Peering inside the aluminum ball: Woodcrest, Conroe, and the “pro” Macs

The dawn of a new tower

As we draw ever closer to Macworld Boston the Worldwide Developers Conference, speculation is heating up as to what we'll see hardware-wise once Steve Jobs has finished unveiling the wonders of Leopard. Reading the entrails of the sacrificial dogcow is a bit easier these days, now that Apple uses Intel CPUs and Intel lays out its processor roadmap months—if not years—in advance.

With that in mind, it would seem easy to look at what Intel has in store and then extrapolate that to Apple's pro-consumer/desktop-portable matrix. It was a simple matter with Yonah, the CPU now known as the Core Duo (and Core Solo). It's a 32-bit CPU targeted at portables, so the MacBook and MacBook Pro were naturals for the Core Duo. The Mac mini is a little guy with the need for a cool-running processor, so again, the Core Duo was a perfect fit.

Although the iMac started the Intel Mac parade at Macworld San Francisco in January, Yonah wasn't such a clear-cut choice. If it wasn't for the fact that Apple wanted to have its most recognizable computer leading the charge into x86 territory, the iMac could have waited for a more desktop-centric processor, like Conroe (the Core 2 Duo). As it stands, Apple decided to put all of its chips in Yonah's basket for the first half-year of its post-Power PC life. But there is still one part of the product matrix stuck in Power PC: the pro desktops. (Yes, the Xserve is still running a PowerPC 970, but it's going to get Intel's server CPU, Woodcrest.)

The final piece of the transition

We're just over a year past the anniversary of Jobs' momentous announcement of Apple's third major architecture transition in its 30-year history (the first being the switch from the MOS Technology 6502 to the Motorola 680x0, and the more recent and better-known transition from Motorola's 680x0 CPUs to Power PC). The whys and wherefores of Apple's decision to switch to Intel have been debated ad nauseam, so let's not get into it again here. The fact is that Apple is poised to beat its self-imposed two-year deadline for a full makeover of its product lineup by about 10 months. All that's left is the towers.

During a lunch last week with some Ars staffers, the topic of Apple's switch came up, and in particular, which CPU the pro desktop would have. Later on, as we discussed Tanya Klowden's post on the Mac Pros in Infinite Loop, we started thinking about the design choices Apple will be making, along with what they do and do not want their customers to be able to do with their machines.

There are a couple of ways to approach the question of what Apple's upcoming pro desktops might look like. The first is to look at Intel's CPU lineup and see what fits logically and where. The second is understanding what Apple has done historically with its machines and try and extrapolate that to an all-new architecture.

Let's do both.

Download the PDF
(This feature for Premier subscribers only.)