AMD chief says Apple will eventually use AMD chips - Page 4

I think my irony detector exploded.

"why does everybody always correct me? "

'coz they know you'll bite ?

oh - and great rant, btw.

Dude, chill out. Smoke a J and relax.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how long this thread is. The AMD/Intel rivallry is nowhere strong than between "fanboys". Fortunately you can bet that the engineers and business guys at Apple are more rational about it.

Doubters notwithstanding, Jobs said last year that they had looked at the Intel roadmap and had been impressed enough by it to jump from PPC. Turns out this wasn't that hard because IBM and Freescale were all but ignoring Apple's demands for what it needed. Now, a little over a year later, Apple has completed its second Mac ISA transition with remarkable smoothness... and we see the on-ramp of the roadmap that Intel showed Mr Jobs. The Core architecture is very impressive and suits Apple's needs very well. I am also quite certain that Intel showed Apple upcoming technology even further beyond what is now public knowledge, and no doubt talked to them about how their 45nm (and beyond) migration is being handled.

The "AMD chief"'s comment is that Apple will eventually use AMD chips, and this is necessarily predicated on his optimistic public outlook on AMD's future. If he did not say something like that then people would probably ask why he wasn't look at Apple's business. The answer would be "because AMD can't compete". If he is correct and AMD does get back into a competitive performance, performance/watt, price/performance, and complete solution situation relative to Intel... then sure, I would expect the guys at Apple to evaluate this option.

Currently, however, AMD is not in this position (from Apple's perspective) and in the short term (1-2 years) these doesn't seem to be any publicly known information suggesting that this will change. I'm sure AMD will catch up with where Intel currently is in that timeframe, but between the two companies I expect to see more surprises coming from Intel's R&D labs than from AMD's. In the longer term these things are very hard to predict in detail, but usually in the chip industry the guy with the most money is the better bet -- especially when he also seems to have recently seen the light and undergone an enormous course correction (i.e. like Intel just did). But never say never, especially since that keeps Intel working harder.

Well said programmer -
I want AMD to catch up just as much as I want Intel to keep ahead > tech up, prices down - that has to be good for us.

My only concern is that there appears to be only two horses on the course.

ROFLMAO That sums up a lot of threads quite well You just missed out on WHEN IS APPLE GOING TO MAKE A NON-CASTRATED MID TOWER BLAH BLAH BLAH WHY CANT I USE ANY GPU IN APPLE BLAH BLAH APPLE TAX BLAH BLAH APPLE MONOPOLY BLAH BLAH OS X FOR ALL PCS BLAH BLAH APPLE GPUS SUCK OKAY GO FRACK OFF PC GAMERS BLAH BLAH NO CONSOLE GAMING IS BETTER NINTENDO WII IS BETTER THAN PS3 BLAH BLAH XBOX360 IS BETTER BLAH BLAH IPOD VIDEO WIDESCREEN ARGHGH APPLE DVR NOW NO I DONT NEED IT I GOT TIVO BLAH BLAH IPOD PHONE WHEN ARGFH BLAH BLAH CANT WAIT FOR MY MACBOOK/ MACBOOKPRO/ IMAC TO SHIP IT JUST LEFT SHANGHAI I CANT WAIT SO LONG WTF BLAH BLAH BLAH... I'm not correcting you, I'm just adding to the fun of your rant. Well, for me it was hella fun reading it.

BTW, I have never really hallucinated smoking pot back a few years. I did have one session where I was super inspired and drew on chalk all over my wall on how "Buddha closed the loop" (deconvolution of X dimensions into pure nothingness in preparation for return to God). Yes, good times Also I did have one session where I was just bundled up in my bed shivering a lot and going WTF

Having not done mushrooms or LSD or hallucinogenics I don't know what hallucinating is like. Pot and Ecstasy have been a real trip in and of themselves. Funnily, five or six years ago a few tokes never really made me "feel" the effects of pot really. I don't inhale fully because I'm slightly asthmatic and when mixed with tobacco I cough a lot. However 2003-2004 pot did really affect me. Fairly good buds...??

