AMD recently unveiled a very positive report for the last fiscal quarter. As it turns out it has plans to move in on Intel territory by talking to Apple. Since 2006 Apple has relied on Intel’s processor platforms, but according to recent rumors Apple is testing AMD’s processors and have had several meetings with high level people from AMD.
Intel’s limited supply of new processors and sour battles with NVIDIA is problematic since Apple is in need of both, but the problems would quickly disappear buy moving on to AMD. Not the least since it has both CPUs and GPUs to offer.
AMD’s powerful graphics solutions is said to be one of the major reasons for Apple’s interest. AMD has offered a thorough walkthrough of the Llano architecture, an architecture that will mend the Phenom II architecture with a DX11-capable graphics circuit. Presumably a solution that is a lot more exciting than Intel’s HD Graphic chip.
Even if this may very well just be a way of pressuring Intel it looks like it is seriously interested in AMD’s processors for its workstations and notebooks. We’re most likely talking Fusion with IGPs for notebooks, and octo and dodeca-core Opteron processors for workstations.
As usual these are just rumors, but we’re not surprised Apple is looking for alternative suppliers.
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