In a keynote address at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs grabs the tech world's attention, saying it will move to Intel processors.
Apple Computer Inc. got the world's attention on Monday, saying it will move to Intel Corp. processors.
Apple will begin moving its systems to Intel processors by June 2006 and will finish the transition by June 2007, Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, said in a keynote address at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco.
Jobs underscored his point by demonstrating a Power Mac running Apple applications on a 3.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 and showing a port of Wolfram Research Inc.'s Mathematica before an audience of developers and other Apple followers during the keynote.
Porting Mac OS X to Intel will be easy, but there will be other challenges. Click here to read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' column.
The move will be made possible by work that's been ongoing at Apple for some time. Apple's Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life, having been compiled for both for Intel and the PowerPC, Apple's current processor of choice, Jobs said in the keynote. The company will support the PowerPC—right now it uses IBM's PowerPC 970FX chip—for some time to come.
Although it's a sea change for Apple, the move to Intel processors will grant Apple the options it feels it needs to move forward, ultimately allowing the company to focus its hardware efforts on designing sleek products and, at the same time, expanding sales.
Intel can provide Apple with a number of different processors, including dual-core desktop chips and a low-power, high-performance processor in the Pentium M, as well as other computer guts such as chip sets, analysts said.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: New Macs: Intel Inside
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