Did anyone else think it was odd that Intel pretty much kept its mouth shut after Big Steve's superlative-laden G5 demo last week? Its response to Apple's claim to have the fastest personal computer in the world was to point quietly to Dell's published benchmarks for its dual Xeon system, which were substantially higher than Apple's; Apple responded publicly in the form of a detailed explanation to Slashdot of the company's benchmarking practices (courtesy of Greg Joswiak), and then from Intel... nothing. Well, okay, there was that cryptic little thing a day or two later where Intel told MacFixIt to look at a particular Gartner Group statement, but all the statement seemed to say was that Apple wasn't lying: the G5 was "'certainly equal' to the most advanced platform Intel offers." What the... where's the dirty fight? The low blows? The folding chair to the spine?

It could just be that Intel feels it has other benchmark battles to focus on; a recent article in The Register reports that IBM just bested Hewlett-Packard to seize the "world record for transaction processing." IBM's 32-processor POWER4+-based p690 server just knocked HP's best out of the top spot-- and HP's best was a 64-processor Itanium 2-based monster. Which means that an IBM chip (the one on which the G5 is based, incidentally) just beat out Intel's heavy-hitting server processor, despite the 2-to-1 odds. So maybe Intel can't say much against Apple's G5 benchmark results because, well, Apple won, there's no way around it, and maybe if Intel just keeps its yapper shut everyone will forget about it.

Or could Intel be hiding something even more scandalous? Faithful viewer Mike Brendler pointed us towards an article over at The Inquirer which reveals via some very interesting screenshots that Intel's most recent annual report was written and processed on-- get this-- a Mac. Well, whaddaya know about that? And since the G5 chip isn't available in any shipping systems yet, that means that Intel was using at best a G4-- you know, those processors we've all been complaining about being so much slower than Intel's offerings. Evidently Chipzilla realizes something that we always tried to explain to the Windoids but often forgot ourselves: having a super-fast processor doesn't do much good if your interface is the bottleneck.

Does anyone else find it delicious that Intel is using Macs running Motorola processors, while Motorola ditched all of its Macs a few years back to standardize on Intel iron? It's like some twisted high-tech Gift of the Magi thing going on. No? Okay, whatever.