[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

The Intel Pentiums have been hitting the wall on packing more inefficient circuits into ever growing (size and heat generated) chips. If the RISC concept is married to more recent chip technology, it could be a game changer.

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From what I can see, your assessment is 180 degrees off.

I see industry moving away from PPC and towards X86. Apple’s switch in their computers is only but one quite visible example.

Theory would say you are right, but practice proves you wrong. The move to dual core and now multi-core has proven to be the way of choice around the power and heat issues. X86 may be ugly, it may be CISC, but it is the future for non-mobile applications.

[antiRepublicrat]

Why not? Apple has chip design experience (the PPC was done by the AIM Alliance, "A" for "Apple"), they recently bought a low-power chip maker and they are concentrating on low-power mobile applications. Intel's Atom isn't quite there yet, and Apple probably doesn't think the current ARM chips have enough performance.

Apple didn't move away from the PPC for architecture reasons. The main one is that their suppliers let them down. IBM produced a powerful chip that took too much juice to put into laptops, and Freescale couldn't make powerful chips, period. Neither wanted to do the R&D to make better chips just for Apple.

But PowerPC chips did find their way into the latest generation of gaming consoles, as each of the three has a PowerPC core (or three).

[anymouse]

You missed my point. Of course the x86 Intel chips have become the defacto PC chip for even Macs. But Intel is hitting the technical walls and is hurting financially. AMD already is on the ropes. If Apple can marry the PPC tech. with the lessons learned of the rise of x86 tech., they could do an end run around Intel - as Apple has done numerous times before. Of course they could fall on their face too. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. And Jobs is if nothing else a smart gambler on pushing smart design over raw power.