It’s becoming more realist than pessimist to see that when Apple hitches its reigns to a chip company they suddenly underperform. Motorola, then IBM, now Intel.
<p>Steve Jobs was happy to proclaim at WWDC ‘05 that the Apple-Intel transition would be done by 2007. He also went on and on (and on) about performance per Watt, leading industry insiders to speculate that the Post-G5 Apple workstations and servers would be powered by Intel Whitefield processors, a Quad-Core chip based on a 65nm process and Intel’s Penitum-M line of super-fast low-power chips.</p>
<p>Now, it appears that the Whitefield project, based in Bangalore, has been fraut with fraud and finally, <a href="http://www.theregister.com/2005/10/28/intel_whitefield_india/">cancelled</a>. </p>
<p>This leaves the Xeon-based <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/25/intel_xeon_dunnington/">Dunnington</a> as the heir-apparent to the Apple Pro line, but it’s not scheduled until 2008. A nice chip, 4 or 8 cores, low-power, on a 45nm process, and with an integrated memory controller, this would be a great chip for the Apple high-end family - but it’s not going to be here in 2007.</p>
<p>Steve’s already had an egg facial at the hands of IBM with his “3GHz by Next Year” announcement - now it seems it’s Intel’s turn to run the silicon beauty salon. Will Steve turn his wrath towards Intel and filander with AMD? Unlikely - AMD doesn’t have the low-power chips Apple needs and is nowhere near as aggressive as Intel on the low-power crusade (which one needs to make sexy-looking iMac HD’s). More likely is a Quad-Dual G5 from IBM or even a Dual-Quad sometime next year. And a revisionist announcement at WWDC ‘06.