AMD new licensee, Apple

[kendall]

Could it be? Tommorow will tell! Though I highly doubt anyone but the man himself (Steve Jobs) would be announcing something this big. Does anyone know if he's at Comdex?

Move over AIM, here comes AA! Story first seen here.

[kommakazi]

I Followed the link there to http://www.amdzone.com and sure enough in their news on the main page there is a blurb about a large amount of Apple people attending Comdex...with rumored attendance at Hector Ruiz's keynote for AMD where they are going to announce a new lisencee (I can't spell)...scroll down more they say AMD possibly delayed release of the 64-bit Hammer processor to give Apple time to finish porting OS X....scrolling down further is a blurb (yes I like the word 'blurb' damnit!) that on Apple's open-source site there are some links for developers about the x86-64 platform for compiling applications...basically a lot of interesting little blurbs. But what could this all add up to? Were we foolish to expect Apple to wait an entire year for IBM's PPC 970 stuck with sh*tty Moto G4's? A year is a long time...the G4 is dying quickly ( mostly due to incompetence on Moto's part, but nevertheless still dying... ). AMD's new 64-bit Hammer processor is right on the horizon...Apple could really be in place to take it and blow the consumer market apart with 64-bit desktop machines....I don't think they'll abandon the G4 completely right away...keep it in the i/eMac and shove it into the next iBooks, possibly keep it in the TiBooks even for one more revision. I've never taken the Apple on x86 rumors too seriously until now...and with all the past ones it adds up, I think something is definately brewing here. Perhaps Apple will still use the PPC 970 when it finally is released...give consumers the option of a PPC or x86 chip in their PowerMac...or maybe instead of all that I just said I'm just totally off my rocker and going insane. Either is quite possible at this point. What do all of you think?

Also just noted that the weekly poll on the main amdzone.com page is "Next AMD Customer?
Is Apple or Dell more likely to be the next AMD customer?"
0 Apple is really thinking different!
0 Dude, Dell!

Interestingly enough Apple is favored 58.48% to Dell's 41.52%...
Just a stupid poll but makes me wonder even more...

[MacLuv]

[MacLuv]

[kommakazi]

There's one giant hole I can poke in this whole theory though: AltiVec. Too much has already been moved toward AltiVec to just drop it off suddenly, major developers and the scientific community would be outraged at such an action... It is possible that AMD could aquire a liscence to it or already have...though I'm sure we would have heard about this already if they had. Any thought on this?

[kendall]

Moving away from PPC would be the smartest thing Apple could possibly do.

[wiz]

and i thought PPC was better than the x86

[kommakazi]

Originally posted by MacLuv
Who cares about RISC processing? It's over, man, we've been through this before...

Interestingly enough, the AMD Opteron (and even the Athlon) has many features of RISC processors: it supports out-of-order execution, has multiple floating-point units, and can issue up to 9 instructions simultaneously. Detailed info here: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~steen/web02/opteron.html