In a sentence, it's not the hardware, but OS X:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520
it really makes me wonder why they're moving to Intel. Quoting from the
article:
You might not have noticed it, but there is in fact a lot of good news in
this article for owners of current Apple systems. Gcc 4.0 promises a lot
better (FP) performance in open source software. The improvement from gcc
4.0 over gcc 3.3.3 and 3.3 is amazing on the PowerFX family: almost a 70%
improved FP performance!
Now that the open source community finally has a decent compiler for the
Apple platform, Apple management decides to step over to another
architecture. Ironically, right now, the Intel architecture needs a
super-optimized compiler (Intel's own) to reach the FP performance that the
G5 now reaches with a very popular but far less aggressive compiler (gcc).
A low power Power 970FX is also available and consumes about 16 Watts at 1.6
GHz; so it seems that IBM, although slightly late, could have provided
everything that Apple needs. The G5 with its 58 million transistors and 66
mm2 die size is not really a hot CPU. The Xserve (2 x 2.3 GHz G5) was by
far the quietest 1U air-cooled server that ever entered our lab in Kortrijk.
Andi..
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