The official press release from the horse's mouth is here. I have to say that this is very very sad news. Of all the architectures out there Apple, for some unkown reason, has decided to go with the worst cpu ever designed. The G5 processor is low power consuming, very well designed, 64bit CPU. And now they switch to a horribly boated, power hungry, register starved piece of junk. Why? Why in the world is this happening? The only reason IA-32 is still alive is because there's so much closed source software out there that wasting transistors on compatibility with a brain dead ISA is justified. If we lived in a world were free software was the norm, only a recompile would be needed, and the joke that is known as Pentium4 would have never been created. AMD's AMD64 patch surely looks nice, but I'd love to see a version that only did 64bit, not 32/16 legacy support. But do you know what's funny here? Microsoft's Xbox 360 uses PPC processors, so does the PS3. The republic has lost and the new Intel Empire has begun. Goodbye OS X. Hopefully NetBSD will keep running on the PPC based Mac hardware for years.

[Edit] How are they going to avoid the Osborne effect? Who's going to buy a G5 now that planned obsolescence for the PPC systems has been announced? OTOH, this might lower the price of G4s quite a bit.