An Odd Victory - The Triumph of X86 Architecture

It was the news that everyone dreaded. Apple announced on 6th June 2005 that, by the end of 2006, the company will have transitioned to Intel x86 chips. What happened?
Steve Jobs is known to be a bit moody. His company has been held hostage by the makers of his CPU's. This is the very heart and brain of the computer. First Motorola and then IBM failed to deliver the promised improvements in the chip design. Speed was never really gained, and it appeared as if all PowerPC development has stalled. Meanwhile, the folks at Intel have been steadily moving along with the x86 series chips, most recently the Pentium 4. Speed has been steadily increasing to the point where the 3 gigahertz barrier was passed with ease. This from what is still essentially a 32-bit chip.
The biggest advantage to be gained in CPU development is market share. The more market share you have, the higher your profits and the more money you can drop into R&D. That is exactly what Intel did. They weren't very interested in radical improvements to the architecture. They were more interested in speed and capacity. That philosophy is exactly the reason that the 3 GH speed barrier was broken; don't do anything radical, just keep finding ways to milk out more speed. In the end, this approach has been wildly successful.
IBM, on the other hand, simply didn't sell enough PPC processors to Apple. That has to be the bottom line. The money wasn't there for R&D. Forget all of the promises. They failed to deliver. Besides, IBM will not miss the departure of Apple. They have more than enough business from the growing game computer market, which will far outsell anything Apple can sell.
The move to Intel will, hopefully, be a smooth one. Jobs & company plan on a full year to implement the changes, and during the initial run-up, there will be a new form of "fat" binaries, software that will work on both the PPC and x86 architecture. There are other advantages to be had by the move to Intel, such as the much rumored Mac Tablet; surely, such a beastie will use something along the lines of a Centrino processor.
Still, the transition is a sad one. PowerPC held so much potential. Instead, the spoils of the CPU war go to the old soldier, the one that can trace its lineage back almost directly to the first 8-bit processors. Sometimes, old soldiers don't die. Sometimes, they win.