AMD and Apple

A few places have pointed out this article in which Apple executives supposedly didn’t know that Opterons were 64-bit processors.

Actually, that’s not so.

From the article:

DMN’s Charlie White talked with Apple Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, Jon Rubinstein, and IBM‘s Chekib Akrout, Vice President, PowerPC & Networking Technology Development, Microelectronics Division, about the new Mac G5s . . . .


DMN: Now, you’re saying it’s the first 64-bit desktop machine. But isn’t there an Opteron dual-processor machine? It shipped on June 4th. BOXX Technologies shipped it. It has an Opteron 244 in it.

Rubinstein: Uh…

Akrout: It’s not a desktop.

DMN: That’s a desktop unit.

Akrout: It depends on what you call a desktop, now. These… From a full desktop per se, this is the first one. I don’t know how you really distinguish the other one as a desktop.

DMN: Well, it’s a dual processor desktop machine, just like that one.

Akrout: It’s not 64, then.

DMN: Yes, it’s a 64-bit machine with two Opteron chips in it. It started shipping June 4th.

Akrout: That we’ll double check, but in my mind, it wasn’t.

As you can see, all the Apple guy said was “Uh.” He hardly covered himself in geek glory, but it was a lot better than what the IBM guy did.

And look where this guy works! He’s a vice-president of the division in charge of technology development of the PowerPC! Isn’t that at least fairly close to the area where IBM and AMD are supposed to be collaborating?

And this is the company supposedly aching to buy AMD and build fabs for? When a guy who would have to work quite a bit with the transplanted AMD guys doesn’t even know squat about their product? Come on now, even you know more about the G5 than he knows about the Opteron.

I don’t think a merger is imminent. 🙂

What’s AMD?

I think the IBM guy has been hanging around with the Apple people too long.

For some strange reason, AMD doesn’t exist in Apple’s eye. I don’t mean not much or inadequately; I mean not at all.

To Apple, there is only one competitor in the personal computer market: Intel. AMD literally doesn’t exist officially in the Mac world.

If you search the Apple site, there are a grand total of four references to “AMD.” Two of them refer to an NFS server called Amd used in Unix systems. The other two refer to Apple software than runs on x86 machines.

Per AMD hardware itself: zero.

In comparison, type in “Pentium” and you get well over a hundred references.

You’d never think AMD makes about eight times the number of CPUs Apple uses.

A shark may have its feelings hurt when a whale snubs it; but a minnow?

Just too funny.

Ed

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