Yusuf Goolamabbas

Before IDF, CPU choices particularly if you were looking for performance and reasonably good thermal envelope was easy. The AMD64 in all its variant pretty much ruled the roost.

Now, 2006 is looking to be a very interesting year particularly if you are looking at a hardware refresh in the second or third quarter. As detailed in this RealWorldTech post by David Kanter, Intel’s new Core Architecture is shaping up to be a strong contender.

Combine this with Apple’s switch to Intel and the possibility of combining good hardware from Intel with the slickness of MacOSX will be very compelling.

With virtualization support native to the CPU, it will be uber-cool if somebody like VMWare came up with VMWare for OSX. That would make MacOSX/Intel the platform of choice for developers particularly in the web space (test Firefox/IE/Safari from one box).