Power PC dumped

Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips

When Apple will switch to x86 and ia64 it will be possible to run mac osX on your own home bought computer, given that they don’t avoid it by changing some opcodes.

One other things is sure; they will loose some power. As long as they provide binaries and provide one set for all apple computers they will have to add support for both ppc and x86 in one binary distribution which will undoubtely be a lot bigger if not slower too.

It will be interesting to see how this issue will evolve.

XBox 360

Microsoft released the specifications of the XBox 360..
it is a beast..

With 3 CPU cores running on 3.2Ghz each with 2 hardware threads and 1 mb l2-cache each it is a powerhouse.

A remarkable feature of the XBox 360 is that it has got processor level support for MSIL (the bytecode used by .net applications).

The best thing of the XBox 360 is that it’ll be quite cheap (~150$), this probably lets the XBox360 deliver the most processor capability per dollar.

Maybe I’ll buy a few and make my own little linux server cluster with it, when the guys behind xbox-linux.org have added support for the XBox360 :-).