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Why AMD Could Win The Coming Visual Computing Battle
Vigile writes "The past week has been rampant with discussion on the new war that is brewing between NVIDIA and Intel, but there was one big player left out of the story: AMD. It would seem that both sides have written this competitor off, but PC Perspective thinks quite the opposite. The company is having financial difficulties, but AMD already has the technologies that both NVIDIA and Intel are striving to build or acquire: mainstream CPU, competitive GPU, high quality IGP solutions and technology for hybrid processing. This article postulates that both Intel and NVIDIA are overlooking a still-competitive opponent, which could turn out to be a drastic mistake."
Apparently you didn't RTFA, because they describe the problems that AMD is having and then go on to say why the problems may be surmounted. In other words, you're overlooking the obvious position that AMD's in. nVidia doesn't have a CPU line that's one of the top CPUs in the market and in performance. Intel doesn't have a GPU that's competitive in performance. With the market moving towards greater integration and interaction between the CPU and the GPU, there's only one company that can deliver both.
So it's going to come down to whether or not AMD has the ability right now to keep pushing their product lines and innovating fast enough to beat Intel and nVidia to the punch. Their financial situation hurts their chances, but it doesn't negate them completely.
OS X runs just fine on SSE3 equipped AMD CPU's as it stands. It's not supported of course but it runs just fine. They (Apple) could easily support AMD even if they didn't optimize for them quite as much as they do for the Core 2 architecture. Frankly, I'm not sure the difference would be all that noticeable compared to the already noticeable delta in performance between the two main x86 architectures.