[b]What of the future of Apple & Intel?

Even after all of the above, the current intel CPUs aren't necessarily ones Apple will use, but it'll be derivatives of some listed above that decide the performance of new Intel Macs. I haven't attempted to give much thought at which direction Apple will move in this article, but Anand at Anandtech has. Arstechnica's John Siracusa looks at the passing of the PPC and gives his view of some of what comes next for Apple with Intel.

Want to see the first Intel Mac? go to O'Grady's Powerpage for photos of a 3.6GHz Development system.

Do you have more to add? comments? Do you feel I've mischaracterised a CPU?

Thanks for the info on Intel chips!

With regards to new Intel based Macs, I think it's worth noting that Intel has said they're abandoning the Pentium 4 derived lines (including current Xeon server lines - new Xeons (q1 2007) will be based on Pentium-Ms). EM64T Pentium Ms aren't due till end of 2006.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05...cancels_tejas/
Which other processors are Pentium 4 based? (Pentium D?)

They're also getting rid of the old 8086-based BIOS, allowing a more modern & configurable setup system, faster startup and fault finding, and a better motherboard that doesn't have some legacy chips.
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/2339/
http://www.tomshardware.com/business...524/index.html

Greg
(edit: main article does link now... either I was losing my mind and missed it or its fixed...
(and: Removed reference to Netburst being abandoned too)

Ahh - that makes sense, considering the little snips of info I've found online in the last couple of days. I've started from a base of knowing little more than "pentium M is used in laptops" I'm afraid, so I couldn't build a complete picture of what's happening just now -- I'm learning along with everyone else!. There seemed to be a general moving away from the Pentium 4 Architecture in opinion pieces, and the extensions to the pentium M look positive. It also makes the Tom's hardware article about the Pentium M being a big part of intel wooing apple all the more relevant.

Pentium M : M for Macintosh

dana