TechTV's ScreenSavers Says AMD & Apple To Make Announcement At Comdex Today

by , 8:00 AM EST, November 19th, 2002

TechTV's ScreenSavers offered a report from the show's cohost, Leo Laporte, from Comdex that Mac users will likely find interesting. According to Mr. Laporte, a Mac user himself, AMD is expected to make a major announcement with Apple during AMD CEO Hector Luiz's keynote presentation. That presentation is scheduled to begin at 9:00 AM, PST today.

ScreenSavers' Leo Laporte also said that the word going around Comdex is that the announcement will be about Apple adopting AMD's "Hammer" line of processors. This qualifies as newsworthy at TMO only because of its mainstream source. We can not confirm any of it, though it is lour long stated position that a move away from PowerPC by Apple is not possible due to the impractical aspect of asking developers to make yet another change, when the change to Mac OS X itself is not yet complete, as well as many other related issues.

TMO will be watching the news from Comdex to see if anything develops. Thanks to Observer L0u13 for his assistance with this piece. You can find more information on ScreenSavers at TechTV's Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Apple is not moving to AMD, at least not the company's Clawhammer series. If we are wrong about that, we will promptly eat crow, but we do expect that Apple will somehow be involved in the keynote today. Apple VP Phil Schiller is on hand at Comdex, though Apple doesn't have vendor presence at the show, and the comments from Mr. Laporte were pretty specific about Apple being involved in the AMD keynote.

Our favorite bit of speculation comes from Observer Spider who suggested in our IRC channel that AMD and Apple would announce a joint takeover of Motorola's PowerPC operations. That would make a number of things work out fairly conveniently, and it's a very intriguing idea. However, we are more inclined to follow some thoughts suggested on an AMD fan site (and pointed out by our own Robert Paul Leitao in our forums) that suggests Apple and AMD may be working to bring Darwin, Apple's Open Source foundation for Mac OS X, to AMD. That's a much different animal, and more in keeping with a keynote not designed for Apple's core user base (Macworld Expo).

Fortunately, we will know what is actually happening, if anything, sometime after 9:00 AM, Pacific.