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Apple Seriously Considered Switching to AMD in 2011 MacBook Air
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Now that could be a possibility mostly if they continue to integrate OS X with IOS where it becomes hard to tell the difference.
Still has intel not deliver a good product for Apple?
Time will tell if Apple goes ARM but AMD would be a folly of the old apple before steve jobs came. I think the executives like Apple as much as the fans.
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And ARM would still be a better fit.
I also used to build and overclock using AMD CPU's. Sadly they have fallen behind Intel quite a lot in the last few years to the point where Intel's offerings are more appealing.
Some very impressive overclocks are being acheived with Intel's Core i-X series of CPU's. AMD was great a few years ago because their CPU's were better than Intel's. They are not currently as good, so why use them?
Go with what works best. If it's Company A's products that offer the best performance, go for those. But don't ever get tied into thinking that Company A's product is so go you should never consider what Company B might have to offer, a few years down the track, Company B (in this case, Intel), might just spring back and offer a better product.
If AMD can get their stuff together and start producing CPU's that perform better than Intel's offerings, then sure, sign me up for an AMD equipped PC/Mac. Until then, I'll stick with Intel as they currently produce a superior product.
Shows how long ago since I built any Windows stuff...If AMD are inferior, then it must be either cost, or lack of supply.
All AMD could provide for Apple if it was ever bought is GPUs. Apple buying AMD would effectively make Intel the only x86 vendor in the world with no competition whatsoever.
The PowerPC days offered more exotic utilities (overclocking, PCIExtreme) but nowadays you hop over the netkas and pray that the next point update of OS X will have some drivers so you can hack something together. Switching jumpers brings some memories back.
You might want to look at xlr8yourmac for some fun.
July 27, 2006
Because that'd be 5 billions wasted! Why would a company that takes pride in making top-notch product be interested in a joke of a company. If it's not for ATI, Apple would have never given AMD the light of day.
And unless Apple continued to produce AMD chips the FTC and DOJ would see this as anti-competitive and not allow it.
The only joke here is making such ignorant statements.
You do realize AMD is the only company giving Intel a run for its money and ultimately pumping out better processors at a lower price. I suppose you'd prefer for them to be wiped out and have only one manufacturer, slow progress and innovation and prices set to whatever Intel liked them to be?
These aren't things Apple's main demographic cares about. You're aware of that, right?
I've messed around with my graphics cards on the Windows side when I had my Mac Pro. I used to own two Nvidia 7300GT cards, which were pretty cool because they were one of the few cards out there that could run in SLI on a non-compliant motherboard, which made things awesome on the mac side. Even better was overclocking both of them with the hacked drivers. And even better was the fact that there were both passive cooled... absolute SILENCE when at full load.
I stopped caring for gaming a while ago though and got myself a MacBook Pro, I'm too busy with work and prefer to watch a good movie when theres downtime.
In either case, Apple is lagging badly in the GPU department.
Agreed that AMD is not a joke of a company, and while they do produce cheaper processors, 'better' is not really accurate.
I would love to see AMD return to their glory days. Athlon XP's used to crap allover Pentium 4's.
Do you have any examples of better processors currently with the exception of Brazos? Llano sacrifices a lot to meet its power requirements and Bulldozer is a trainwreck at best unless you look at the server market.
AMD's gem is the HD 7900/GCN but the less said about the drivers the better.
I made that fairly obvious in my post, the FIRST thing on my list as well. I'll post it again, I don't think you even read my post:
1) Mac users are generally noobs without a clue on how to overclock, swap hard drives, flash roms, etc. Development for such fine-tuning computer savvy people would be limited on the mac side.
I speculated Apple might buy AMD in 2011 in order to gain more control over their product release cycles vs dependency on Intel's development cycles.
Can't blame Apple for trying out things that look good on paper, but deep down they must know only Intel with its own fabs can deliver the quantity and quality that Apple demands of itself and its suppliers. I'm surprised they even entertained the idea of a "fabless" model.
All the more reason for Apple to make an MBA with an A7 in it. That's assuming the A6 will still be 32-bit and the A7 will be the first 64-bit ARM reference processor in 2014 as anticipated. Doesn't help with the here and now but given how much problems Apple has had with Intel, IBM, and Motorola I'm sure they want to control their Mac processors as well. 
At least try to follow the argument. He replied to someone saying the Macbook airs should just be overclocked if performance (gaming in particular) was a concern - and went through and said why this doesn't work well on the mac platform (poor tools), and why nobody really cares about that point anyway.
My point was not about AMD offering better processors. I know theyre slower. The point I was making was that the idea of AMD being out of the picture or throwing them aside is suicide.
