But, I think you’re a littlw too hard on INter based processors… No matter what you say about PPC’s being “smoother” or “faster”, it’s simply not true! Just because it’s NOT x86 based, doesn’t mean it’s better in any way. Risc architechure is inherently flawed for personal computers. They’re wonderful for servers and high performance computers that do specific things, but PC’s (of all types) need to be able to handle many different programs and uses at a time. x86 instructions (with MMX, or whatever it uses) does actually help by giving compilers an extended instruction set!

Intel (and AMD) based processors are so vastly superiour to any other processors out there. I think that’s the MAIN reason Apple switched. They probably only went with PPC because they were hoping big blue would have enough clout to muscle it’s way into the processor market with a faster-than-intel processor; but it never happened.

Besides that – I have a G4.

Anyway, I like the PPC architecture. If you compile anything with Altivec vectorizing they’ll outperform pretty much anything. Unfortunately gcc isn’t all that great at it, apparently. But my mplayer is compiled with altivec enhancements and that’s all great for me. (Altivec > MMX :P)

I was kind of hoping for another generation of PPC’s. Just one more – to kind of blow everyone away. I think the x86 architecture is reaching its limit with recent speed boosts being attributed to little more than better cooling systems. “Sure it can run at 4GHz, we just need a bigger fan!”.

I would like to see a new breed of better, faster, higher-performance processors that are developed totally from scratch, using everything we’ve learned in the last 30 or so years of computing. I know they’ll break compatibility with all existing software and we’d have a bit of a rough start – but the sooner we do it the better. We can’t stay stuck using the same achitetcture that we’ve been using since 1974… and the longer we wait the harder the transition will be.

In conclusion: I think we should be moving progressively away from x86, not towards it.

My main reason for purchasing a mac was still the OS and the software, but finding out that soon it will be available for the common Pentium based PC is a bit of a let down, especially considering the current price differences.

All the switch to intel means is that you’ll stil have OS X running on Apple systems, but the CPU behind it will be an x86.

However, there’s always the possibility of running a hacked up system, using custom drivers and whatnot to get x86 running on your everyday PC, but I think it’ll be a couple years before anything close to that happens.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t too far down the line for Apple to run on commodity PCs. If they did do such a thing … Microsoft is going to be in a lot of trouble.