You never know
Apple-watcher appleinsider.com published a story late last week that Apple and AMD are chatting about Apple using AMD chips in its Mac products. This is firmly in rumour territory for now, as the story is based on seeing some AMD execs leave meetings with supposed Apple execs, but intriguing nonetheless.
Such a move would be a much-needed fillip for AMD, which is showing little sign of gaining market share from Intel in the CPU space, while strong showing in GPUs in the past couple of years hasn't claimed as much market share from NVIDIA as we had expected. But if this rumour has substance, its rival's mutual animosity will have played a major part.
Over a year ago, Intel announced its chipset license agreement with NVIDIA doesn't apply to CPUs that have integrated memory controllers. This means NVIDIA's popular ION (9400M) chipset - which provides a significant integrated graphics improvement over anything Intel has to offer - can't be used with the latest Core i7, i5 and i3 CPUs.
For Apple this presents a challenge, especially for its smaller notebooks. When it updated its MacBook line to the latest Intel CPUs last week, the 13-inch version got left out. It's thought that the reason for this is that a discrete GPU is not desirable for smaller form-factors and Apple didn't want to rely on just an Intel IGP, so it stuck with the Core 2 + ION combo.
It just so happens that AMD is expected to finally launch the fruit of its ATI acquisition next year. This ‘fusion' of the CPU and GPU is codenamed ‘Llano' and promises to provide the decent graphics performance in a small package with low power requirement that ION-equipped systems currently do.
Whether or not Apple would consider AMD offerings in other areas - like higher-end notebooks and in desktops - is even further into the realms of blind speculation. But another benefit to Apple of it using any AMD products would be to get Intel's attention and improve its negotiating position.
AMD has a relatively weak negotiating position to start with and, we imagine, would bend over backwards to accommodate Apple. But the legitimisation to Llano that its adoption by Apple would provide would probably justify almost giving them away.
