Apple negotiating eventual use of AMD Opteron and Turion chips

21st April, 2010 by adina
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Apple may use AMD chips in order to supplement Intel if the advanced discussions with the chipmaker are successful. Executives from AMD and other persons belonging to the company have reportedly been observed visiting the Cupertino campus and helping Apple work on Macs based on AMD processors. According to AppleInsider, most of the tests are centered on workstation chips made by AMD, such as the Opteron line and mobile chips like those in the Turion range.

The surprising move, not necessarily definite, may have both business and technical motivations. By choosing AMD, Apple makes sure to have more than a single processor supplier and also has the ability to build more types of systems and avoid eventual supply problems related to Intel. Although not yet confirmed, a shortage of mobile processors Core i5 and i7 during this spring may have had an important role in MacBook Pro line’s delay, favouring Acer over Apple. Another reason may be the use of AMD as a potential threat to Intel in order to be more flexible as for favourable prices and reasonable ship dates.

As far as hardware is concerned, AMD has a series of advantages that were not present in 2005, when Apple made public its decision of using Intel processors. After acquiring ATI, the chip maker was in the position of having far faster integrated graphics than its rival. Intel’s GMA architecture has not made important steps in performance over the past two years. The custom NVIDIA chipset used in the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the graphics switching used in larger MacBook Pros are necessary to keep a high level of performance by avoiding the usage of Intel graphics as far as it is possible. Meanwhile, AMD’s graphics represented by Radeon and Mobility Radeon have better performance and often provide support for modern features.

With an exclusive Intel line-up, there is no guarantee for Apple of using NVIDIA integrated graphics as there is an ongoing Intel/NVIDIA conflict that may prevent NVIDIA from providing such a component for Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, at least until resolved.

AMD recently launched the 12-core Opteron, which theoretically surpasses the 8-core Xeon when it comes to very parallel tasks. The Opteron series, with significantly lower costs than their rival counterparts, are dedicated to workstations and could contribute to curbing the rising prices of Mac Pro towers.

As for mobile, it has been AMD’s weak point for a long time, as the company has not paid as much attention as Intel to release power efficient processors. Its Turion and Athlon ranges either have used more energy or have run at lower clock speeds than Intel’s correspondent processors. However, Apple is believed to use AMD to custom-engineer chips, like it also did the A4 in the case of the iPad, in order to get the exact wanted results.

None of the involved actors have commented on the accuracy of this news.


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