Intel Inside: Great News!

WWDC was very cool. One of the best features was the availability of Intel macs in the labs to test and compile code. I brought the Path Finder source on an external firewire disk, mounted it on one of the Intel macs and compiled everything without any problems. The switch is going to be absolutely painless.

Apple isn’t releasing any specs on these new Intel Macs, but from my experience they were very fast and extremely quiet. The machines in the lab were single processor Pentiums running at 3.6ghz (If I remember correctly). They had hyperthreading, so it acted like a dual processor. I didn’t take any official timing tests, but it seemed faster than my dual 2.5 G5, and the fan never rose above a whisper. My G5 fans kick in to high speed every-time I hit the build command in XCode, so the silence was almost disturbing. I wasn’t use to the quiet!!

Another thing that was noteworthy. The Intel Mac towers are almost empty inside except for the motherboard and a tiny heatsink. No huge heatsinks like on the G5s. Hopefully this means Apple will be able to shrink the size of the towers, or add more processors.

So, look forward to the new Intel Macs, they are going to rule.