Some corrections. NetBurst was not 'cheating' by using a long pipeline to get higher clock speeds. NetBurst was purposely designed to get higher clock speeds t

Some corrections. NetBurst was not 'cheating' by using a long pipeline to get higher clock speeds. NetBurst was purposely designed to get higher clock speeds therefore better performance. Intel thought it would get to 4 ghz, 5 ghz, 6 ghz, and beyond on NetBurst which would theoretically be better than what we have today if it had worked. Obviously it didn't. The Core Duo was not based on NetBurst (i.e. Pentium 4). It was based on the Pentium M which was an improved Pentium 3. The Core Duo and everything that came after it are based on the old P6 architecture that started with the Pentium Pro. Intel's saving grace was going back to the P6 and abandoning NetBurst. Intel had adopted x86_64 on NetBurst and it was worthless. PowerPC can get smaller dies and lower power consumption just fine. In fact most PowerPC chips today are smaller and lower power than the G4 ever was. Motorola makes them all day long for automaters, defense contractors, and network device makers. The problem was Motorola's other customers didn't care about performance. Nobody wanted to run Photoshop on guided missiles. The PPC 970 (i.e. G5) was powerful, but IBM made CPUs for big iron. When a CPU ran hotter than expected it was the mechanical engineer's problem to fix in the enclosure. IBM just didn't need to figure out how to make chips with tight operational constraints. IBM didn't have the expertise to get the PPC 970 to work in a Power Book and IBM didn't have any incentive moving forward to build that expertise. It just so happened that Intel was in the middle of its NetBurst epiphany. NetBurst was bad. Centrino was great. The Core Duo was the future. Now Intel was talking Apple's language. PS. IBM's POWER7 just came out in 2010. The PPC 970 that Apple called the G5 was a low power version of the POWER4.