Apple joins Windows-benchmarking group?
GearLog reported on Wednesday that Apple has joined Bapco, an industry consortium that develops benchmarks for comparing PC performance. Bapco, short for Business Application Performance Corporation, counts Microsoft, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and CNET Networks (publisher of News.com) among its members.
A representative of Bapco said all inquiries regarding the consortium and Apple had to be directed through an Apple representative, who did not return a phone call and an e-mail Wednesday morning seeking confirmation.
The report set off usual speculation about Apple's motives. Some fear that Apple might dump the Macintosh operating system in favor of Windows, while more level-headed commentators argue that Apple is simply looking to compare the performance of Mac OS X applications on Intel's x86 chips against the performance of Windows applications on chips from Intel and AMD.
Another theory considers that with Intel's built-in support for virtualization technology, Apple wants to build Macs that will boot applications written for both Windows and Mac OS Leopard, which rumors say will include support for virtualization when it is unveiled later this year.
Bapco's benchmarks, such as MobileMark and Sysmark, are supposed to evaluate the performance of business applications. Benchmarking is a tricky business, as chip and system vendors spend millions to tweak their systems to run better than the competition on influential benchmarks such as SPEC, short for Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
