Apple's announcement that it will abandon PowerPC and build future Mac OSX machines on Intel chips has raised a few eyebrows. How compatible will this Intel Mac hardware be with the well established PC platform? What about Windows/Mac software portability? Should Borland create a Delphi for the Intel Mac?

Apple's G4 and G5 Macs are powerful 64 bit PPC systems. I seriously doubt that Apple is in any way interested in 32 bit Intel x86. Apple needs 64 bit to maintain parity. AMD64 / Intel x64 is the only x86 related chipset that makes sense.

So is this Intel Mac really so similar to existing x86 systems that it is more within striking distance for Delphi than the PPC Mac? Essentially, no. The Mac is just as far from the current Delphi target architectures as it was prior to this Intel Mac announcement. Delphi's current target architectures are 32 bit x86 and .NET IL. I expect this Intel Mac will be x64. Kylix targets Linux, but Linux is very different from the Unix flavor behind OSX.

Delphi for this Apple / Intel Mac would require as much work as any other new platform. New codegen, new linker, new language / RTL binding to the OS, etc. It's still a possibility, but no closer than it was before.

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http://blogs.borland.com/dcc/archive/2005/06/08/5229.aspx