Yeah I posted that before MACs went to Intel that was one of their tests to showcase the MAC CPUs. But enve though MACs use Intel CPUs does not mean they are the same CPUs that PCs use (I don't know if that is true, but just stating the fact it's not necessarily equal).
The specs are just so hard to find.
Yes, Apple uses bog standard Intel CPUs. That's sort of the point. The Mac Pro uses Xeon, though.
MACs, I think, still have proprietary MBs too, right?
That's likely. Quite a few manufacturers do.
And then you have a completely different OS too. I don't have any idea if that would make a diff or not.
That's the most significant difference between a Mac and a PC these days.
It's the OS that manages memory (whether something needs swapping), how to handle I/O, whether you're allowed to poke the hardware more or less directly), ...
The reason quite a few technical people like to run a Unix on their servers isn't that it's "all the same as Windows, just free" (which Unixes often aren't), it's because there are
real, tangible differences in
how they perform.
MacOS X is a "unixy" (or unix-like) OS, which brings some of these differences to the desktop, with a neat and sweet frosting (the GUI).
Whether the differences float your boat is another matter.