It boggles my mind that Apple hasn't switched to AMD Ryzen yet. Lower cost for them, more cores/higher overall performance for their customers. What's not to like?
But no, they'd rather try and sell people $20,000 Xeon Mac Pros with half the cores of an AMD Threadripper and like 4x the price.
I am secretly hoping that at least for Desktop Mac, Apple could switch to AMD. They could leave the Mac Pro and iMac Pro for Xeon ( Or they could choose AMD and that will be EPYC ) But right now it is very hard to argue for purchasing Intel when AMD offer many more cores for lower price at the expense of ~20% peak single threaded performance.
Unless Intel offer Apple very good deal but I thought part of the Intel / AMD agreement was Intel can not use any tactics to undercut AMD with incentives or rebate or something similar.
At the same time Intel is like assembling old Apple alumni from CPU to GPU.
It baffles me that Apple continues to use Xeons (?!) over Ryzen 9/Threadrippers in its Mac Pros, most of all because it could gain a much larger profit margin than with the Intel CPUs, but also because I think they could make the Mac Pros a bit more accessible to professionals.
It makes little sense, considering they already use AMD GPUs, so it's not like they can even say "we just wanted the very best for our customers" (which doesn't seem to be Intel for CPUs anymore anyway), because then they would've gone with Nvidia GPUs.
This is purely because of its corporate relationship with Intel and the product and the customers suffer for it.
Apple should have switched to AMD instead. They would have almost perfect compatibility with Intel hardware and they would not need investing lots of money to develop chips.
Now they either need to halt some Mac lines or develop all kinds of CPUs, from mobile (which they probably can do, because they should be similar enough to iPhones) to server-grade (which they have no experience at all). And there's no way Mac Pros would sell enough to offset development costs. I just don't understand how they are going to manage that situation.
I wonder if Apple knows something about what Intel has in store, or if they just doin't care because the performance of their ARM-type chips will be so vastly better they can emulate x86 and still be faster than what Intel has.
That being said, the Mac Pro with a 64-core Ryzen chip and 4TB of memory would have been absolutely nuts.
Why doesn't Apple buy AMD? I know there's a perennial dance around their buying Intel, but that would probably raise some pretty gnarly questions (antitrust, for a start).
But AMD has solid GPU experience, solid x86 and chipset experience, and with Ryzen is (finally) making some headway against Intel's CPU lead. What's not to love?
Apple has been screwed by CPU manufacturers 3 times already, or do you think they changed architectures because they were having great fun doing that?
In the past 3 years I've seen more and more people asking not for an Arm Mac, but for an AMD Mac. Because AMD is again cheaper and faster than Intel.
But it appears Apple can now afford to build their own CPUs that are better and lower power than either AMD or Intel. Not to mention PowerPC, which is still around in some form at IBM :)
It's a no brainer for them. No one can screw them over now except themselves.
This is a unique situation though. Intel is now years behind in their process nodes. Ryzen right now is already significantly better than any Intel CPU. M1 has been released which trounces all of those and PC manufacturers now have to compete with Apple in a way that they haven't really before. I don't remember Apple ever being this competitive in performance and they're going to take the lead once the Macbook Pros are released. The only way for manufacturers to keep up is a top-to-bottom switch to Ryzen.
So I do think we're going to see a big shift towards Ryzen, since I'm not sure how Intel could possibly entice manufacturers to stick with them when they haven't been able to deliver in years.
Any chance Apple will ever consider AMD chips for the MacBook Pro or any of their computers. I have to wonder how much of the $4k+ I just spent on my MacBook Pro went to pay for the Intel 8-core CPU...
Great marketing. I wonder the sales difference if they were also selling Macs with current generation AMD Ryzen chips manufactured on a modern TSMC node.
Given that Apple is tightly coupled with Intel for now, I would assume that they did not expect AMD to deliver great new CPUs and did not create the Mac Pro to compete with them in mind IMO.
It would be interesting if Apple used these chips in upcoming Mac desktops.
I'm guessing that adopting these lower priced chips without lowering prices would have a negligible impact on sales for Apple if the performance is as good as AMD claims.
I just can't believe they chose the 18-core 2018 Intel vaporware chip [1] over this year's 16-core AMD Threadripper. Very strange decision on Apple's part. Not to mention they could've sold the iMac Pro for like $1,000 less.
I think amd may be on the verge of fixing a lot of the problems that intel has run into in their inability to move forward quickly - the 10nm switch is potentially devestating intel (intel's slow pace of advancement is kind of what the article eventually gets to). If apple said they were going to focus on amd chips at this point, the market would be excited. Are those apple arms going to be able to really handle the cpu load and scale over time like large market intel and amd design teams are scaling investments over billions of devices? I'd just be afraid apple isn't quite big enough. It's very exciting when a change like this comes along in any case. Will they run x86 'legacy' mac programs at a reasonable speed?
But no, they'd rather try and sell people $20,000 Xeon Mac Pros with half the cores of an AMD Threadripper and like 4x the price.
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