Bad idea. If Apple had bought AMD, its products would have been delayed or become vaporware, with its 'exciting' pipeline running dry.
Yeah, these Threadripper cpu's would have had 64 emojis in them, instead of 64 cores.
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New References to AMD Processors Discovered in macOS 10.15.4 Beta
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Yeah, these Threadripper cpu's would have had 64 emojis in them, instead of 64 cores.
A lot of PC manufacturers have intel and AMD BTO options. I don’t think it’s crazy to think that Apple could release a few AMD systems just to test the waters, I would be okay with a Ryzen $499 AMD Mac mini. I think Apple needs to bring the cost of the Mac mini down and that would be a good way to do it.
A Mac mini with an Ryzen APU ...
THAT would be the ultimate entry drug to macOS.
BYOD - Bring your own display
Also this would make a LOT of owners of old iMacs upgrade.
THAT would be the ultimate entry drug to macOS.
BYOD - Bring your own display
Also this would make a LOT of owners of old iMacs upgrade.
I personally think that the “gaming” mac is either an iMac (or iMac Pro) with a ProMotion 120hz display (this isn’t exactly and unfounded prediction, as ming chi kuo has speculated that the next iMac will have a “major display refresh”), or perhaps new, lower end tiers for the Mac Pro starting at $3999 with AMD cpu options. The latter prediction is more wishful thinking than it is probable, i’ll admit
Less interested in APU's, would rather see some Threadripper in iMac or Mac Pro.
Isn't this what sank the Itanic? Itanium was native VLIW and my understanding was that x86 compatibility was dreadfully difficult to achieve while maintaining performance of the VLIW engine.
How many times have there been delays because of shortages from intel? Sourcing CPUs from both manufacturers could alleviate some of these delays which result in less sales.
I don’t think that will be a problem, especially when USB4 comes out and is based on Thunderbolt 3
That would have worked for the graphics division, but not the CPU division. There’s an agreement between intel and AMD that doesn’t allow this (they have to license x86 and x64 to each other and that was part of the deal IIRC.)
Thank goodness they did not. AMD has been taking on a strong lead in the CPU market, and is continuing to slam Intel. Apple would have made improvements there that would have only been relevant to the macOS ecosystem, whereas AMD's work is making advancements for PC's in general.
Personally have been team blue for years, and want to continue this, but if Intel doesn't pull their head out of their ass for their next upgrade, it's going to be very hard for me not to switch over to Ryzen.
Still very much favor team green for GPU's, though.
Right, but how many people spend money on $3000 Macbooks vs $1000 Macbooks? The people spending the big bucks are the people who need absolute compatibility in a work environment. It doesn't matter if I can use 99% of my software at the same speed as an Intel PC, if there's a single utility that I need, that I can't run, the entire computer is worthless. And all you need to do is look at the Surface X, to see the sort of teething issues that exist. Sure it's nice for web surfing, but it's not a good computer when you need 100% compatibility on a range of hardware and software.
My current job, there's about 300 people with maxed out Macbook Pros. My previous job was 30 people with an 80/20 split of maxed out macbook pros and surface books. Any incompatibility would make that 330 Surfaces and Dell XPS/Latitude machines.
Absolutely true. This is not 2006 where it was not possible to run Mac OS X on AMD processors.
I was actually expecting co-processors from Apple a few years ago, when they first announced that touchID ran off of a co-processor. Maybe that'll be the new feature for MacOS 10.16, and any mac with a touchID will be able to run ARM compiled apps. I'm not holding my breath for it though.
Thunderbolt is open to non-Intel systems now. There are motherboards those support AMD & Thunderbolt.
Though Intel may want more money per port.
The billion dollar question for Tim Cook and Apple is - Do they care enough about the Mac and the PC industry as a whole to commit to the transition away from Intel or offer both Intel and AMD, which seems incredibly unlikely. To me, that is more important than the speculation of Apple moving to A-Series CPUs...
Why would Apple spend the time necessary to shift to AMD if they ultimately want to move to their own CPUs? Apple does not/is not going to go through two transitions...ultimately if they go with AMD,I think it means they are going to move away from Intel as well, which is going to look incredibly bad to those who have just purchased a Mac Pro. I just cannot see Apple dedicating resources to maintaining two different lines of Macs (dying industry, dinosaurs, et al.), one Intel, one AMD.
I honestly think this is Apple hedging their bets in negotiating a new exclusivity deal with Intel. I still don’t think AMD’s portfolio is big enough for all of Apple’s needs.
The Mac Mini would be the same price, but with a much more capable APU and PCI-E 4.0, to name two differences. For $799 you'd get 6 core / 12 threads and $999 8 core / 16 thread system Renoir Ryzen 4000 APUs.
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Not to mention the custom AMD GPGPU Radeo Pro Duo on the Mac Pros are custom ASIC designs from Apple and AMD that have TB 3 on-board.
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Intel FAB is stalled for the next 18 months. Apple isn't negotiating when Zen 3 will be at 5nm and Intel is stuck at 14nm.
Apple most certainly can maintain both. Their resources dwarf the rest of the industry. Apple would provide an upgrade path for first-generation Mac Pro customers.
The Co-Processor is the T2. All HEVC/HEIC/HEIC encode/decode, TouchID, UEFI boot processes and more run off them.
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TB 3 is royalty-free and open-sourced. USB 4.0 is already in the hands of Apple for over a year. Apple will include both to address existing customers with TB hardware. USB 4.0 uses the same interface as TB3. So, it will be a universal plug-n'-play adapter that no one will notice.
AMD 4000-Series APUs are PCIe 3.0, NOT 4.0 -https://www.anandtech.com/show/15324/amd-ryzen-4000-mobile-apus-7nm-8core-on-both-15w-and-45w-coming-q1
Transitioning to AMD vs transitioning to ARM isn’t even in the same ballpark. Hacintoshes have ran on AMD with very few modifications that Apple could probably have an engineer do in a day. The transition would be seem-less for users.
