Apple appears to be gearing up for AMD CPUs and APUs

[trents]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-may-start-selling-macs-with-amd-cpus

 

[EarthDog]

Seems like a great choice... though it won't help their pricing, lol.

 

[notarat]

Seems like a great choice... though it won't help their pricing, lol.

They aren't doing it for the price. They're doing it for "teh profit".

They'll either keep the price the same or raise it and pocket the difference between the Intel CPU/mobo and the AMD CPU/mobo as pure profit

 

[trents]

This is gonna hurt Intel in the back pocket.

I remember back in 2008-2009 when AMD came out with the IMC and was briefly on top of Intel in the CPU performance wars. At that time, Apple resisted jumping on the AMD bandwagon and their patience paid off because Intel quickly regained dominance. So it makes me wonder if Apple has evaluated the Ryzen phenomenon and decided it has some staying power. I'm sure they are factoring in the struggles Intel is having with their effort to move to 10nm fab while AMD has successfully launched a CPU line around a 7nm fab process.

In addition, Apple has already dumped Nvidia in favor of AMD-based GPUs in their Mac Pro line so maybe they're looking at some wheeling and dealing cost cutting agreements with AMD by combining AMD GPUs nad CPUs in their Mac Pro product line. And in Apple's other products that use IGPs, it is no secret that AMD's APUs have a stronger IGP component than Intel CPUs at this point in time.

 

[EarthDog]

I wonder why they would be going to AMD discrete GPUs? More compute power for the dollar? Otherwise, I don't understand that move too much, honestly.

 

[deathman20]

Interesting....
My curiosity is wondering if the prices will come down!

 

[EarthDog]

Interesting....
My curiosity is wondering if the prices will come down!

Well, like notarat said and I mentioned too, I'm not sure it will do anything. Prices may come down a bit (doubtful), but profits will go up!

 

[trents]

I wonder why they would be going to AMD discrete GPUs? More compute power for the dollar? Otherwise, I don't understand that move too much, honestly.

More power for the dollar I think. It caused a feud between Nvidia and Apple. Nvidia has not generated Apple drivers for their last two generations of GPUs. One thing led to another. Apple users who do creative content are really upset and many are jumping ship to Windows I understand.

 

[Woomack]

My guess is the same as with any large vendor right now. Intel has problems with production, more or less for the last year+. The same is with DELL or HP which I was checking recently. Not so big problems with Lenovo as their business computers are not selling well because of lower quality and pathetic support in EU. Local distribution is again moving to AMD based desktops and laptops (the same story every 4-5 months). When I ask for business laptops or desktops based on i5 at a reasonable price so let's say up to $700, then all say that everything is sold out and they don't know when will be next delivery. Available are mostly series which were more expensive or something older that is on sale right now.
Also for the first time since I don't remember how long, AMD servers are recommended by large companies, software developers and distribution. AMD servers are also available from the shelf, not like before on special orders and in limited quantity.

I'm talking mostly about the EU market which is really large and business computers which are over 60% of total computer sales.

 

[deathman20]

Sounds like its going to happen sometime in 2021 the switch.

 

[Zerileous]

I wonder why they would be going to AMD discrete GPUs? More compute power for the dollar? Otherwise, I don't understand that move too much, honestly.

I've seen some casual mentions of a disagreement of some sort between Apple and nVidia. At this point nVidia drivers are blocked in the latest mac OS and nVidia has stopped supporting mac entirely. Someone on quora claims it is because apple wanted to write their own drivers and nvidia said no.

 

[freakdiablo]

Also for the first time since I don't remember how long, AMD servers are recommended by large companies, software developers and distribution. AMD servers are also available from the shelf, not like before on special orders and in limited quantity.

Hey, I'm actually seeing this first hand. At my current job, we just started installation on a project not 4 months ago where we started using Opterons - first project I've seen around here where it wasn't a gut reaction to go with Xeons. Deciding factor being all the software guys are pushing for massive amounts of parallel processing, and these days AMD is ahead in core count vs cost which keeps management happy.

Apple (and their devs) are probably along the long lines of thinking, AMD having the leg up there, and even if AMD Apples aren't necessarily cheaper for the end user it's good for their bottom line. (As much as I'd like a Macbook for <$600 *new* so I can help my mother with her tech issues, lol.)

 

[EarthDog]

Opterons? I thought that name was retired a couple of generations ago... before Ryzen. Aren't server chips from them now called Epyc? If you are comparing Opteron server parts, they are typically slower than Intel, no? It wasn't until EPyc they caught up?

 

[maxfly]

Wasnt there just a story about apple moving to arm processors in the next 18 months?

 

[trents]

Wasnt there just a story about apple moving to arm processors in the next 18 months?

There have been rumors of this for quite some time now but many challenges exist to doing this, especially for higher end machines that require many cores. You might see it in their mobile product line first (tablets and netbooks) if it happens.

I'm wondering if Apple is now taking a different direction than ARM and has instead decided to go with AMD in the non mobile sector.