you guys should go check out ARStechnica.com/ we have gone over all this stuff many, many times.
as a quicl note, it is rumored that the xBox2 will have three 970's in it. However, given a Wattage rating of 27 @2Ghz, even on the 90nm process, that isn't going to happen. The San Jose news article which first mentioned that idea may have gotten the notion of having the north and south brige chips integrated in the main CPU system as a "three ship system".
Microsoft has confirmed that they will be using a PPC Chip in the xbox2, but there has been no confirmation on what chip. the 970 is a likely canidate, though given the xbox's time frame, it may even end up being a 980, the POWER5 dirivitive chip which is rumored for Apple systems come 2006.
either way, most likely, it will be a one chip system for the simple reason that coding for multi-chip systems is difficult, esp for games. This is one of the main reasons that the Sega Saturn died a quick death. When playing a game, you don't need to thread things - you have on application, one interface, one rendering engine...having more procs adds power, but significanly hinders dev time.
OSX is great for me because I can do all the things I need on one system: play Medal of Honor, browse windows networks, edit video and photos in FCE and Photoshop respectively. And then I can take my ibook to work, and use gcc to compile C code I wrote in vi, then compile the same code on a heafty server running Linux with the same tools and the same options.
And it doesn't randomly loose track of it's main HD partition like my roomate's Sony XP machine. It randomly decided that it couldn't find the C: drive- after two days of paid computer professionsals fighting with it, he re-formatted, and lost about half his data.
I use OSX for a reason. or 20. They have their own problems, too (like the ibook logic board failures which have been an issue for a while, though Apple is now fixing, free of charge, any iBooks with logic board problems made in the past 2 years). I have faired better in the past with apple systems, and the design of the UI allows me to work more efficiently. Better multi-tasking ability with a non-MDI interface such as many windows applications have.
edit: and it is not a marketing lie when people say that the PPC ISA was designed to run both 32 ans 64 bit instructions. If fact, the PPC ISA *is* a 64 bit instruction ISA, which was then designed down to 32 bit for the production of the 601 chips back in the day- for desktop use.
the x86 instruction set was never designed to go 64 bit. Such is the problem right now in the x86 world. Intel has created a PPC-like ISA (ie, its much more of a RISC design over x86) called IA-64, and has produced the Itainium chip series with it. the Itainium I sucked A$$, so they revamped the design, and now a an ok but expensive Itainium 2. At the same time, AMD has created the x86-64 ISA extention to the x86 ISA to run 64 and 32 bit stuff on the same chip. Now that this area has begun to take off, Intel is finnally sucking it up, admitting the large flop that is Itanium, and introducing their own x86-64 chips by the end of this month. THe design was pretty good, the implimentation sucks pretty badly.
SOOOO, soon, in the 64bit area, we'll have the G5 at 2.4 Ghz, an AMD 64 bit chip @2.7Ghz, and and a 64-bit Prescott derivitive at some unknown speed, all running faster than the 32bit Prescott Intel P4's which are out now (given that the P4 is comparible to or slower than the current offerings). Due to the G5's Altivec unit, it will continue to kill on large FPU work, and will be about on par with the AMD offering RE: integer unit math. I have no idea how the Intel offering will perform, we'll have to see how their transition to 90 nanometers continues - it's been difficult for them so far. The new 90nm P4 will actually use *more* watts that then 130nm chips, based on increased e- leakage.
The PPC series still has alot of life left in it's design. the x86 ISA is already being patch to keep it hobbling along. The next gen Pentium 4 will be slower clock-for-clock than the current version, thought it shuld reach 5Ghz by 2006.
PS:
I should be fair, XP is not bad. However, I do progromming on Windows in both 2000 Pro and XP Pro 50 hours a week. I also do scripting, web dev and C coding on a Mac about 20 hours a week, and *then* I do all my relaxing computer work, like photoshop, etc. After all them hours on both Macs and Windows, I can say that both are functional systems. I would rather work on my mac than on my Windows machine, however - I run into many more frustrations with Windows than with OSX, so I use Windows only when I have to.
PPS:
and lastly, even Anand from Anandtech.com is going to try out Macs. and he's a Windows/linux/x86 fanatic.
for those interested, check out the Mac history over at folklore.org
