“After leading the design of Apple’s mobile processors, which have powered the iPhone and iPad over the last few years, chip architect Jim Keller is returning to AMD to head up its microprocessor core design team, the chipmaker announced today. Keller is an industry veteran who brought plenty of experience to Apple’s mobile processors. He was previously vice president at P.A. Semiconductor, which Apple acquired in 2008 for $278 million, and he went on to serve as a director of Apple’s platform architecture group.”
I’ve had AMDs in my personal computers since the K6-2. They always seemed to have a performance vs price sweet spot.
However, its been a bit hard to justify not having an Intel recently.
Agreed.
I had a K6-2, I bought a board recommended in PC Pro and I am glad I did. Most K6-2 systems suffered from poorly made motherboards with low amounts of cache. I had double the usual amount and the board was well made. My sister had a cheaper board with the same K6-2 and it was night and day performance.
AMD’s CPUs have lagged (barely if not worse than the previous generation of AMD) whilst Intel has been on a purple patch.
At the budget end of the market I would still double check the benchmarks. However i3/i5/i7 are just do good value.
Buying ATI is the best thing they ever did. I really wonder where they would be now without them.
Somewhere inside the boxes I keep a K6-II, I consider it the first multimedia CPU
I had a AMD spitfire 600, and it could be clocked with c2 snow to past 3 ghz. And i think the spitfire also lacked the SMP lock, so you could have used several of those bad boys. I know of very few chips that had more than 5x overclock rate. imagine intel I7 running at 4ghz*5 (20 ghz).
I have to agree. I’ve been buying AMD since the days of the Athlon and once they got rid of Phenom II its been awfully hard to justify going AMD. You either get the “crippled half core” of Bulldozer/Piledriver or stuck with a GPU that you may not want with Liano. They killed the successor to Bobcat so Liano is all they really have in mobile, and worst of all BD/PD won’t work right unless you have Windows 8 as Win 7 and below treat its half cores as HyperThreading so that quad ends up running like a dual.
Lets just hope Mr Keller can right the ship as I remember what it was like when Intel was the only game in town and it wasn’t fun. as long as I can get the Zosma and Thuban Phenom II chips along with the Athlon II I’ll keep building AMD desktops but my customers don’t want Windows 8 which means BD/PD is right out. BD is not a good design, its too hot, too power hungry and gives too little for too much heat, its netburst all over again, yuck.
Would Intel be doing so well now if AMD hadn’t embarrassed the P4 architecture? I don’t know. It was good for consumers though. Our 64-Bit transition was far easier and a competitive Intel is producing some of it’s finest chips.
I really hope AMD gets back in the game, we need them to keep Intel on their toes.
Yes. Having competition is very beneficial to everyone.
As often in this kind of moves, I wonder whether his primary wish was to leave Apple or to (re)join AMD.
Most of the times it’s just money.
Also he arrived at Apple via a takeover and it’s often not easy to fit in if you’re a high level person. Being used to have a free hand to a more restricted situation is something most people wouldn’t like. Could you imagine Apple being taken over years ago and Steve having to report to someone else?
So if AMD calls offers him money and certain freedom I’m not surprised he went for it.
A stolen Quote from /.
now they should hire John Mathieson from nvidia
don’t know where i read about it, but there was an article about who left apple and where they went
had the vibe of rats leaving the sinking ship…
Apple keeps growing and growing. If they end is really near a sinking ship isn’t a fitting comparison, a sun going nova would more suit it.
I kind of agree.
However it probably has more to do with the kind of people that reach this level.
They need a challenge and the smoothly oiled and slightly predictable Apple might seem dull compared to potential glory making of resurrecting AMD’s CPU business. Especially if Steve did work out Apple’s roadmap for the near future.
To be honest I don’t totally believe this Steve’s magic roadmap.
It’s hard to predict how the future will look, let alone in the tech world.
Steve saved Apple and a lot of people thought Apple would be lost if Steve left. So I kind of suspect this roadmap story is just a way to buy Apple time to prove they can manage find without Steve.
Don’t forget it didn’t bother Steve to tell you straight in the face something that wasn’t true. It could be his final RDF act straight from the other side.
Too true, I think that sounds more plausible.
Not to mention the numerous times that Jobs famously did a complete 180 when he saw that all of the facts were completely against his previous view. Which is the way smart people do work, not a knock on him by any means. However, if they start treating any kind of last instructions from him as a holy, unalterable, infallible text, then they’re going to be screwed in the mid to long term.
At least we’re sure he won’t change his mind any time soon.
Should he return to Apple it would be his Third Comming, going up one against Jesus and providing huge marketing possibilities.
So will we be looking forward to an article on Apple filing claims against AMD next in the near future on the release of new AMD CPUs?
God, I didn’t even think of that trial …
Fortunately I can vote with my wallet. I’ve never bought an Intel CPU after buying up my first AMD K7 and I will keep doing that as long as I can. It’s not that I have anything against Intel *now*, but better be safe than sorry. Also, AMD is still very competitive if you compare the price/power ratio. Normally people don’t need the best of the best (and paying 1K for a CPU) and AMD is a very smart choice. Don’t forget to add the motherboard cost to the CPU cost.