Hey, seeing as things are so quiet around here today, why not take some time out from fretting about the PowerPC's apparent slippage in the chip performance race and give thanks that we Mac users aren't staking the future of our computing platform on Intel's latest processor, the Itanium 2? If you happen to follow such stuff, you may recall that last year the massively-hyped original 64-bit Itanium finally belly-flopped onto the scene four years late and with performance so lackluster it prompted from the tech crowd the Yawn Heard 'Round The World. Gee, remember when Apple promised an Itanium (then Merced) version of Mac OS X (then Rhapsody)? We don't hear too many people complaining about that project quietly fizzling out...

Well, despite the original Itanium's disappointing debut, Intel's looking to take another stab at it; according to a New York Times article pointed out to us by faithful viewer Jason Bunston, the Itanium 2 was designed to address those performance issues-- by packing 221 million transistors into the chip. The result? A single processor with heaps of performance-- and a power dissipation of a knee-buckling 130 watts, which the Times describes as "enough to fry the proverbial egg." (For comparison's sake, a 1 GHz G4 has a maximum power dissipation of 30 watts, and it's typically shedding more like 21.3.)

"Enough to fry the proverbial egg"? Aw, c'mon... even an Athlon XP 1500+ (touted for its low power consumption, relatively speaking) runs hot enough to fry an egg, as has been proven and painstakingly documented in the past. We strongly suspect that, spitting out 130 watts, an Itanium 2 would vaporize any chicken ovum brought within three feet of its blast-furnace heat-- unless said egg issued forth from a Kryptonian chicken who gained super powers from exposure to Earth's yellow sun. And really, what are the odds?

Now, we really haven't heard enough about the rumored IBM-designed GPUL chip to be able to compare its power consumption to that of the Itanium 2, but we'd bet the farm (and all Kryptonian chickens thereon) that GPUL won't even come close to throwing off 130 watts. Seriously, if Intel keeps on this path, in ten years Macs will be running PowerPCs that are cooled by something as pedestrian as, say, a fan, while a typical Wintel server will need a piped water system, a self-contained refrigeration unit, and a small contained black hole to funnel the heat away from the Itanium 5 cranking away at its core. And we can't wait to see what the laptops are going to look like...