Apple Silicon's success helped AMD make Ryzen AI Max chips
AMD's latest Ryzen AI Max chips probably wouldn't have existed without Apple, an AMD executive has admitted, thanks to the popularity of Apple Silicon.
AMD Ryzen AI Max - Image Credit: AMD
At CES, AMD introduced Ryzen AI Max chips, an upgraded version of its Ryzen AI architecture with up to 16 CPU cores and up to 40 AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics compute units, and a neural processing unit with up to 50 trillion operations per second.
The chips, offering tons of performance in various ways in one focused component, has considerable echoes to the way Apple Silicon works. During the launch, AMD VP Joe Macri hinted that Apple Silicon helped with getting the product made and out the door, reports Engadget.
An Apple Silicon thing
"Many people in the PC industry said, well, if you want graphics,, it's gotta be discrete graphics because otherwise people will think it's bad graphics," Macri offered.
He continued "What Apple showed was consumers don't care what's inside the box. They actually care about what the box looks like. They care about the screen, the keyboard, the mouse. They care about what it does."
With Apple having a massive success on its hands with Apple Silicon, it allowed Macri to convince upper management to spend a "mind boggling" amount of resources to develop the Ryzen AI Max.
"I always knew, because we were building APUs, and I'd been pushing for this big APU forever, that I could build," Macri enthused. "A system that was smaller, faster, and I could give much higher performance at the same power."
Inspired, but not first
While Macri was complementary about Apple Silicon's success and how it helped convince others that Ryzen AI Max chips were a real possibility, he stops short of giving full credit to Apple.
He insists that AMD was working towards this scenario well ahead of Apple. "We were building APUs while Apple was using discrete GPUs," he crows, referring to chips that combined a CPU with Radeon graphics.
"They [Apple] were using our discrete GPUs. So I don't credit Apple with coming up with the idea," he continued.
Before implementing Apple Silicon, Apple did extensively use AMD Radeon GPUs as discrete graphics options in its MacBook Pro lines.
Apple may have had an interest in creating its own APU at the time AMD was working on the concept. In July 2012, former AMD chip architect John Bruno, who previously contributed to AMD's Trinity APU was spotted on LinkedIn as having become a "System Architect at Apple."
At one point, Apple apparently considered using the original AMD Fusion APU in the Apple TV in 2010, before eventually using its A4 processor.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
And, AMD has a lot of experience putting higher performance GPUs into an SoC. They provided the SoCs for both PS5 and XBox X-series, or in their language, APUs. There's a lot of technical heritage there.
Management likely needs to be convinced to make a high performance x86 APU for PC laptops, though. I'd bet AMD managers are thinking it is crazy to spend a lot of R&D on a high performance APU or SoC in the laptop market. AMD seems to be failing or having a down turn in this market. It's a hyper mature market where the vast majority of laptops are neutered $600 devices that doesn't require much of a GPU at all. They are competing for a pretty small slice with very little margins.
AMD is way way behind in the AI accelerator market. These are like $5000 modules that has been in hyper demand for the past couple of years, and is slated to grow. These are really high margin products. AMD not trying to cut into that market seems like a troublesome path. Those margins will pay for everything else.
“Apple silicon is super rad and popular, so let’s say that similar thing we did was ahead of it’s time… because apple used discrete CPUs before snd we sold them to apple. Yeah. Cool. Say that. People will believe it and like us more.”
-recent AMD board meeting.
AMD rose from about 8% to 20% from 2017 to 2020 and they've been floating around 20% since then. It's kind of amazing how well Intel has held onto the laptop market, but I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with technical merit (although Lunar Lake is competitive in the thin and light segment).
Maybe the more 'honest' description is that AMD came up with the APU idea first but botched the implementation and nearly went bankrupt because of it. Apple ended up implementing the idea far better than AMD had, and AMD is now copying the superior implementation.
The funny part is that Apple never had to waste $5 billion buying a video card maker in order to do this.
Today's Apple Silicon is a descendant of the A-series SoCs so it's not like Apple had the sudden epiphany of integrated graphics when they launched the M-series silicon.
This AMD guy is trying to take credit for something that wasn't AMD's doing. It's worth pointing out that Apple also used discrete Nvidia GPUs years ago. His braggadocio is nonsense.
So weird.
No amount of revisionism will dull the shine on what Apple has accomplished.
The fact of the matter is its not an original concept by far. Many teams were working on this simultaneously. Remember that SGI had unified memory architecture (UMA) in their O2 workstation in the mid Nineties. It wasn't feasible to put this all in one package back then; it just took time and then there were multiple versions from various vendors.
The silicon concept was not revolutionary. Apple was brilliant enough to put it in a smartphone "the computer for the rest of us" and focus on the software. Joe Consumer doesn't really care whether or not all the transistors in the same package or not, as the AMD guy mentions. Consumers care what it does.
Anyhow in a couple of weeks, Apple will announce another quarter of great results and this AMD guy's comments will be a faint memory for all but a handful of industry pundits. We know he's playing buzzword bingo at CES but c'mon now.
It was just an interesting architecture. Apple’s T2 was a kind of advanced “Southbridge” chip, a kind of successor to this integrated chip, that was also eventually folded into the SoC on Apple silicon. Long history of consolidating function into single chips, and gradually migrating into the SoC chip.
Instead, they combined these things together in A-series processors and eventually the M1/MacBook Air, which was an absolute home run.
Apple's claim to fame is innovation – figuring out how to apply technology effectively to create best-in-class devices.