BAPCo (Business Applications Performance Consortium) recently announced that Apple Computer has joined its membership. The consortium provides industry-standard Windows benchmarking and includes members such as AMD, Intel, nVidia, ATI, and Microsoft. BAPCo's efforts led to the creation of the SYSmark 2004SE and MobileMark benchmark suites used for testing PCs, and the WEBmark webserver test.

This move has led to speculation that Apple will soon be offering official support for Windows virtualization or emulation.

From Gearlog:

This is significant because it means that Apple has now committed to Windows-based performance testing, and it will influence industry-standard testing methodologies going forward, possibly including Mac OS X testing.  We speculate that Apple will now develop Windows drivers for Intel Macs like the iMac, Mac mini and MacBook Pro with Intel Core Duo processors.  You will probably still need to buy your own copy of Windows XP (or Vista), but this is exciting stuff.

We've seen rumors that Apple will include virtualization technology in Mac Os X 10.5 (Leopard), but benchmarks like SYSmark and MobileMark don't work well in virtualized environments since they use ultilities that call low level processes (like anti-virus).  This bodes well for native Windows support on Macs in the future.

Extreme Tech: Apple Joins BAPCo

Gearlog: OS X Virtualization, Windows Support

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