Tom's Hardware may have shed some light on why Apple made the switch

Many pundits have been confused by Apple's sudden switch to Intel processors, claiming that AMD makes more sense as Apple's new chip supplier from a technology perspective, or that Apple and Intel must be merging in an attempt to dethrone Microsoft (alright, Cringely's the only one saying that). Indeed, looking at Intel's current desktop processor technology, there does not seem to be a compelling technological reason for Apple to move their entire Macintosh product line to Intel chips. But maybe we need to look beyond their "desktop processors" to see what Steve Jobs & Co. were thinking. As this (rather surprising) article on Tom's Hardware Guide reveals, one of Intel's current chips that is based on a pre-Pentium 4 design not only outperforms both Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 FX chips in most applications, but it does so using much less power than either of these heat-sweating behemoths. When you think about this in light of Apple's stated reasons for switching to Intel (Steve Jobs had some vague numbers about "performance per watt"), it begins to look like Apple may have been eyeing Pentium M (Dothan) technology for the new Intel-based Macs. And Intel seems to be heading that way too. The Tom's article concludes with, "Intel's upcoming accelerated 65 nm dual-core processor, [is] code named 'Conroe.' Care to guess upon which architecture this design will be based?" I predict that we'll see Pentium M-based Mac Minis, iBooks, and Powerbooks first, followed by Conroe-based desktops and servers. I'll be very surprised if any Mac ever contains a Pentium 4 (other than Jobs' demo machine and the dev kit Apple is selling to its developers). I, for one, welcome our new mobile processor overlords. UPDATE: Tom's agrees, more or less.