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Contrary to the recent rumors that Apple would drop PowerPC architecture support with its newest update to OS X, a tipster (and possible Apple insider) was able to acquire the latest build of the soon to be released update of Mac OS X 10.6, and found some evidence that Apple might actually be keeping the chip alive.

The tipster, who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, found a WWDC seed release labeled 10.6. After going through it for a while, he found the following information:

• Work has definitely been done on PPC-native drivers, which means that PPC is unlikely to be dropped.
• A number of drivers didn’t load on a Core 2 Duo MacBook, because it was using a 64-bit kernel and the drivers were only 32. The kernel was not only 64-bit though.
• “uname -a” reports: Darwin localhost 10.0.0d1 Darwin Kernel Version 10.0.0d1: Thu May XX XX:XX:XX XDT 2008; root:xnu-1286~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
• Googling that kernel reveals that there might actually be SnowLeopard releases out in the wild already, processing Rosetta@Home protein folding clients.

If the tip happens to be true, then it looks like Apple’s not exactly ready to let go of its PowerPC chips and hand over chip building to a third party. Perhaps we’ll have to wait for a few more OS X builds before Apple creates a completely Intel-only version of Mac OS X. Via [Gizmodo]