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Comment by floatboth | Hacker News Reader

Oh, so still not confirmed officially.

Why would AMD agree to this? This would massively eat into Raven Ridge laptop sales.

Probably next Apple release cycle is the main motivation, but who knows?

I'm actually quite surprised Apple didn't go with Ryzen/Threadripper already in their Mac Pros, considering what a huge multi-thousand dollar margins that would have offered them (at least if they went with the same absurd prices as the Xeon Mac Pros). And they could've still claimed a significant boost for their Mac Pro performance compared to the old Intel chip in the last generation.

They could've also replaced all of their dual-core laptops with quad-core Ryzen APUs for about 2-2.5x increase in both CPU multi-thread performance and GPU performance. And I don't think it would've cost them more, or not significantly more at least. AMD seems to price their cores at 50-60% of Intel's cores.

I would guess that Apple/Intel have a multi-year contract in place. Apple probably has a legal obligation to keep using Intel for the next couple years. There are many benefits that to both sides that can be put into a contract - different for each case.

Pricing and Volume most likely.

Isn't thickness and therefore heat dissipation and power consumption paramount in Apple's laptop line? AMD struggles in all those areas as far as I know.

AMD's latest chips and APUs are more efficient than Intel's. You should do a hard reset on everything you know about AMD's chips that is older than a year.

I thought Ryzen was finally catching up in those areas? They certainly seem to be competitive in the desktop space.

I would have liked to see that too but I assume one of the reasons can be porting the BIOS/UEFI and Chipset Drivers, and keep the quality the same as the one that they have already. AMD has done good on the hardware but they are not famous for being stable on the driver and software side.

Considering how successful in the laptop space AMD has been for the last... decade, I don't think they have much market share to lose here.

Laptops have always been the most profound demonstration of Intels monopoly because they are tightly integrated products that end users never get to customize deeply. So its really easy for Intel to just "persuade" notebook vendors to only put AMD chips in garbage models, if at all.

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