Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sources Say Apple Originally Planned AMD Chip For MacBook Air

Posted by timothy on from the llano's-just-a-town-in-texas dept.

Several media sources (here's PC Magazine's version), all seemingly based on an account at SemiAccurate citing (but not naming) "multiple sources," report that Apple originally planned an AMD-chip based MacBook Air, rather than the Intel-based version that emerged later ("Plan B," says the report).

22 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. In summary by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

    The AMD chips had a significantly better GPU, at the cost of a slightly slower CPU (which is a good tradeoff). Apple didn't go with it because AMD couldn't guarantee the volumes that Apple needed.

    And this is essentially the story of AMD for the last decade.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:In summary by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Informative

      It is slightly more specific than that, in this case:

      Apple continued to ship Core2s in their smaller systems for a surprising length of time after the newer intel gear became available because that was the only way they could continue to get Nvidia GPUs in anything too small for a discrete graphics card, and they were just that unimpressed with intel's offering.

      Given that, it seems likely that AMD must have had real, serious, dealbreaker, volume issues with their APU parts(not just 'we need our Intel marketing support money' volume issues) for Apple to have dropped that plan.

      It would be interesting to know if AMD just can't ship them in quantity at all(which seems modestly unlikely, given the number of cheapie PC laptops where they've popped up, and the fairly low prices they must be selling for), or if Apple required some fancy low voltage bin that AMD's process just didn't hit regularly enough...

    2. Re:In summary by symbolset · · Score: 4, Interesting

      On the other hand for what Apple's paying for Intel chips Apple could just buy AMD and fix their supply chain problems. AMD could be had for about $5 billion today. Apple's moving about 16 million Macs a year. It wouldn't take too long for that to pay off. And 64-core Mac desktops would be pretty neat.

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
  2. *** SHOCK *** by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Funny

    So Apple were trying to chose between the only two players in the performance x86 world?! They actually stopped to consider the alternative rather than just picking the default when millions of dollars were at stake?

    I'm blown away, like everyone else I thought Steve Jobs just picked names out of a hat.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    1. Re:*** SHOCK *** by masternerdguy · · Score: 3, Funny

      Nobody picks names out of a hat these days. Everyone now uses psychoactive drugs to have a vision where the X86 gods will appear and guide you. If an ARM god appears you know that your product is cursed.

      --
      To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
  3. AMD always considered ... by perpenso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    AMD is always considered before negotiating prices with Intel. Flirting with AMD before choosing Intel is a pretty common practice, even for those who planned on going with Intel all along.

    1. Re:AMD always considered ... by Baloroth · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's one thing to flirt. It is entirely another to be actually planing on using them, which by most accounts Apple was. I don't think this was just a gambit. AMD also would have given them a couple of advantages. Far superior GPU and better power efficiency (so I have heard, anyways), mainly. Probably would have been cheaper too, although that is just a guess.

      --
      "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
  4. CPU & GPU performance not relevant by perpenso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The AMD chips had a significantly better GPU, at the cost of a slightly slower CPU (which is a good tradeoff).

    In the context of something like a MacBook Air power consumption is a far greater factor than CPU or GPU performance.

    1. Re:CPU & GPU performance not relevant by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In the context of something like a MacBook Air power consumption is a far greater factor than CPU or GPU performance.

      I'm not sure why you think this, if they were looking for power consumption, wouldn't they go with the Atom?

      I can tell you at least anecdotally, the last time I was looking at a laptop I really wanted something like an Air because of its nice slender shape, but I decided against it because it is underpowered compared to most other laptops I was considering, and I am ok with a shorter battery life.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:CPU & GPU performance not relevant by allanw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Atoms are friggin slow compared to a regular CPU and should only be used for sub-$400 netbooks, not $1000 laptops. One of the great things about the Air is that it doesn't use some dumbed down CPU, it's just a regular Sandy Bridge clocked down.

