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I was thinking about this yesterday as well. I know Apple bought their own processors for the iPhone. I'm not sure they'd run their desktops off an apple A4 chip - but I mean - look at AMD. Market cap is $5 billion. Apple has $50 billion in cash.

Apple could buy them and REALLY control the computer, end-to-end.

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This is not as easy as it sounds. AMD will loose it's x86 license if acquired without Intel permission. Designing an efficient parser for a different instruction set can take years.

I'm pretty sure that the patent situation between AMD and Intel is one of mutually assured destruction, given that AMD created the 64-bit extensions to x86. Intel could complain a lot and file some lawsuits, but if they seriously tried to block the acquisition of AMD, they would be putting their whole patent portfolio at risk and opening themselves up to billions of dollars of punitive fines from antitrust regulators.

Not really: "However, the agreement[43] provides that if one party breaches the agreement it loses all rights to the other party's technology while the other party receives perpetual rights to all licensed technology."

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/X86-64

http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.com/operations/ip/802.htm...

That sentence doesn't seem to be supported by the citation as redacted and posted online, or I just can't find the relevant language. It looks to me like the list of sections that survive the termination of the agreement doesn't include section 3, which is the actual cross-licensing section. I'm not a lawyer, though, so please point me to the section that has that effect.

Even if the agreement does stipulate that AMD's patent license to Intel becomes perpetual upon termination due to change of control, I really doubt that it is legal in the US, since it basically means that a third party can't buy their way in to the market unless they bribe both AMD and Intel to weaken the duopoly. That would seem to amount to a cartel.

Exactly. Both Intel and AMD require licenses from the other to produce current x86 chips.

I can't see Apple buying AMD; like in the G4/G5 days, they'd just have to get up on stage every year and acknowledge the large performance gap between themselves and Intel and insist that it would be reduced sometime in the upcoming year. (Edit: And as a sibling post points out, this isn't even practicable. Without an x86 license they'd be dead in the water).

On the other hand I could see them buying NVidia and taking control of their GPU woes directly. Intel Integrated graphics aren't going to stop sucking, and OS X isn't going to stop growing its dependency on a real GPU anytime soon.

Given that apple is in a much different place now then it was during the PowerPC days, maybe this isn't such a terrible idea. (And PPC wasn't apple so much as moto/ibm). They're proving it works right now with the A4... so maybe you're right.

That sad, I'd hate to have them go down the sun route, and just get left behind if/once intel gets off their ass.

I don't think Apple has any reason to buy AMD (too much of a bother, they're already busy with their fabless ARM acquisitions, and they're not into big buys), but they sure as hell could "orient" AMD's future decision making, especially when it comes to LV/ULV CPUs and IGPs.

AMD spun off their fab business in mid-2008, so an acquisition of AMD wouldn't put Apple into the fab business.

Why not ship an A4 process along with intel chips? It only costs $10.75 for the A4 v.s. over $100 for the intel chip.

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