Published in PC Hardware

Industry sources denying Apple with AMD APUs

by on12 November 2010
appleamd

Intel only for now

Updated: Someone much closer to the core has confirmed that AMD has the deal with Apple about fusion here.

It doesn’t
matter how you call them, CPUs or APUs and if you put graphics on the same chip or in a chipset, our industry sources are suggesting that Apple at this time only wants Intel's CPUs.

Apple was not too happy about Nehalem and Arrandale chips for its ultra transportable notebook market due to their higher power consumption, but again at this time it doesn’t plan to launch any Fusion or other AMD processor based products. At least not in the near future. Arrandale Core i3, Core i5 got to Mac book pros but not in smaller notebooks like Air who is still stuck with Core 2 Duo. 

Apple will continue to use AMD graphics, as an alternative to its Nvidia GPU offering but that’s it. The dream to see Apple with Fusion (Ontario, Zacate, Llano) chips inside is over, at least for the time being. Don’t give up the hope, Apple is known to adopt new partners and technologies, as long as they are significantly better than the competition. Just remember how Intel won against IBM PowerPC CPUs. It took Intel years to get there but now PowerPC is completely replaced by Intel as Intel got things right.

The Sandy Bridge monolithic core looks like a decent “Fusion” product and Optimus works just fine, so we don’t see much space for AMD CPUs or APUs. At this time AMD would probably give its chips below cost just to claim that it got in Apple, but Jobs is well aware of that, and doesn’t like when companies are using Apple for its cause. He just care about marking profits for its company. Cudos to that cause.

AMD also denied the suggestion that they won the deal with Apple as probably Apple wanted to kill such talk as soon as possible. Let's hope that AMDs Executive Vice presidents will be a bit more clear next time they show an Apple picture.

Also read

Apple to embrace AMD Fusion?

http://www.fudzilla.com/processors/item/20817-apple-to-embrace-amd-fusion
Last modified on 12 November 2010
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