da Intel Bomb: “‘Yes, it’s true,’Jobs said. ‘We are transitioning from PowerPC to Intel processors.’

The transition to Intel will take two years. Jobs said Apple will be shipping Intel-powered Macs in mid-2006, with higher-end machines following a year later.”

First I was a little bit shocked, but it fast went over in it’s gonna be buissness more or less as usuale. You will not be able to run MacOS X on ordinary Intel PCs, but it seems that you will be able to run Windows, Linux and other operating systems on the new Macs. If that is the case, my next home machine just might be a triple boot machine running MacOS X, Ubuntu and Zeta. Now who would have dreamed that just a few days ago?

Steve Jobs blaimed IBM and said “I stood up here two years ago and promised you 3.0 GHz. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook, and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you,”. “But as we look ahead, and though we’ve got great products now, and great PowerPC products still to come, we can envision great products we want to build, and we can’t envision how to build them with the current PowerPC roadmap,”. I’m not sure that I am beliving Steve Jobs here. I have never liked IBM, and I think that IBM forced Apple over. IBM is clearly focusing on various game consols, which is a huge market compared to the “few” CPUs sold each year to Apple.

What I don’t understand is, why didn’t Apple go for the Cell CPU? Steve Jobs said: “When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PowerPC gives us 15 units of performance per watt, but Intel’s roadmap gives us 70. And so this tells us what we have to do,”. Probably true, but what about the Cell CPU?

The old news site The BeBox Zone had a crazy view on this, with the article Apple follows the BeOS road. True in the part of moving away from the PowerPC platform, but it is so much more smoothly done: A new build of Xcode, version 2.1, is being released today. This new release enables developers to specify PowerPC or Intel architectures. “… and you’re going to build what’s called a universal binary. It contains all the bits for both architectures,” said Jobs. “One binary, works on both PowerPC and Intel architecture. So you can ship one CD that supports both processors.”

If you haven’t already watched Steve Jobs keynote for the Apple WWDC 2005, it can be streamed with QuickTime.