There's a lot of BS in this thread
It would definitely be great if Macs got a new, better PowerPC chip, but the Intel-bashing in this thread is ridiculous. A few points:
1) As someone else already pointed out, Intel's MHZ advantage isn't just a creation of marketing, it was a design decision. They purposely decided to make a chip that was not very efficient but upon which it would be easy to increase the clock speed, believing that was the right decision long run. Now, so far that hasn't been the right decision - the AMD beats the Intel in price to performance. BUT, the P4 is as fast as the AMDs - it's just more expensive too. And long run, it is possible that it will be the right decision. At the very least, it is silly to say that the P4 is a bad chip - it is a very, very fast chip, it is just overpriced.
2) It's total bull**** to say "I hate the MHz myth! PC users are so dumb" and then turn around and say "Macs will kick PC ass next year because they will have 64 bit chips." There is nothing automatically better about a 64 bit chip. I could build a ****ty 64 bit chip just like I could build a chip that runs at 10GHz but is still slow. It's not even clear why Macs would need a 64 bit chip. All current 64 bit chips are aimed at very high-end markets - data warehousing and massive data processing primary. Macs don't fit that market.
3) The New York Times article claiming that Itanium (linked by Hawthorne) was so blatantly wrong that it was painful to read it. The whole premise that because Google doesn't buy Itaniums means that the Itanium is a failure is total garbage. Anyone who knows anything about how Google works knows that the idea behind Google is that instead of having a few supercomputers, they have decided to buy thousands of very cheap PCs running Linux. Google found that this was much cheaper than buying a few expensive, powerful computers.
4) This, by the way, is why agreenster shouldn't get his hopes too high about future Macs taking over rendering farms for 3d graphics. Yes, SGI used to be the **** when it came to rendering farms. But nowadays more and more companies are going Google's route - buying lots of cheap PCs, and rolling their own Linux distro and software. It's possible that the XServe can make inroads into this market, but it will be tough because price/performance is the key metric. Macs are losing the price/performance war right now.
5) The Itanium 1 was no good, but Intel made it clear that it was practically a "beta test" - for people who wanted to get a head start on learning to program and creating hardware around the Itanium. The Itanium 2 (McKinley) has been very well received, on the other hand - its SpecFP and SpecINT scores were very, very respectable. And this is just revision two. New chips take a while to gain entrance into the high-end market. For example, AMD has had a hard time getting corporations to buy their chips, just because they don't have the right "rep" in corporate circles. Well, the task is even tougher for a new high-end server chip, because no one's going to just replace their existing million dollar Power4 investment with Itaniums. So Itanium's weak showing so far doesn't mean that the Itanium is a failure. It just means that Intel needs to keep pushing the technology. But Intel has a lot of money, and PA-RISC and Alpha are being put out to pasture. It'll be Sparc, Opteron, Itanium and Power 4 competing for the 64 bit crown. If I were a betting man, I'd bet on Itanium winning this war long run - just because it's hard to bet against Intel's coffers. They have a lot more money than Sun and AMD, and while IBM has the money to push Power chips, it doesn't have quite the incentive as Intel does, since IBM can make money selling Itanium systems, whereas Intel can't make money selling Power systems.
