MacRumors.com

This Reuters story revives one of the oldest Mac rumors around... Apple switching to Intel?

The rumor originated at The Wall Street Journal:

The report, citing two industry executives with knowledge of recent discussions between the companies, said Apple will agree to use Intel chips.

Apple has seriously considered switching to Intel at least twice in its history. One previous project code-named Star Trek actually ported Mac OS 7 to Intel based hardware in 1992. Most recently, internal IBM documents noted that Apple considered switching to Intel but felt it would cause too much trouble:

Apple believed that using Intel would deeply affect its current customer base. Using an Intel architecture might solve Apple's short-term megahertz dilemma, but customers would have to suffer through a slow transition from PowerPC over the long term.

Such a switch would traditionally require recompilation of applications, but Page 2 rumors have suggested the use of Transitive Technologies' software which claims to "dynamically translate and accelerate binaries" up to 80% performance matching, as well as unconfirmed reports of x86 seeds of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).