OSX on Itanium?

At least in the near term I would expect the servers to get Xeon processors. The current tools aren't providing an Itanic target, so all the third party software would end up being emulated x86 or PowerPC code. It might be a hard sell to get developers on board with supporting three architectures at once too.

 

No

 

I would see the servers keeping their PPC chips for a long time...it wouldn't make sense to switch over to Intel. The G5 offers plenty of power for server applications for a great price.

 

That, and the Apple-IBM chip contract runs out near the end of 2006 anyway.

 

There's no way that Apple will keep the Xserves G5 powered - its just way too much power consumption when compared to the P-M line of chips. Rack mount servers are often rack mounted with lots of other rack mount servers. To you or me you won't really be able to tell much of a difference in your electricity bill if you've been using a G5 PowerMac or an x86 P-M PowerMac. However if you have just one whole rack of P-M X-Serves, you'll notice one hell of a difference in electricity bills. Big bucks companies want this. Trust me, its important.

 

Around the time Apple say they are moving the high end machines to Intel, Intel should have the Conroe and Woodcrest CPUs available, both are 64 bit dual core topping out at 2.5 GHz per core, both are based on Pentium-M technology and you can think of the Woodcrest as the Xeon version. Either of these would make a lot more sense than the Itanium 2 which if you actually look at the price isn't an affordable option at all.

 

I think it's very unlikely that Macs will ever use Itanium chips. Since the dawn of the G5, chips like the Itanium and Sparc have really been ridiculously overpriced wastes of money. Also, the Itanium technically isn't x86, so I don't even know if OSX could run on it without special work being done on Apple's part.

 

Itanium Pros:
Very fast

Itanium Cons:
Very expensive for all current implementations
Incompatible with x86 or PowerPC (completely unrelated instruction set, although there is a pretty decent emulator)

Overall, I'd say it's Not Gonna Happen. It'd be pretty cool (2700 specfp... mmmm....), but it just doesn't seem practical. Intel would have to start selling them at very drastically reduced prices for it to even begin to be practical (like knocking >$1000 off the price of each chip).

<edit> I suppose I should amend this to say that I think it's certainly possible for the future... but not for the near future. Intel won't be able to kill off x86 for quite a while; possibly the only way they could do it is if IA-64 (Itanium) gets enough of a performance advantage that it could emulate x86 at close to native speeds, AND gets price parity with x86. I believe it can currently emulate around a 1.5GHz Xeon, which is not bad, but not great. </edit>