With Intel Inside Mac Hopes to Cross 3 Ghz Barrier

Apple’s announcement that it would be abondoning its long standing chip suppliers IBM and Motorola came as a big surprise to the industry and its loyal customers.

The news has left many Mac users, as well as iPod fans, contemplating a move to a similarly stylish Apple computer - confused.

To most PC users, the fuss must seem bizarre. After all, Apple has only a minuscule share of the global market for personal computers - between 2.5 and 4 per cent, depending on how and where you measure it. So who cares what such a minnow chooses to do?

Apple hasn’t been able to deliver 3-gigahertz Power Macs, which Apple CEO Jobs promised about two years ago, or a Mac laptop built around the G5, the most powerful PowerPC processor. G5 processors run too hot and draw too much power to work well in portable computers.

Little wonder then that Apple has been hedging its bets for the past five years by secretly running its Mac OS X system software on rival Intel’s chips - a long-standing rumour confirmed last week by Jobs when he addressed the annual Developer Conference in San Francisco.

Power consumption is a crucial factor in laptops, which must run cooler than desktop PCs. It’s expected that Intel’s Pentium M chips, designed specifically for the laptop sector of the market, will be the first Intel chips to find their way into Apple hardware next year.

The inability of IBM to deliver is difficult to understand given the company’s recent wins in the games console market. IBM is contracted to supply processors for every one of the three major upcoming platforms. If IBM can satisfy Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, why not Apple?

"It was a simple business calculation rather than an engineering problem," says analyst Kevin Krewell of InStat/MDR, a chip market research outfit.