The things many Mac users seem to either forget or ignore is, many popular pieces of software were developed for YEARS on the Intel processor, because they were writing them for Windows. By contrast, the G5 PPC was a "special case" people had to learn to develop for independently of the Intel architecture.
I'm afraid I must totally and utterly disagree. To most software developers these days, "
the Iron" is totally irrelevant. Compilers and IDEs make the process of constructing actual instruction sequences transparent and invisible to the average application programmer. They only need to invoke the correct system calls and
APIs, and from that perspective, the Apple/OSX world is just as alien compared to Windows win32/win64 as it ever was. The switch to Intel has made absolutely no difference to the average programmer's learning curve: just consider how easy it is to compile hybrid ("
Universal")
PPC/
x86 applications in
Xcode.
On a technical note, the optimisation of algorithms relies heavily on graph-theoretic concepts ("
discrete topology") and is handled by the a higher-level structure of the optimising compiler than the low-level formulation of assembler code sequences. The delay in releasing Intel-
optimised (as opposed to Intel-
compatible) versions of popular software is related to the complexities of producing these optimal path predictors, not to actual sequential programming tasks. As for
Office, the delay was due to commercial greed ("Hey, here's an opportunity to make Intel users pay for decent performance!") and sloppy programming (archaic architecture-dependent coding).
And as a final note, writing raw assembler code for a
RISC architecture such as the
PowerPC is a far more satisfying and elegant experience than hard-coding illogical, idiosyncratic, legacy-ridden
x86 code. The
G5's
AltiVec/
VXD/
Velocity Engine SIMD instructions allow a level of performance not easily attained by even the most recent
SSE4 extensions courtesy of Intel. The processor is perfectly balanced and the HyperTransport bus allows you to feed data into the cores at exactly the right rate. To coin a metaphor, it's like when a 1980s aspirated engine takes off next to your turbo and makes you feel like a fool. It just isn't a fair comparison. That every "serious" supercomputer (as opposed to crappy "Linux-cluster"/Beowulf) is a RISC machine is an indicator of this.
To summarise: OSX on
x86 is just as alien to
Wintel programmers as OSX on
PPC is/was, and
PowerPC is still the superior
architecture, even though it's been abandoned as a matter of economic pragmatism.
Please, no more of this unreasoned dogma. If you're not a programmer, don't pretend to be one.