Take Canada's broadband internet market. There are really only two major companys that provide internet in Canada; Bell and Rogers. The rest of the smaller ISPs are limited. Canadians pay some of the worlds highest prices for the slowest speeds with the most restricting bandwidth caps. Specifically we pay with Bell;
$34/month
2mbit connection
2gb monthly download limit
Thats a base package. The next best offer is;
$44/month
Max. of 6mbit connection
25gb monthly download limit
The Rogers alternatives are more or less the same because... why should they be better? Both companys can gouge the consumer all they want.
A similar situation would be bound to happen if only Intel was around. I'm sick of hearing this notion that Apple needs to 'win' and buyout everyone else, or that AMD is useless and should just call it quits... or worse, are the ignorant Blackberry haters that want RIM to die.
This kind of behaviour I find insane.
I think we're mixing up the dates for comparison here.
Fact A) Macbook Airs switched to Core iX only in the summer of 2011.
Fact B) Sandy Bridge was released in early 2011 using Intel integrated HD3000 graphics, which is pretty reasonable.
Fact C) The first generation core i was Nehalem and used intel HD graphics, which is awful, and where released in the summer of '10.
Fact D) AMD has better graphics than Intel.
Rumor A) Llano was delayed and had issues shipping Apple parts sometime before Summer '11.
Fact E) AMD only released Llano in early 2011, only a handful of months ahead of SB Core i Mobile processors.
So, it appears to me that Apple was likely considering only once it became apparent Nehalem mobile Core i series chips would not work for the Air. This time point was probably well before the actually shipping of 1st gen Core i series chips. So probably maybe early 2010. Then AMD blew it. They lost that window of time, and where never being considered by Apple once Sandy Bridge was on the horizon.
So.... while Llano has been competing with Sandy Bridge for over six months, when Apple was likely making these choices, it was not. It was instead being compared to Core 2 Duo machines with Nvidia or Core i#what-ever# and the crappy integrated graphics at the time. If AMD could have got their act together, and released Llano in Late 2010, maybe we wouldn't have seen Core 2 Duo's in Macbook Airs for 2.5 years. As far as Geekbench scores, the MBA's of 2008 were not particularly far behind those being sold up until the refresh in 2011. Especially those 11' models once they became available in '10. I think most of us, at least those that want an air, would have been pretty happy to see Llano processors in the MBA in late 2010.
Maybe it still wouldn't have been worth a change away from intel, but anyway, point is, people need to not get all worked up when thinking about processors from today. This "rumor" is maybe up to 2 years old...
Fact A) Macbook Airs switched to Core iX only in the summer of 2011.
Fact B) Sandy Bridge was released in early 2011 using Intel integrated HD3000 graphics, which is pretty reasonable.
Fact C) The first generation core i was Nehalem and used intel HD graphics, which is awful, and where released in the summer of '10.
Fact D) AMD has better graphics than Intel.
Rumor A) Llano was delayed and had issues shipping Apple parts sometime before Summer '11.
Fact E) AMD only released Llano in early 2011, only a handful of months ahead of SB Core i Mobile processors.
So, it appears to me that Apple was likely considering only once it became apparent Nehalem mobile Core i series chips would not work for the Air. This time point was probably well before the actually shipping of 1st gen Core i series chips. So probably maybe early 2010. Then AMD blew it. They lost that window of time, and where never being considered by Apple once Sandy Bridge was on the horizon.
So.... while Llano has been competing with Sandy Bridge for over six months, when Apple was likely making these choices, it was not. It was instead being compared to Core 2 Duo machines with Nvidia or Core i#what-ever# and the crappy integrated graphics at the time. If AMD could have got their act together, and released Llano in Late 2010, maybe we wouldn't have seen Core 2 Duo's in Macbook Airs for 2.5 years. As far as Geekbench scores, the MBA's of 2008 were not particularly far behind those being sold up until the refresh in 2011. Especially those 11' models once they became available in '10. I think most of us, at least those that want an air, would have been pretty happy to see Llano processors in the MBA in late 2010.
Maybe it still wouldn't have been worth a change away from intel, but anyway, point is, people need to not get all worked up when thinking about processors from today. This "rumor" is maybe up to 2 years old...
Now, perhaps, but certainly not last year when Apple was looking to get away from the Core 2 Duo. It'll be nifty to see AMD push higher-performance CPUs into lower power envelopes, but time will tell how well it works out.
Loyalty to a fault, that's all it is. People just love their XXX so much, that they forget it is only that good because it needed to be in order to make money. If it didn't need to be, you'd be cursing it like it were Canadian internet providers.