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Ask HN: Could it make sense for Apple to switch to AMD

13 points by hodder 10y ago

Hacker news: could it makes sense for Apple to switch to AMD? Any ideas on the likelihood of a switch given the high performance and low cost of Ryzen chips? I am not a hardware expert so I defer to HN. From a cost perspective it seems like it could make sense to increase Apple margins and maybe decrease costs to increase Mac penetration. Intel has also been known to miss deadlines and cause issues for Apple product launches. What does everyone think?

mtgx 10y ago
AMD's Ryzen on GloFo's 14nm process seems to be highly efficient up till 3.3GHz - even better than Intel with its better process. So I think that's great news for the notebook APUs, but we'll have to see. Apple has already started using AMD's GPUs in some devices, so I could see them moving to AMD in the near future fully or almost fully. And before anyone says that Intel may still offer better performance, if Apple cared about absolute performance, it wouldn't have switched Macbook Air from Core i5 to Core M chips, which likely lowered performance compared to previous generation Macbook Air, or at best stagnated it at the level of a few years old Macbook Air. If switching to AMD will lower the Macbook's BOM costs by 20% (from about 40% represented by Intel chips in ultrabooks now), I think Apple will do it.
mchannon 10y ago
In order for Apple to even consider making that tradeoff, they'd have to find a successor technology to Thunderbolt (Intel makes Thunderbolt), which has been part of the Apple ecosystem for quite some time. USB-C might fit that bill, but I don't see Apple making the jump anytime soon.
tgragnato 10y ago
Well, we have seen m68k, PowerPC, x86_64, arm, AArch64. Given the inherent problems to the x86 architecture, if they could produce a multi-core successor to the A10, an alignment in arm64 between mobile and desktop would be a best fit. - power consumption - no Trojan as a service ;) - a single arch to support - ... The issue here s the performance : beating an Intel processor is not as simple as taping a bunch of cores together.
ploggingdev 10y ago
No. The cost of the AMD CPU itself might be low, but I imagine there is an engineering cost to switch CPU vendors. And for laptops, Intel CPUs provide better battery life which seems to be a higher priority than pure performance. Given Apple's preference to have control over their CPUs, they might end up replacing Intel CPUs with an in house SoC at some point.
brudgers 10y ago
Apple mostly uses ARM and the ARM chips are mostly of its own design. If Apple moves away from Intel for its PC lines, I'd bet on ARM over AMD all day, every day. Of course, AMD could heavily subsidize an Apple switch, but I think that is fairly unlikely. If the new chip is good enough for Apple to switch, it will do fine in the market all on its own. If it isn't, there isn't a big enough subsidy to drive an Apple change.

13 points by hodder 10y ago

mtgx 10y ago

AMD's Ryzen on GloFo's 14nm process seems to be highly efficient up till 3.3GHz - even better than Intel with its better process. So I think that's great news for the notebook APUs, but we'll have to see. Apple has already started using AMD's GPUs in some devices, so I could see them moving to AMD in the near future fully or almost fully. And before anyone says that Intel may still offer better performance, if Apple cared about absolute performance, it wouldn't have switched Macbook Air from Core i5 to Core M chips, which likely lowered performance compared to previous generation Macbook Air, or at best stagnated it at the level of a few years old Macbook Air. If switching to AMD will lower the Macbook's BOM costs by 20% (from about 40% represented by Intel chips in ultrabooks now), I think Apple will do it.

mchannon 10y ago

In order for Apple to even consider making that tradeoff, they'd have to find a successor technology to Thunderbolt (Intel makes Thunderbolt), which has been part of the Apple ecosystem for quite some time. USB-C might fit that bill, but I don't see Apple making the jump anytime soon.

tgragnato 10y ago

Well, we have seen m68k, PowerPC, x86_64, arm, AArch64. Given the inherent problems to the x86 architecture, if they could produce a multi-core successor to the A10, an alignment in arm64 between mobile and desktop would be a best fit. - power consumption - no Trojan as a service ;) - a single arch to support - ... The issue here s the performance : beating an Intel processor is not as simple as taping a bunch of cores together.

ploggingdev 10y ago

No. The cost of the AMD CPU itself might be low, but I imagine there is an engineering cost to switch CPU vendors. And for laptops, Intel CPUs provide better battery life which seems to be a higher priority than pure performance. Given Apple's preference to have control over their CPUs, they might end up replacing Intel CPUs with an in house SoC at some point.

brudgers 10y ago

Apple mostly uses ARM and the ARM chips are mostly of its own design. If Apple moves away from Intel for its PC lines, I'd bet on ARM over AMD all day, every day. Of course, AMD could heavily subsidize an Apple switch, but I think that is fairly unlikely. If the new chip is good enough for Apple to switch, it will do fine in the market all on its own. If it isn't, there isn't a big enough subsidy to drive an Apple change.