Apple Makes the Switch: iMac G5 vs. iMac Core Duo @ AnandTech

Vikingod

It seemed so far away, when in June last year Apple announced their two year transition to Intel architectures; it also didn't exactly add up. At their World Wide Developer Conference, Apple let the world know that every version of Mac OS X since 10.0 has been compiled and running on x86 hardware, so the OS was ready. Apple's iLife and iWork suites are a great supporting cast to the OS, and those applications were either ready or very close to being ready. Yet Apple was telling everyone that they would start the transition by June of 2006 and be done with it a year later.

Everything started to make sense once Intel's Core Duo launch was scheduled for the beginning of the new year, it was this chip that Apple would launch with, and why not as it has a guaranteed migration path over the next year? Core Duo platforms will eventually be able to be migrated to Merom based offerings (the two chips are pin-compatible) and using Core Duo on the desktop can tide users over until Conroe arrives if necessary. This way, Apple doesn't have to worry about switching to the Pentium 4 and its high clock speeds and then over to Conroe with its lower clock speeds, explaining why one is superior to the other each step of the way. Apple gets a quick and easy migration to an architecture that today offers similar clock speeds to their G5 processors (at least at the low end and mid-range), and they get to boost clock speed and performance later this year with Conroe and Merom.
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Read More / Source: AnandTech

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