Apple in advanced discussions to adopt AMD chips

[BD231]

Dell also wasn't able to move their entire lineup to AMD. They would if AMD had the warehouse capacity but AMD just can't operate like that.

Dell has been an Intel VIP customer since I was downing breast milk. I've never seen Dell harbor the thought of AMD besting Intel, either. At best, dell put themselves in better position to take advantage of AMD's offerings should any noteworthy piece of silicon steal the show. But that's just my take on the Dell/AMD shenanigans. For all the advertising Dell dose, they didn't try very hard to push AMD on anyone.

One thing I've certainly seen Dell do is complain about pricing.

Leverage with Intel on pricing was more likely then, and it's probably more likely now with the MacBook. Intel has been known to charge heavily for performance that can't be matched and MacBooks are using Core processor's pretty much exclusively at this point.

I think what we have here is history repeating itself. In the world of Mac less processing power used to be the norm, so if Mac decides to cut corners going AMD it could certainly be a gainful opportunity for them. Probably more so than dell could (would) ever make of it through marketing alone.

We're talking about the makers of the IMac here, Mac can sell anything and they do.

In any case I doubt we'd see that cost reduction returned to the customer, Macs have not been value oriented since the Power PC days.

 

[Kaido]

I'll take a 12-core AMD Mac, thank you very much

I think Apple hasn't been real pleased with Intel's craptastic integrated graphics...their new 330m systems in their laptops are weird Frankenstein hybrid fusions of Intel & NVIDIA graphics. I'm sure AMD would be more than willing to play ball if they got some Apple action and increased their marketshare that way.

 

[ZimZum]

Dell is still much bigger than Apple in terms of the number of computers sold, IIRC. AMD doesn't have a ton of capacity, but Apple only moves what? 2-3mil laptops per quarter?

Moving 3 million Macs total is a good quarter for Apple.

 

[ElFenix]

i don't see apple moving to amd unless bulldozer really is that good.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

this might be a good marketing move. they could come out with a $1200 phenom imac, you know, offer something lower end at an only slighty lower price point while still making craploads off it

 

[DrMrLordX]

I'll take a 12-core AMD Mac, thank you very much

There ARE single-socket G34 boards out there for Magny-Cours. I wonder if they will come out with a version of k10stat for OSX? Hmm!

 

[srp49ers]

This kinda reminds me of when rumors came out that apple was planning a move to intel. I distinctly remember some head scratching going on around here. At that time AMD was firmly in the lead with the Athlon X2's in both power and performance.

Well it turned out that Apple was privy to a sneak peak of what Conroe was going to be.
Maybe apple is being shown something enticing from AMD. My guess would be that it is Llano.