Future Apple hardware to be powered by AMD?

Those sleuthing Apple informants seem to have struck gold once again. After noticing a continuous stream of AMD bosses and representatives travelling to and from Apple’s Cupertino campus, they’re now reporting that Apple is seriously considering the #2 chipmaker as a replacement for its current Intel offerings. Apple is thought to be unhappy with Intel, whose prolonged chip development cycle has slowed the pace of Apple’s hardware refresh and whose incompatibility with Nvidia has forced Apple to use the less than optimal integrated Intel graphics chipset. In fact, Apple’s dissatisfaction with Intel’s GPU performance is what prompted the company to develop the novel automatic graphics switching utilized by its recently refreshed MacBook Pro line-up. The hardware work-around allows the notebook to switch from the integrated Intel chipset to the more powerful NVIDIA GT 320M and GT 330M cards when needed. AMD, with its strong ties to ATI, could seemingly offer Apple greater flexibility over its future products which might one day include a powerful graphics subsytem worthy of the Apple name. Before you get too excited and sell your new Core i5 and Core i7 MBPs on eBay, keep in mind that all of this is speculation based upon the rather ambiguous, yet highly referenced “people familiar with the matter”. Respond appropriately.

Read