Leo Laporte was reporting from Comdex on the ScreenSavers tonight. He heard that AMD’s CEO is going to announce at a keynote tomorrow, that Apple will be using the Hammer CPU’s in the near future.

I’ll go on record as being a skeptic of this rumor, what are your thoughts?

Pure, unadulterated bull@%^$.

I sincerely doubt this, because of all the other reasons we’ve talked about before and because of the 970.

Perhaps they could be talking about HyperTransport and they’re just reading something wrong? AMD and Apple are part of the HyperTransport consortium, lest I recall.

Here’s a tidbit from an AMD affinity site that may help clarify the issue.

That wouldn’t be a bad move. but i would love to see a 64 bit PPC chip instead.

I’m skeptical, but I don’t think it’s impossible.

The hammer model is a next generation 64-bit chip, and according to The Register, http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/27621.html , AMD’s claiming that it’ll ship sooner and faster than the IBM model.

That said, I think the technical hurdles towards the Hammer are against it: The lack of Altivec and a PowerPC legacy are going to be difficult to deal with, and would require another program rewrite, something programmers probably wouldn’t be happy with after the major rewrite of MacOS X.

Still, real-world performance, and the benchmarks of the IBM chips once systems are shipping are going to be impossible to accurately guage until they’re released.

Ah, that makes MUCH more sense. Thanks. =)

Let’s remember that Darwin and Mac OS X are two separate products. Granted, OS X runs on a Darwin layer, but Apple has other uses for Open Source Darwin than Mac OS X.

Apple is pushing its technology and the development of products using Darwin or Darwin ports to other hardware have a mulitude of uses. At some point Apple’s plans for Darwin and growth in Apple’s market share may converge, but not at a point anytime in the near future.

The continuing maturity of Darwin as a development tool will only help Apple, but a full-blown version of OS X running on AMD hardware in a form and fashion that would produce a commercially viable OS X product that could challenge other operating systems on AMD hardware for sales is light years away in development terms, not to mention calling into question Apple’s hardware sales-focused business model.

Let me be the devil’s advocate and point out that Apple could avoid this problem by simply not letting it boot on anything other than Apple hardware.  Remember, OS X currently doesn’t boot on other PPC-based machines even though others exist…

Well, in any case… AMD is announcing *something* with Apple tomorrow. We’ll find out sometime between 9-10AM PST.

Let me be the devil’s advocate and point out that Apple could avoid this problem by simply not letting it boot on anything other than Apple hardware. 

Yes, that worked so well that IBM never had an unauthorized clone in the PC market, did they? 

It didn’t sound like it was clear AMD was announcing anything with *Apple* specifically tomorrow.  Here’s what I originally saw:

There was a lot of talk around the media people about Apple’s presence so far at Comdex this year. In the Comdex press briefing we were told that Hector Ruiz would make a “shattering” announcement about a new licensee. As much as Dell would be a shocker to the public, the shattering news would be Apple moving to the x86 platform.

So Apple has a bigger presence at Comdex than usual.  And AMD is to make a “shattering” announcement about a new licensee.  Interesting, but nothing clear to connect the two.  Any connection is thus far speculation.  A search on the AMDZone site turns up previous references to Apple in story tidbits, but clicking on the links in the search results will not bring up the referenced writings.

Ah, well, we’ll see in another few hours what all the fuss is about.

Hyper transport, they’re both members of the group and they’ll simply announce somthing regarding it.  No big.

One question:

What would be so bad about seeind Mac OS X running on a AMD and wouldn’t it then be possible to run an OS X on a Pentium?

Well, but I don’t know to much about all of the stuff, so maybe this is all bull$@|7.

[quote author=“Johannes”]One question:

What would be so bad about seeind Mac OS X running on a AMD and wouldn’t it then be possible to run an OS X on a Pentium?

Well, but I don’t know to much about all of the stuff, so maybe this is all bull$@|7.

Basically all mac apps are compiled for the ppc platform.  The switch to a different processor all the developers would have to recompile and possilby rewrite thier code.  Not to mention what about altivec?

You think the transition to OSX was bad, this would be several orders of magnitude worse!

omgwtfbbq!

You know, it just hit me.

1) M$ has been pushing the TabletPC.
2) Apple has been pushing Rendezvous and Bluetooth.
3) M$ is most likely in bed with Intel.
4) AMD needs a bed partner.
5) Apple needs to combat the TabletPC.
6) Apple wants to show off OS X’s scalability.
7) Apple wants a new revenue stream.
8) G4’s suck too much power for a TabletPC.
9) G3’s suck too much for a TabletPC.
10) OS X is already ready already for x86.
11) ???
12) Profit!

Apple TabletPC with AMD processor… maybe just wishful thinking. If you’re gonna wish, wish big!

That would also make the Macs abit cheaper, wouldn’t it?
I mean, the AMD processors are very cheap compared to the Motoroler ones.