Robert said:
"The forums"? Does that include comp.sys.intel?
You'll have to ask Gundeep, he's the one that brought it up.
The Apple-Intel deal tells the story, and a post in the comp.arch
thread about the Apple-Intel deal summarizes the problem nicely: one
processor just isn't enough. You need a whole family of processors
and chipsets tweaked to fit into lots of market segments. AMD *still*
doesn't have a presence in the notebook market, AFAIK. AMD was
probably interviewed, they probably said they were working on it, and
Apple said, "Yeah, right."
Well, what happens when you offer all of that and still nobody picks up
your product? You just have to look back at AMD's early Opteron
experience. It engineered a complete barebones server platform (through
Newisys), and manufacturers were still balking until their customers
forced them to accept it (IBM, for example was forced to accept it by a
group of its Japanese customers looking to buy a supercomputer). AMD
actually went beyond just offering an accompanying chipset, it offered
the whole platform to manufacturers, all they would have to do is add
hard disks and a logo. Now the ball has gotten going, but it took a
while for it get started rolling.
Well, the Turion platforms are coming out now. By the time Apple is
ready to offer its first x86 machine (in one year), that platform will
already be mature and probably already on its second or third
generation. It's not as if Apple would be manufacturing its own laptops
anyways, those are always done by the Taiwanese laptop houses.
One company in particular comes to mind which is offering AMD64
laptops, which is Acer; Acer produces probably five times as many
systems as Apple, it's now the second or third largest laptop brand in
the world. And it's seen fit to produce Athlon 64, Sempron, and Turion
laptops. Of course, AMD was in a rare power position with respect to
Acer: it sponsors the Ferrari F1 team, and Acer wanted to produce
Ferrari-logo'ed laptops, it's only choice was to do it with AMD
processors. When AMD forces them to try its processors, they usually
tend become loyal. But the fact that AMD has to force these
manufacturers to use its processors is highly suspicious.
The benefit of huge volume is that can make all those different tweaks
and flavors. It just didn't make economic sense for IBM to try to
fulfull Apple's wish list. The volume was too small. It might make
sense for AMD to try, but their promises apparently aren't credible.
Intel's promises aren't always credible either, but when Intel fails
to deliver, you're no worse off than everybody else, and Intel will
eventually deliver something.
As I said, Apple is not even expecting to introduce anything until one
or two years out. AMD's credibility has been a lot more than Intel's in
the past three years. But it's not really the manufacturing or platform
credibility that matters here, it's the advertising credibility. Apple
can now advertise its Macs on TV for cheap.
Yousuf Khan
