Folks, we know that technically it's (sort of) Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, but we figured we'd give it a rest this week. It gets a little fatiguing engaging in all this mean-spirited defamation week in and week out, you know? Besides, badmouthing Microsoft is like enumerating the faults of a giant puppy-stomping, baby-eating robot that's fueled by the burning of human souls and is controlled by Hitler's brain in a glass bubble; perhaps just slightly redundant by nature. So we're not going to bag on Microsoft today.

But hey, did you hear the latest about those dorks over at Intel?

Ha! Just kidding! Intel, like Microsoft, actually has some very smart people working on some really nifty technology. Still, given the fact that Intel seems married to the aging x86 architecture and Apple has spent the last decade betting on PowerPC instead, it's only natural for Mac fans to take an adversarial stance. That's why, when faithful viewer Gary Brandt alerted us to a Reuters article about Intel cancelling a couple of upcoming processors, we couldn't help but grin an evil little grin. (Hey, we're not proud of it or anything. Well, okay, maybe just a little.)

Yes, Intel has formally cancelled development of "Tejas," its fourth-gen Pentium 4, originally slated to hit the market next year, and "Jayhawk," a revision of the company's Xeon chip-- and the reason shouldn't come as any particular surprise to any of you: the things would give off enough heat to melt a block of Velveeta at 100 paces. It's the same old story coming back to bite Intel in the kiester; after years and years of cranking up clock speeds, it's finally hit a point where the heat generated by its chips would incinerate any poor sucker foolish enough to sit down at a system labeled "Intel Inside."

So what's Intel going to do instead, you ask? Well, interestingly enough, with Tejas and Jayhawk on the chopping block, the company is going to deemphasize the whole crank-up-the-clock-speed thing and instead "combine two processors onto a single chip, allowing for lower power usage as well as doubling performance." Apparently this is a bit of a shocker, because analysts weren't originally expecting Intel to go the dual-core route for its mass-market chips for at least another year and a half. "It's kind of a matter of reprioritizing our resources and accelerating development of dual core," said an Intel spokesperson.

Hmmmm. Suppose this has anything to do with the fact that IBM has had dual-core POWER chips for servers for something like three years now, and is rumored to be working on a dual-core PowerPC G5 for desktop Macs scheduled for release sometime next year? After all, as things stand today, the G5 is arguably on par with or faster than Intel's desktop offerings; could it be that Intel didn't much care for the idea of a dual-core G5 wiping the floor with its Tejas Pentium 4? It's just speculation, mind you, but you just gotta love the timing. It couldn't possibly be a coincidence, could it?

Well, uh, okay, sure, it could. But isn't it a lot more satisfying to assume that it couldn't?