Intel and Apple like apples and oranges

IDG News Service - With a buzz factor that far exceeds its market share, Apple Computer Inc. is the darling of technophiles, graphics artists, and vocal nonconformist computer users around the world. The world's largest chip company might also be smitten with the Mac maker, according to a report in today's Wall Street Journal (see story).

Apple and Intel Corp. have held talks in the past about coming together on a personal computer. But today's report stated that Apple will agree to use Intel chips in Macintosh computers at some unspecified date, a development that was viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism by veteran industry analysts who have heard this rumor before. An Intel spokeswoman declined to comment on the report, and an Apple spokeswoman did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

The largest obstacle between Apple and Intel is the incompatibility between the two different chip architectures in their current products. Apple's Macintosh computers are based on the PowerPC instruction set developed by current Apple supplier IBM Corp. and former supplier Motorola Inc. Intel's chips use the x86 instruction set, which has provided the operating orders for Windows-based PCs since the 1980s.

Software developed for one architecture does not run on the other architecture without a software emulator that usually slows performance dramatically. Therefore, if Apple was to switch to using x86 chips it would have to get all of its Mac-friendly software partners to port their applications to a version of Mac OS X based on the x86 architecture.

When Apple made the transition from Motorola Inc.'s 68000 family of processors to chips based on the PowerPC architecture in the early 1990s, the company lost about half its market share, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with Insight 64 in Saratoga, Calif.


"Software transitions are always painful," Brookwood said. "Maybe [Apple] can get ISVs to recompile everything, but getting them to do that is something ISVs don't really enjoy."

But Apple has already taken tentative steps in the direction of x86 chips. An x86 version of Darwin, a collection of Unix-based code that provides the foundation of the Mac OS X operating system, can be downloaded from Apple's site. But that is not a full-featured Mac OS X release that would be required to support x86 chips in large volumes.

"They could do it if they wanted to," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst with Mercury Research Inc. in Cave Creek, Ariz. "Doing ports of software is much easier than it was 10 years ago. But why would they want to?"

Apple's

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