I'm not really a Wintel PC guy anymore, although I do still have the Windows box that was my primary computer until I started working at OSAF. But I have a houseful of Intel/AMD hardware running Linux, so I try to keep up with happening in the x86 hardware world. This week is the Intel Developer Forum, where Intel trots out their plans for their next round of products. There's lots there, but there is one set of announcements/previews in particular that just has me depressed.

Intel is talking about a mobile processor called Yonah, which will probably ship in machines in Q1 2006. This is a dual-core and hyperthreaded version of their Pentium-M mobile processor, which appears in Centrino branded notebooks along with an Intel wireless radio. And they are going use as much power as today's Pentium-M's or possibly even a little less. Today's Centrino based machines are already seriously fast (maybe not quite as fast as the Shuttle G5, but close enough). So I'm imagining a Q1 2006 Thinkpad T4x that has some serious compute power.

Meanwhile, the Powerbook G5 is nowhere in sight, which means maybe it ships by the end of the year. Apple is already talking about how hard it is to keep the thing cool, which also means short battery life (today's Centrinos are getting like 5 hours). I know that as a Mac head, I'm supposed to be drooling into my beer over the prospect of a single core, hot-running, short battery life Powerbook G5, but Bainbridge Island is pretty far away from the Jobsian reality distortion field, so I just can't get excited. If you ask me, IBM and Apple (and maybe Motorola) have some serious work to do in the high end mobile space. Intel says mobile is the future and we get stuff like Yonah. Steve declares a year of the laptop (2003), and we get to fall behind.

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OS X is a great OS, but decent performance is a usability feature too. And since I got the Shuttle, I find myself sending many compute intensive task over there. I sure hope that those rumors about Apple keeping an x86 version of OS X running side by side with PowerPC are true. In my mind, the perfect mobile platform would be OS X for x86 running on an IBM T-Series (at least until/unless Lenovo ruins them). Oh, and yes, I'd be willing to pay for it. My time is worth money, and the time savings of fast hardware and a good OS would be worth a handsome investment.
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