San Francisco (CA) - One day after the announcement of the first Intel-based Apple computers, Intel follows up on its new relationship with Apple: The company and released software that is designed to help Apple developers to create multi-threaded applications for the Core Duo processor.
The developer suite includes beta versions of the Intel Fortran Compiler, Intel C++ Compiler, Intel Math Kernel Library and Intel(R) Integrated Performance Primitives are available now. Intel hinted that developers of Apple software will need those tools to "maximize application performance" and reach the performance improvements Apple promised yesterday.
It is unclear at this time how many native Intel-applications are actually available for the Intel-Macs announced yesterday. The new system will need native applications to achieve the performance gain Steve Jobs promises. While the new computers also run traditional Apple code, software needs to be translated using Apple's Rosetta technology - a process which is estimated to eat up the performance gain the Core Duo processor delivers.
So far, Apple has only confirmed x86 multithreaded code for Mac OS X 10.4.4 and applications such as Mail, Quicktime, the Safari browser as well as iCal, iChat, iWork, iLife 06, Front Row and Photo Booth. Third party x86-ready software appears to be very rare at this time. Even Microsoft does not have a recompiled Office suite for the new platform available; however, the company confirmed that it will continue to develop applications for Apple computers at least for another five years.
