Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…Indeed, the usual hardware developer notes which used to come out a few weeks after a new PowerPC Mac was released are still absent for all Intel Macs – not that these notes ever went into chip-level detail of any Apple hardware.

The developer note for the Intel iMacs just came out (along with a few others). There are some interesting tidbits – for instance, EFI Flash memory size is 2 megabytes – but no mention of the TPM chip, as expected. Also, all the recent notes are very terse and go into less detail, even for PowerPC machines…

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…But the main advantage is that the OSes for the virtual machines can be simplified. All the tricky little kexts and drivers you see on current PowerPC Macs will be substituted by one or two “generic” versions which will interface to the virtual peripherals simulated by the hypervisor, and the actual machine’s peripheral drivers will be in EFI or on the cards themselves.

One variation of this idea would be for Apple to sit down with game developers and define a basic Intel VM; just enough to see a drive partition, input devices and the video card. This would make porting very easy, as most games try to take over as much of the machine as possible anyway, and you’d have optimum performance.