    3. Re:CPU & GPU performance not relevant by allanw · · Score: 5, Informative

      Obviously power consumption is important but performance is also very important. An Atom is an extremely cheap CPU that doesn't deserve to go in a $1000 laptop, like I said. Otherwise you can take the argument to silliness by asking why Apple didn't go with ARM or something.

      I've found that Macbooks are pretty comparable in price to a Windows laptop now, at least the Airs (since we're on that topic). Nothing out there matches a Macbook Air in price, considering that the Air comes with an SSD and a Sandy Bridge CPU.

    4. Re:CPU & GPU performance not relevant by Theovon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      People tend to conflate power with energy, and you may be doing it here. If you're going to be executing a particular job, and you want to optmize its efficiency, then it will consume some power over some time period, which is ENERGY. On the other hand, if you're talking about the battery life of your laptop, then the computer is almost completely idle, and what we want to therefore minimize is idle and average power.

      Optimizing just for power isn't sufficient. If something uses half the power but takes 4 times as long, then it's twice as bad. However, we don't typically wake our computers to run compute-intensive jobs, just to put them back to sleep when those are done. We do a lot of screen-staring, which complicates the issue.

      Interestingly, performance per watt IS in the right units. Performance would be something comparable to operations per second, while watts is joules per second. The seconds cancel out, giving you operations per joule, which is the correct efficiency metric.

    5. Re:CPU & GPU performance not relevant by Kumiorava · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sure, but you also managed to overlook the Macbook Air benefits compared to your excellent Asus model. First of all Macbook Air is just under 3lbs, while Asus is 3.7lbs. That weight difference alone explains some of the hardware differences and design decisions. Additionally Macbook Air has better resolution on the display, which is a huge plus in my eyes, 1440x900 compared to 1366x768. Add the ultra light power adapter of Macbook Air to the mix and you get portable system with you well under 4lbs.

      Second area where I believe Macbook Air will prevail is heat management. Try using all those goodies loaded in Asus for an extended period of time and the laptop becomes unbearably hot and reduces battery life significantly. Macbook Air also heats but I believe less so because of lower powered CPU and no dedicated GPU. Adding dedicated GPU or more CPU power is less appealing on ultra portable than on a desktop computer and should be always weighted on the down side they create.

      Nice things Macbook Air has that are more rarely found in competing products: Magsafe power port, OSX Lion, Thunderbolt port, excellent microphone, and great webcam.

    6. Re:CPU & GPU performance not relevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      ah... I wasn't aware AMD sold off every fab... more fallout from Intel's dirty tricks... fuckers... competition drives technology, and Intel set technology back a bit by doing what they did.

      The fallout from the "dirty tricks" was maybe that AMD couldn't gain as much marketshare as they might have during the window of time when AMD's technology was competitive, but that was mostly limited by how fast they could expand production facilities (building chip fabs is very expensive and time consuming). Many other factors went into AMD's fab sell-off, most of them self-inflicted wounds. Off the top of my head:

      * The last time AMD executed well on CPU core design was the original Athlon 64/Opteron core. Everything since has been between terrible and mediocre, with the only minor success finally coming this year in the "APU" products (which still only give them a foothold at the low end). In the meantime, Intel hit a home run with Core 2 and kept executing extremely well thereafter.

      * AMD had to cancel an entire next-gen CPU architecture, and based on recent events probably should've cancelled Bulldozer too. While waiting for these new architectures they could do little but release minor retreads of the aging K8 (Athlon 64) core, which kept them a year or more behind Intel in performance (especially in the growing laptop segment, where AMD was very weak). Worse, they managed to screw up some of the retread products with serious bugs, hurting their credibility (especially in the server market).

      * AMD correctly anticipated the need to acquire GPU technology when GPU + CPU integration was on the horizon. However, after failing to acquire NVidia, they then overpaid for ATI by several billion dollars. After the acquisition, ATI went through a multiyear stretch of disappointing products, so the ATI division kept posting losses. It was so bad that for a year or two AMD had to periodically write off hundreds of millions of dollars of "goodwill" to reflect the declining value of the ATI division relative to what they'd paid.

