An industry watcher, who wishes to remain anonymous, has plucked a rumour from the dark mill where they tend to be spawned about Apple, Intel and AMD.
A crazy theory, our source begins, but plausible nonetheless. Apple and Intel are secretly on the warpath with each other - and that's what the Ultrabook is all about. 2005 saw an exclusivity agreement struck between the two. Our source suggests Apple traded that five years in exclusivity for a seamless transition to x86.
As a result, Apple is an x86 company. That gives it decent interoperability with Wintel, and it means Apple doesn't have to hang about waiting for ARM to conjure up a chip that will provide the sort of beefcake power Apple needs at the higher end.
Who else runs on X86? When Apple's five year agreement allegedly came to an end, Apple was rumoured to be tinkering with AMD processors inside its Macbook Air. Jobs was always a fan of Intel, but he does say in his biography that, while Intel chips are excellent, the company has a rough time in innovating quickly.
The good ship Intel runs very slow on innovation, and Apple has never been too keen to help. Apple worried that if it started giving Intel ideas, Intel would probably go ahead and share those with its other partners. The first Ultrabooks, with their uncanny resemblance to Macbooks, are the proof.
Apple wants its own ego-system to triumph. And that means leaving Intel behind - because of its close ties to Microsoft. The Wintel alliance is in full swing again, meaning Chipzilla gets the best of both worlds. If Apple partnered with, or even acquired AMD, it would leave Wintel behind. Not to mention the IP and patent portfolio it would inherit and the freedom to add or modify different functions to its own x86 designs.
Crucially, if Apple was interested, the regulators probably wouldn't get too excited. Neither Apple nor AMD holds enough of the market for the antitrust watchdogs to gnash their teeth. At the same time, it would bolster competition against convicted monopolist Intel.
The signs, the industry watcher says, are all there. New CEO Rory Read has slashed staff by ten percent, and top execs have had the boot, too. Could Read be opening AMD's kimono to Apple?
If Apple buys AMD, Apple will rule the x86 and ARM world, and it will become the largest, most innovative, and most influencial chip/software company in the world and it will rewrite technology history in this century.
Apple and AMD have the right technology and people to create the most amazing hardware devices.
It's just mind blowing what Apple could do if it uses AMD's fusion, embedded processor technology, and the x86 IP..
Likely the best thing in the world for nVidia.
Let's look at this with some logic and history. Steve Jobs and Apple (his Apple, not Apple when Steve was not there) has always been about "The Vision". The Vision was blending computer technology and liberal arts to give the masses something functional as well as artful.
So...#1 The Vision
Next...how do you fulfill the The Vision....
#2 you employ "The Way".
The way Steve and Apple have done this is through making not just insanely great products but products priced in such a way to make an insane PROFIT off mostly off the shelf parts. Granted, the PowerPC era saw Apple products use CPU's that were derivatives of IBM servers and mainframes along with Motorola's take on that as well. However, these chips being RISC based and not CISC x86 based allow Apple to make products that were demonstrably better in terms of speed, to make effective and unique software that ran better and with less bloat and to have a more secure (at that time) computing platform since the CISC/x86 platform then and now remain the easiest and most widespread target for viruses and malware.
All of which allowed Apple to charge higher prices for all those benefits, on mostly off the shelf technology, thus generating the PROFITS, in order to execute "The Way" in which you bring forth "The Vision"
Now....after the advent of the move of Apple to the x86 world, they have a less compelling way to justify there price points on computers. This is masked by the insane profits on the iOS side of things (iPod, iPad, iPhone) all which Apple is executing better on the "The Way" side of things since they control a lot of the technology (yes...they have to license the ARM core technology, but they get to make a lot of the design decisions (particularly since the PA Semi aquisition) that make iOS based products worth their price tag, and hence Apple profits.
That is not the case in their PC division. There is even rumors that Apple may drop there Pro line altogether. But what if Apple buys AMD. Now they would have in their control a wonderful portfolio of technology, not the least of which is the FUSION line of APU's of which there is the LLANO and soon to be TRINITY lines, which include Dual Core with embedded GPU and Quad Core with Embedded GPU.
This would allow Apple a lot of options to make Powerful but Power sipping products in a range of build options and price points. Not to mention the bold moves AMD is making with ARM to share software development (OpenCL being one) but CPU integration schemes by which you could see AMD integrating not only their own x86 CPU core with their ATI aquired GPU's but ARM cores as well.
