The story you are about to read might be true or it might be something I am totally making up. You’ll need o decide.

Today I saw the Intel version of OS X running on a vanilla Dell Optiplex GX280. Not only did everything that was thrown at it work except for iChatAV, but the performance really caught me off guard.

I have a 15″ G4 PowerBook running at 1.25GHz with 1GB of RAM. I also have a Mac Mini running at 1.45GHz with 512MB of RAM. I have always been happy with the performance of my PowerBook and Mini. Very happy. But every single thing that was done on the Mactel machine absolutely blew the doors off of my machines. Everything just jumped on to the screen when clicked or selected.

When Steve Jobs announced that there had been a group of people doing parallel development on the Intel processor I was a little skeptical. Now that I have seen the Mactel version in action I can honestly say that Steve must have been telling us the truth because this version is spot on exact to the PowerPC version. That doesn’t just happen overnight.

Will I morn for the G4/G5? Sure. In a lot of ways I believe it is a better processor than the Intel chips. I think AMD has the edge right now in the x86 world though. One thing is for sure, I am now positive that I will jump on an Intel based PowerBook when one is released. The speed is just too significant to deny.