      * Core 2 hurt demand for AMD's CPUs badly enough to drop orders far below AMD's production capacity, at a time when AMD was trying to expand from one to two fabs. They were eventually forced to mothball the new facility partway through completing it, which is very bad news financially (fab equipment is horribly expensive and depreciates quickly, so buying a bunch of it and then having it sit idle means you're losing money at a scary rate). It's also bad financially to not fully utilize a completed fab, for the same reason, but because AMD's process tech was too unique, nobody wanted to build ASICs in AMD's fabs, so they were stuck with just letting it be partially idle.

      * Tying into that, the reason for expansion was that during the P4 vs. Athlon64 era, AMD's CEO (Hector Ruiz) had come up with a long term strategy of expanding marketshare to 30%. This required a second fab (AMD had traditionally had just one), and aggressive price competition with Intel to buy marketshare. He stuck with it long after Core 2 changed AMD's competitive position for the worse. This left AMD spending tons of money and pricing its products too low during a time when they should've been putting the market share expansion plan on hold, maximizing profits on the products they had, and focusing on new products to put themselves back in front of Intel.

      This all snowballed to the point that AMD was unable to get new loans because they were too much of a credit risk. They were hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, and were having problems with the capital expenditures needed to keep up with Intel on fab technology even after giving up on capacity expansion. It became a death spiral which could only be stopped by selling the fabs. It never would've gotten so bad if it AMD hadn't stumbled so badly on execution and made so many tactical and strategic mistakes.

      (Many in the industry think AMD hasn't been run well since Jerry Sanders retired in 2

  5. This would have been great for.. by ClaraBow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hackintosh community as drivers for AMD based netbooks and laptops would've become available. So wish AMD had the resources to meant high volume demands. Maybe next time!

  6. Re:Not Sure This is Newsworthy by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You don't know why people write articles that you admit you find interesting?

    You judge Slashdot articles on whether computer supply chain logistics readers already know the stories?

    Have another bottle of beer.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  7. Re:Intel by Macrat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    At least AMD doesn't build hardware level backdoors into their CPUs.

    That you know of.

  8. Re:wish they had used AMD chips from the beginning by mehrotra.akash · · Score: 3, Informative

    I meant, doesnt AMD need better battery life to be considered by Apple?
    Apple going with AMD wouldnt improve the battery life as OP implies, AMD having better battery life would increase chances of it getting into Apple devices
    making the comment original

  9. Re:Intel by TrancePhreak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So you believe. http://www.i-programmer.info/news/91-hardware/1586-secret-debug-registers-in-amd-processors.html

    --

    -]Phreak Out[-
  10. Re:PPC vs Intel vs AMD? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Does my XBox count?

    It's a computer. What else would it do?

  11. Re:Not Sure This is Newsworthy by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The "story", in this case, is not that 'Apple had a prototype' but the claim that AMD was Plan A and that the intel Air shipped for volume reasons.

    It's been a while since AMD was plan A for a thin-n-light laptop design...

  12. Re:PPC vs Intel vs AMD? by catmistake · · Score: 3, Informative

    It wasn't a question of IBM "falling behind." IBM is still cutting the bleeding edge as Intel, even today. The PowerPC's in Mac's were different from the PPC's IBM supplies for their own hw and xboxes... one major difference, Mac's PPCs had Altevec. But the issue was IBM wasn't pushing the envelope on the Mac PPC's fast enough for Apple's tastes, not exactly falling behind... IBM didn't have their heart in it because Apple was such a small customer for them... only a small percentage of the chips IBM produced were for the Macintosh. Apple had no negotiating power with IBM to get them to step up their R&D in the Altevec PPCs. Intel saw Apple as a tasty meal and promised them everything they wanted, and except for GPU, pretty much made good on the promises. All of this notwithstanding, PPC's are great technology, and they are still around and will still be around for some time... just not on the desktop (often I make the mistake of thinking the desktop is all there is... of course there are plenty of spaces IBM has taken PPC to that Intel couldn't touch.)

    --
    The Admin and the Engineer