What's Right About the PowerPC?

If anything were guaranteed to set teeth gnashing in the executive suite at Apple Computer's headquarters, it was Intel's Thursday announcement of Yonah, the dual-core version of its Pentium Mobile processor line due next year for Windows notebooks. Or maybe not.
Over the weekend, the rumors of Apple switching from its PowerPC-based platform to some flavor of Intel chip kept growing. Perhaps these reports (or more likely the television crews camped out in Cupertino) caused apoplexy in the upper ranks as well. Or not.
The only certain bet is that on Monday morning, CEO Steve Jobs will take the stage at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco and pitch developers (again) on the goodness of the company's recently released "Tiger" version of Mac OS X. Everything else is speculation.
Now, Intel's Yonah platform sounds interesting. The two cores will boost performance for multithreaded applications (and will give some oomph to the next-generation version of Windows, which will no doubt need it).
But when running on the battery, the processor can shut down one core to improve power consumption. This will only sap the performance of processes that can take advantage of multiple cores—usually a minority of applications or functions, albeit important ones. The single core can also control all of the chip's integrated 2MB Level 2 cache, instead of having a pair of smaller, dedicated caches.
Unlike the clarity from Intel on its mobile processors, the roadmap for the PowerPC G5 chips, Apple's branding for the PowerPC 970, is missing from IBM and Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola's SPSS chip group). This lack of fresh marketing pitches on the topic is often a portent of forthcoming announcements.