My favourite drug at the end of the day is Jaegermeister. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaegermeister ...Only alcoholic/drug thing where I actually lost sense of time once or twice. This one time at band camp... heh. Actually it was this one time after leaving a bar back to a friends place we were all drunk and dancing around and I had several shots of Jaeger, then I looked at the clock, it was 1am, then the next time, I look at the clock, it was 4am...!!! Wooo it was a little freaky and I ended up making out with a coworker 10 years older than me. Then we just cuddled. Really.

Have been drug and alcohol(only a few sips once every few weeks in social contexts) free for about a year and a half. Would be a great detox except I am taking psychiatric "establishment" medicine

Good enough for me for now. The fact that all three new-gen consoles have separate CPU/GPU architectures is comforting to some degree.

Also, since GPUs in PCs and Macs (well, more so in PC gaming) are becoming increasingly as or more important than the CPU, the wide range of PC GPUs is also comforting to some degree. Although, that is also a two-horse race.

Again, I mentioned before, it's a hardware-software oligopoly in computing today. Choose from a matrix of Intel, AMD, ATI, nVidia, Windows, OSX, Linux.

Not like buying a car (lots of choices) or filling up petrol/ gasoline where you can choose from a ton of places and even add ethanol to the mix or get a hybrid car, etc.

I agree - it seems to be working in our favour at the moment. Long may it last.

In my convoluted mind though, I can see in the not too distant future, a couple of the jockeys having a talk before they line up to start.

Also from your matrix - 2 are really one, ATI/AMD.

Oh dear god I hate Jaeger.

<ot derail>
Whassamatter with you boy ! - one for breakfast'll put hairs on your chest.
Or, have you been hanging out in some dingy bar and drinking to excess for no good reason in the vain hope it'll impress some waitress ?
<ot derail>

I personally have halucinated the same damned brady bunch rerun for about 14 years now,and i dont take any drugs!!!!!!

its the one where greg gets high and changes the tires on his bike.

Yes, I mean the Xeons, which are the ones that will have the need for better memory access. Xeons are more often used for servers where constant access to many smaller randomly placed files will find memory access to be more important that simply doing calculations.


Well, the process shrink for their older designs kept the exact same designs. They didn't even raise speeds on the new Core chips, when they could have.

The total power is not rising, but the energy used per square mm is. So, while total power input, and heat output, is less, the power and heat is greater over a smaller area. That's the problem they are facing, and why they are reluctant to raise the frequency right now. New designs are helping to mitigate these problems, but not totally.

They don't need new particles. The same old particles will continue to work just fine.

The problem is related to the fact that we use charge to keep data in memory, or to do calculations. Charge uses energy to retain a bit, or to change a bit. The faster a bit changes, the more energy is required.

But, now they are learning to use "spin". The field is called "Spintronics".

In theory, no energy need be expended with this concept. In reality, some energy is always expended. But the amount of energy needed is far less.

This is how they are intending to extend the parameters down below the 20 - 30 nm levels. If they can get complex circuits working in time, which it looks as though they have a good chance of doing.

It is such a vastly expensive venture to build a new cpu chip manufacturing process line these days—billions of dollars. Each new process reduction raises the price of those fabs by 50% or more. Most chip manufacturing companies are building them in conjunction with at least one other partner.

It's why AMD is so far behind Intel and IBM in going to 300 mm wafers, and in going to 65 nm fabs.

A company needs to make such a large commitment to this that few are willing to do so these days.

Hey, of course AMD will be available in Macs in a few years. Intel is supported officially, Windows is supported officially (via bootcamp), you can use a Microsoft XBOX usb controller in a mac, etc. etc. Aside from the exclusivity of OSX, mac is slowly becoming more of a packaging/distribution brand than a distinct hardware/software entity.

