Apple to Intel announcement at WWDC?

The run up to this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference has been strangely quiet in terms of rumors. Most of the hardware has been recently updated and with Tiger only a couple of months old, there’s not much on the hardware end to look forward to. However, CNET is reporting that Steve Jobs is going to drop a bombshell during his keynote address on Monday, June 6:

Apple Computer plans to announce Monday that it’s scrapping its partnership with IBM and switching its computers to Intel’s microprocessors, CNET News.com has learned.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that the Apple-on-Intel rumors heated up, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple and Intel were in serious discussion about the computer maker ditching IBM in favor of Intel CPUs. At the time, it seemed likely that Apple was actually talking about adopting Intel’s Xscale CPU for some sort of appliance or other non-desktop/laptop device.

One more bit of grist for the rumor mill: Adam Israel just pointed me to this blog entry. Yes, it’s a Live Journal entry from some random guy (well, actually a major contributor to the Linux kernel) in Prague. But hey, this is an Apple Rumor.

I noted before that an architecture shift would be a huge undertaking. Applications would have to be recompiled, and developers would have to be brought on board for yet another major shift. However, Apple has done it before, when it transitioned from Motorola’s 680×0 chips to the PowerPC. That was a big shift and required a lot of emulationsupposedly the last version of the Classic Finder (OS 9) still contained a fair bit of legacy 680×0 code in it.

Analysts remain skeptical about the prospects of a move. Nathan Brookwood from industry research firm Insight 64 doubts it will happen.

"If they actually do that, I will be surprised, amazed and concerned. I don’t know that Apple’s market share can survive another architecture shift. Every time they do this, they lose more customers" and more software partners, he said.

As I digest this particular bit of news late on a Friday night, I’m a little less certain of my position that it won’t happen than I was a couple of weeks ago. If you think Apple is going to make the big switch, you would need to believe that Apple already has Tiger running on x86 hardware (likely), it does not see much of a future with the PowerPC 970 line (possible), and it believes switching to Pentium D and/or Pentium M systems would allow them to increase their market share (debatable).

IBM is definitely committed to the POWER architecture that is at the heart of the PowerPC 970 used in the iMac and PowerMac. Witness the Power Everywhere play by IBM as well as the fact that all three next-generation consoles will be using CPUs based on the architecture. On the other hand, it seems that the PPC 970 has not worked out so well for Apple. Remember the now-infamous prediction by Steve Jobs in June 2003? 3.0GHz in 12 months. 24 months later and IBM is still only 70 percent there. Not only that, but cooling issues have left the PowerBook still using the bandwidth-throttled PPC 74xx (G4) line.

Intel would offer Apple instant brand recognition and credibility, an ample supply of CPUs, and even the option of marketing Mac OS X as an x86 alternative to Windows. While I’m quite fond of my Dual 2.5GHz Power Macintosh G5, the thought of having a pair of Pentium D 840s (or better yet, some dual-core Opterons) in there is intriguing. And don’t get me started on a Centrino Aluminum PowerBook.

On the flip side, it would require a big commitment on the part of its developers and might alarm some people who have made a significant investment in PowerPC Mac hardware. For the next few years, the company would likely need to maintain builds of Mac OS X for both architectures, as would application developers.

A quick straw poll in the Orbiting HQ showed that there is a large amount of support for an Apple switch to Intel. At this point, I think it’s within the realm of possibilityeven likelybut I’m not 100 percent sold. We’ll find out for sure after the weekend.