Brian's Brain

Hello from the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynote, which just wrapped up. As has been widely rumoured for the past few weeks, Apple will be transitioning its product line from PowerPC- to Intel-based products over the next 2.5 years, and plans to be shipping Intel-based systems by this time next year. I'll write up more information this evening on the train back to Sacramento but wanted to quickly hit the highlights, before I rush off to my lunch meeting:

1) As I predicted in my three-part blog entry posted Saturday night, absolute performance isn't what forced Apple's hand, it's performance-per-watt. Steve Jobs specifically highlighted the lack of a 3 GHz Power Mac, and the inability to ship a G5-based PowerBook, as factors in the decision. Looking out a year, Apple believed that PowerPC CPUs would deliver 15 units of integer performance per watt, whereas Intel would give them 70. Note the focus on integer performance, versus floating point; this implies that x86 CPUs will be the primary new CPU platform Apple uses, but it doesn't preclude Apple's use of the Itanium architecture.

2) Apple has lots of "great PowerPC products" yet in the pipeline (note the attempt to dodge the Osborne Effect). "We also have future great products to come, but we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC roadmap".

3) For at least the last five years, OS X has led a "secret double life", driven by two key rules. Rule #1: Designs must be processor-independent. Rule #2: Projects must be built for both PowerPC and Intel processors.

4) Jobs ran his keynote on a system powered by a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 CPU, with 2 GBytes of DDR SDRAM.

5) Universal binary support, enabled by today's unveiled version 2.1 of the Xcode developer toolset, will enable one binary that runs on both PowerPC and Intel "with a single checkbox checked".

6) Wolfram Research was contacted last Wednesday evening and flew a single engineer out on Thursday with Mathematica source code (a future alpha internal build, not just the currently shipping version). Quotes from company co-founder Theo Gray: "There are millions of lines of C code, Java code, ancient code that hasn't been changed since the Reagan administration. This isn't a little toy app, it's a beast". Within two hours, and after only 20 source code line changes, it was up and running on Intel hardware.

7) Apple will also be shipping 'Rosetta' emulation technology that enables PowerPC binaries to run on Intel hardware, transparent to users ("this is nothing like Classic") and with "fast (enough)" performance. I suspect this is based on Transitive's technology, which I wrote about in part 2 of my Intel Developer Forum trip report, but this wasn't revealed by Jobs. Demo'd apps included Microsoft Office for Mac (Word and Excel), Intuit Quicken, and Adobe Photoshop CS2.

Off to my lunch meeting; more later. Comments welcomed!