CISC madness
Looks like Apple might actually ditch the beautiful PowerPC RISC architecture after all this. I have to admit I find it a little bit doubtful for a number of reasons, but there are enough rumors converging that it is worth thinking about. For most programs this wouldn’t be a problem, just a quick recompile. Building a nice emulator like they did switching from 68K to PPC would be a bit harder going to x86 I would think. More to the point, they just did a major switch to OS X (which works just fine on an x86) so doing another one again now seems brutal to the developers. OTOH, they did just promise to not change the OS API any more.
More interesting is… does this mean that they are going to be open to cloning again? That seems a little deadly… too hard to make it all “just work”. OTOH, maybe they just want to make the stuff that goes with the computer now (read iPod, airport, etc…) Just seems so… odd.
We’ll know more in two days in any case.