Imagine an Apple PC with a totally integrated, cool running, CPU/GPU/ARM core that could simultanously run Mac OS X and iOS apps and in a stylish thin case that no one on the WINTEL side of things could hope to ever accomplish.
That's just my thinking on how Apple by acquiring AMD could continue to accomplish "The Way" and ultimately "The Vision" on their PC side as they are now doing with the iOS side.
Sure, AMD has a strong in-house graphics teams, but their CPU designs are always way behind schedule and their latest products (i.e., Bulldozer) aren't delivering. I don't see why Apple would want to buy AMD when Intel is the performance leader, has a more predictable product roadmap, and they have partnered together in many areas in the past (like Thunderbolt). How would they justify such a large purchase that adds another several billion dollars to operating expenses. It's hard to create chips - that's why so many people look to Intel.
If Apple was going to leave Intel, the only thing I would imagine would be to switch it to their iOS chips. But the A-series chips are way underpowered to compete with Intel. Apple has seen so much success with Intel in its Mac line, the motivation would have to be pretty strong to change. Apple would be better off investing its resources into other areas.
AMD is lagging behind Intel because it has no cash to put in R&D. The result is the sequential delays in new products as Bulldozer and Bobcat.
With Apple giving the right amount of boost behind it, they could come up with a new Athlon. Hopefully not exclusive to Mac products.
Apple already ditched Motorola for not providing faster processors. That's why Jobs took the risk to jump from PowerPC to X86. AMD is in a very weak situation now, it'd be cheap to buy, and has tons of IP that would be useful in their mobile products too.A Radeon iPhone, for exemple.
But I think there is a fear in Apple to come back to the company in the early 90's, really bloated and with an unimpressive line of products. It already begun with the launch of iPhone 4S...
Since those days (AMD with a far smaller R&D budget) has out innovated Intel almost every step of the way. Intel still has enough money sitting around due to the undue attention given it by consumer blitz advertising and favorable "technical reviews" that people still believe Intel is ahead of the game where as today it most definitely isn't.
Don't believe any benchmarks which you haven't confirmed yourself either through the Windows Performance indicators and or the fgl_glxgears in Linux.
Even using the bottom end APU the C-50 the fgl_glxgears graphics frames per second rate is around 360 fps and in the case of an eMachines 17 inch laptop I tested today it did a steady 800 fps (and over about a minute it even registered a cool 1300 fps). The latest Intel Atom selling for around $500 dollars or so, simply gave a segment fault and refused to run either the fgl_glxgears test or any of the three Tux games that were tried.
The Intel chip just suffocates unless it's purposely limited to a single task where floating point performance is needed - in which case it has superior performance for a very specific set of circumstances otherwise it just becomes outclassed by AMD's APU throughput when running multiple and varied tasks.
If you can't find the videos mentioned please let me know
Benchmarks are very tricky to validate. Even more with Intel since Intel disables compiler optimization if their compiler detects a non-Intel environment. The latter means that all those benchmark applications that were compiled with Intel compilers are running un-optimized executables when ran on AMD boxes. Any benchmarking entity/applications should state what compilers were used to compile their applications.
Many benchmarking application results become irrelevant if they are compiled with Intel compilers.
For me, the fact that Intel does not have a high-end GPU and have failed miserably building one (Larrabee), shows me that Intel is in trouble and will be for the next couple of years.
I have anAMD A8 laptop, It's is just great and I can ran heavy duty multi-threaded applicaitons that use the A8 built-in GPU and the discrete GPU at the same time.
On Intel machines, people have to disable their internal GPU's because Intel does not support AMD Crossfire or NVIDIA SLI, and even more, Intel's GPU's only support older versions of DirectX so they cannot be used with advanced applications that require newer and higher end GPU's and have to be disabled.
Yes, Intel is doing better than AMD, but Intel payed AMD competitors to not buy AMD products. To the point that DELL profits were less than what Intel payed DELL for not buying AMD products. We are talking billions of dollars. AMD will be much better off if Intel would not use corrupted practices to stale their competitors. Too bad that the justice system takes years to stop corrupted companies, but now ARM, NVIDIA, and AMD are eating away Intel.. slowly but surely..
" would refrain the company from using Intel which could be suicidal."
Babar es loco!
I don't mind Apple dealing with AMD in terms of a joint venture, but if they flat out buy out AMD, then I am done with AMD. I will start buying Intel.