Forget Pat O’Brien. The big defection story this morning could be that Apple is abandoning the PowerPC chip… and moving to Intel.

This is one of those stories that has popped up as a hot rumour just about every year for a decade or so, and the first few times I heard it this year I rolled my eyes. But now it’s being carried not as rumour, but confirmed fact by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and CNet.

I’ll know in a few minutes, because the announcement is due to be made in Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote address to Apple’s World Wide Developers’ Conference. The show begins at 10 a.m. Pacific; the flurry of outraged comments – either at the mistaken news stories or at the news that we’re embracing the same chip maker as (gasp!) Microsoft! – will begin shortly afterward.

Update 2: And the word is… it’s true.

By the way, the MacRumors solution I refer to below worked, but only to a point. Eventually, even that “much smaller file” was impossible to load, presumably because the traffic on the site was so high.

Update 1: Apple has a huge following online, including a slew of sites that report news and rumours about the platform. These sites get hammered with visitors on a day like today, when big news is expected.

Traditionally, as Jobs’ delivers his speech, the sites add information minute-by-minute to a single page; visitors reload the page constantly to see the latest. The result is that the load on the sites’ web servers, already much larger than normal, is multiplied.

MacRumors.com has responded with a solution that looks kind of cool. Instead of having visitors reload the page, they use a little code to add information incrementally to a much smaller file. Your browser looks at that file every minute, and adds it to the web page you’re viewing. In theory, that should relieve a lot of the pressure on their server.

Find out more here.