Apple and AMD - a marriage made in heaven?

Reg Hardware is speculating that Apple may be interested in utilising AMD chips in new Macs that are coming in the future. I better reiterate that this is purely speculation, but apparently AMD CEO Hector Ruiz was quoted as saying:

“Why would they [Apple] want to be held hostage [to Intel] like everyone else has been?”

Certainly a move to use AMD processors in their computers would be credible if it happened. One of the features Apple is showcasing about their next operating system release Mac OS X Leopard, is full 64-bit support (at the application level, not just the system level).

While some of the more top-end PowerPC-based Macs had 64-bit chips, only the new Mac Pro has an Intel Xeon 64-bit chip which would be able to fully take advantage of this feature.

But if Apple were to go to AMD, they would have access to the Athlon 64 range, which are considerably cheaper than the Xeon (which has traditionally been used for servers). Apple could choose processors from the Athlon 64 X2 dual core range for the iMac consumer desktop machine and get the 64-bit capabilities in their consumer products, not just their pro products.

On the other hand, Apple may well choose just to stick with the one new processor brand, partly to try and reinforce the difference between a ‘Mac’ and a ‘PC’. Also, they have marketed all the new Macs as Intel-based Macs, which is fair enough, because they are. If they used AMD chips as well, they would end up with PowerPC-based machines and Intel-based and AMD-based machines. This could potentially cause confusion to the vital Windows switcher market, which would not be good news for Apple.

So in my eyes it’s pretty 50/50 here, with both upsides and downsides for both ways to go. With AMD officials talking about it, however, inevitably the Apple rumour mill will start up again following their event a couple of weeks ago.