Apple would have to have a reason to do this. Dell is going to AMD chips for a few lines because they are sometimes less expensive. When you sell $350 computers, even a $5 difference in the cost of the cpu can make the difference.

They also sell 4 and eight socket servers, where Opterons still have an advantage.

But, where does Apple fit in here? While Dell might move more to the cost/performance model, Apple is more in the performance/cost model, where the first part is the more important.

AMD now has a bit of work to do. Unless they have more to offer Apple than Intel does, the will get nowhere.

The ATI acquisition will help somewhat, as now they will be able to offer a good line of chipsets as well.

But it isn't nearly enough.

Not in 2007, certainly. We'll see what happens in 2008. 15 months in IT-land is actually, quite some time to re-revolutionize things.

If I had a choice between a current AMD chip and the Core Duo 2 in a Mac, I'd pick the Intel everytime. Of course AMD is going to say that "eventually" Apple will use AMD microsprocessors. That way he can lie to the shareholders that they may just be in discussions with Apple - but it wouldn't make me want to go out and buy one if they did.

Core Duo 2 for me all the way. Then Core Duo Quadro next.

Sorry to be picky, but Dell only sells up to 4 sockets in their servers. This has always been the case because they buy Intel-based (in the past) "white boxes" and re-label them as Dell's. Please see this link for their largest server:

http://tinyurl.com/z6ftj

For larger than 4 sockets, you need to go to NEC, Unisys, HP, Fujitsu or other less-known vendors.

Thanks -

It's hard to say.

But people should remember that in 2009, I think April, but that month could be wrong (I'm too lazy to look it up right now8) ), all broadcasters MUST give up their analog frequencies, and only broadcast in digital. By that time all Tv's sold must have H def tuners, at least down to some small size. There is supposed to be a program to supply digital tuners to people who have older models.

This will be a major impedus to these HD conversions. By then, something will be done. But before then, it will have to be proven that Apple, and others, are convinced that a large enough population can actually view, in HD, HD downloads.

Right now, it's a guessing game.

Ok Porky, it was the point of 4 and up that mattered here, no matter who makes them.

What with all the references to grass, I was positive this thread was about drugs... now with this post, we can clearly see that I was right.

I agree,

The average consumer doesnt have a clue what the difference b/t intel and amd is, and they would just be like fx82? core 2 duo? huh????? help me dell?

Intel = one type of processor, which = simple, Apple's specialty

If they were gonna switch, it would def. be a full jump, which wouldnt prob happen for couple of years after Apple was so proud of the 210 day switch and the share they've gained.

Why? You're not familiar with the concept?

That's very true!

When Apple first announced the switch, back in June 2005, I went around and asked a large variety of people about which cpu was in their Mac, if they had one, and if they didn't have one, I asked which company supplied it.

The Mac people didn't always know that it was either IBM or Freescale (who are they?).

The PC people usually thought it was an Intel chip (don't they all use Intel?).

The fact that Mac sales never dipped below the previous years when the switch was underway shows, I think, that many people had no idea (dispite the commercials) that Apple was doing anything different, whatever that was.

Some of the others, who knew, waited. But, they actually seem to be in the minority, even today.

Of course they are in the minority -- most people aren't geeks, and the world is a better place for it. Not only does it mean that us geeks can make a better living, it also means we're not overrun with geeks!

Seriously though, I think that the people on sites like this one forget that they are unusual in that they are interested in obscure details about how their machine works. Most people don't care, don't want to care, and don't even really care about 20% performance differences here and there. All they know is they want it fast enough, able to do what they need to easily, that it looks good and is quiet, and that it keeps working.

I'm not sure I agree with this entirely. Sure there are people who have no idea what's in their computer, but many others do. How else do you explain the gains that AMD has made in marketshare over the last several years? Opteron and athlon chips were far better than Intel's netburst counterparts and consumers began to choose AMD.

