Apple in advance discussions to adopt AMD chips | Hacker News Reader

Apple in advance discussions to adopt AMD chips

appleinsider.com

29 pointsssp13 comments

It seems to make sense for Apple to talk to alternative suppliers, if only to keep Intel on their toes.

I wonder though, whether there are any places in Apple's lineup where AMD chips are a better fit than Intel. I can't really think of any.

Indeed, AMD's current selection of chips seems to be significantly less energy efficient than Intel's, so the speculation about notebook chips strikes me as extremely odd. Things are a little different at the high end - I think an Opteron-based Mac Pro might be realistic. The new 12-core Opterons are more energy efficient than the latest 8-core Xeons, and roughly equally fast.

But then, if the top brass are negotiating now, real products are probably at least a year away, if not more, so who knows.

Many reasons:

* Intel vs nVidia legal battles have hurt Apple for sure.

* Delays in new mobile chips.

* Price

* Apple hoped Larrabee would be a hit and introduced Grand Central Dispatch etc. only to have Intel cancel it. Did Intel communicate early enough that Larrabee was not going to be feasible?

* nVidia is not doing very well in the graphics department with their new Fermi parts being power hungry and slow compared to AMD/ATI's chips.

Hasn't Intel just delayed Larrabee as a graphics solution, not officially given up on it? I.e. the current parts missed their marketing window, so they're only useful in the HPC market, but they hope to do better with later ones.

I presume they aren't interested in anything that AMD is selling right now, but rather Llano, AMDs APU (CPU and graphics on the same die) which has had test silicon going out to partners recently.

This leak is merely a public negotiating tactic to get a better deal from Intel. I doubt they'd drop Intel for AMD even if this generation's chips are faster/better.

I'd like to see Apple move to POWER7 in Xserves. Then we'd really be cooking with gas. The only issue would be how happy IBM would be with a(nother) competitor Unix.

Steve Jobs holds a grudge though, so I think it's unlikely they'll use IBM chips again after the 3GHZ G5 failure.

From a marketing perspective, you have to wonder what sort of dilution effect this would have on the Apple brand. Apple is (generally) known for producing high quality products with plenty of power underneath the hood. The introduction of cheaper, slower performing chips to create a sub-tier of macbooks, etc., doesn't really gel with the current Apple brand image.

Apple is already running C2D on the MacBookPro (13 inch) and iMac (all but the top tier 27 inch).

They could find great replacements in AMD's line-up for a lot less. Nothing as good as an i7, and I've heard that TPD is a bit high, but AMD chips are fine if you don't want bleeding edge performance.

But that's the problem - most Apple consumers don't need bleeding edge performance, but the brand is known for having high quality components in their products. Perhaps AMD could find a socket in the Mac Mini, which is already positioned as a low-cost starter machine.

If anything, the talks concern GPUs, NOT CPUs.

However much I dislike Intel, and however much I like AMD, the fact is that today AMD just cannot compare to Intel in the mobile segment in terms of power consumption and heat dissipation. There is just no way that Apple would make this kind of "switch" for their desktops or laptops. The closest plausible scenario would be a switch for their XServe segment, to bring more cores to them at a lower cost.

I am 100% certain that the next time Apple makes a brand/manufacturer switch of CPU in their desktop/laptop segment, you will see ARM written all over it.

That's going to depend a lot on what AMD have in their combined chip road map.

Who apart from AMD could offer a single chip with laptop-class performance? Nvidia lack a CPU and Intel's graphics are not in the top tier (yet).

If they could save 15% of their power budget for the CPU _and_ the graphics card by putting it all on one chip then that might be something that would work, even though a direct CPU to CPU comparison wouldn't.

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