Apple Joins Hands with Intel - Why Not AMD?
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I can think of more than a few reasons why. One of the most obvious is the Intel brand name. Even if AMD chips perform as well as Pentium ones, AMD doesn’t have mainstream brand recognition. The Intel name is more valuable and widely trusted by people browsing machines at Circuit City. Also, uninformed computer buyers are still watching clockspeeds as the sole determination of a computer’s value, which is part of what sells Intel and has cursed Apple.
Another obvious reason is that AMD does not have the mobile suite that Intel does. The A64 is flexible enough to do well in that environment, especially with the new branding that AMD has provided (Turion 64), as well as more optimizations to get into thin and light class notebooks. However, all that AMD designs is the CPU. There is no specific mobile chipset to match it with, let alone wireless cards and other advancements that Intel has made so that they can provide the whole enchilada in terms of mobile hardware. The same goes for the desktop and server level hardware.
The less obvious reasoning comes from AMDs relationship with IBM. At the moment, Athlon64 performance is nearly completely dependent on process technology (SOIfor example) borrowed fromIBM. If you are leaving a company for another why would you move to a new one that is similarly dependent on your old one that you weren't happy with? It doesn't make any sense. Until AMD can show that they have their own innovations to solve process issues (with Fab36 perhaps?) I don't believe Apple would be willing to tie their fate to them. At least with the move to x86, Apple does have the option of both companies without further changes to the code base.
Some people have been wondering how Apple could have the forethought to keep OS X builds on Intel hardware. I have kept the software issues for a separate article, but I want to explain that part now too (since it relates to why all this could even happen). The OS X backend is based off of BSD, a type of UNIX. Originally this had to be ported to PowerPC, since it was written for x86 to begin with. So most of the operating system code already was there as Intel specific. The pretty GUI stuff and many of the other libraries Apple has added in are processor independent as a result of their programming philosophy.
Well, that concludes our initial look at the Apple-Intel deal for this article. To wrap up, this whole series of events occurred due toIBM's inability to supply a mobile class G5 processor, as well the difficulty in providing one that operates at 3GHz+ in the desktop environment going forward. Intel has in its future plans mobile CPUs based off of its wildly successful Pentium M in both single and dual core flavors, in addition to the rest of the Centrino platform. That is reason enough by itself, but there's more.
Intel also concentrates heavily on the CPU market, whileIBMhas a bit of a wandering eye. Lastly, OS X was already set up to run on that platform. It was just a question of creating the tools to port the existing and future application code bases to run on both platforms. In articles following this one, we will discuss what this means to Apple's product line and how they plan to solve the software issue of going from one architecture to another.
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