Sure...
Everybody know if it isn't Pentium4 it sucks.

AMD? Fake Pentiums, Boo...
More something for (large) corporate business users, a couple of geeks and gamers.

Are you implying that AMDs gains in marketshare came only from geeks and gamers and corporate business users? I think it went a little deeper than that.

I don't know what he's implying, but he sort of has it right. At least until very recently.

Most people don't care what's in their machines, as long as it does what they expect it to do.

What people in the PC buying world do care about though, is price. Over the years, AMD has been found in the cheapest of machines. Manufacturers were going for those cheap products, because the competition in that low end space was factored in pennies. Any advantage there would end up in a sale.

Only more recently has AMD been gaining in the higher end machines. AMD is big in the do it yourself crowd, otherwise known as the retail chip trade. That's where they made their biggest consumer advances. Then, of course, the high end game machines. The higher end x86 market servers have been using them as well, but still have mostly Intel inside.

But, as AMD's visibility has risen, we are seeing more of their chips in mid range machines as well.

But, this might change, if Intel maintains their lead, as it seems they will do in most areas. Do it yourselfers seem to be turning to Conroe in recents months.

AMD's gains may be short lived in many markets.

I thought corporate businesses were the very heart of Intel's sales, and the one place where AMD penetration hadn't reached yet. At least half a year ago.

Look at the computer companies, and what products they are selling. AMD certainly hasn't taken that business over. Not by a long shot. But, due to the lawsuits they have brought against Intel, as well as the improvement in their product line, they have made advances.

Overall though, Intel still controls almost 80% of the x86 market.

But both the high end, and the low end have been chipped away somewhat. There's been some creep into the middle as well.

The pc market is a large market. I think it is more diverse than people here are giving it credit for. Not everyone who buys a pc is ignorant of their purchase. Many are quite aware of what they bought and did so for a reason. If not why is Intel now concerned about perfromance and performance per watt? AMD wasn't hurting Intel on price with their Athlons and Opterons. Those were generally more expensive than the Intel offerings, Extreme Editions notwithstanding. If price was the only consideration all pcs sold would have celerons.

The majority of people are sold the product they buy. Get a salesman jazzed about a product, and he'll work harder to sell it. The salesmen aren't just at the stores, either. They are friends of the purchasers, writers of magazines and websites, review contributors, etc. Get one geek on board and you probably get 10 sales.

But does the average purchaser really care what his processor is? No.

See my post above.

Right. but MOST people do not care, or even know what cpu is in their machine. Just try asking people you know who are not "into" it the way we are. My bet is that most won't know. They might not even remember who MAKES the machine, much less the model name or number.

This is less true for Mac users, but it still is true to a great extent. I went through this, and found that most people are very ignorant about their machines.

Most can't say how much RAM they have, or even what it is. They don't know what size the HD is, what speed it runs at, or how big the cache is. They have no idea what video card or chip is there, or how much video memory is available.

The salesperson may tell them some of those things, assuming they know, but the information is lost in the overload, and soon forgotten.

Or which OS it runs, though it's easy to "lucky guess" Windows assuming they even know that's the name for an operating system.

And there's risk of overgeneralizing, believing every computer runs Windows or has "Intel Inside".


Went through? I can't imagine ever asking most people technical details about their computers without encountering some amount of ignorance and/or confusion. I have to force myself to "talk dumb" with them and hope there's communication.


Yep. Plenty of people are totally unfamiliar with the basic terminology for those components and don't care or aren't interested enough to ever learn.

There's an analogous software-related ignorance, too. For instance, some people will only know names of programs they use (e.g. Internet Explorer) but have no clue about the general categories (e.g. web browser). Or they have trouble associating one with the other.

Damn those non-geeks with their ignorance and real lives filled with other things besides figuring out the exact default and max clock speed of their notebook GPU....!!!!!!!11!!!!!1!one!!

Heh.