November 30, 2010, 2:42 PM — For the past few years, predicting the CPUs that Apple would put inside its Macs has been relatively easy. Ever since Apple made the move to Intel's x86 processors, the Mac road map mirrored Intel's road map: Intel would release a new CPU, and a few months later Apple would release a new Mac. It was like clockwork, and it removed some of the surprise from Apple's otherwise difficult-to-predict product-release cadence.
But over the past year, Apple effectively smashed that clock. It all started with the MacBook Pros released in April 2010.
In that round of updates, only two members of the MacBook Pro family--the 15-inch ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ) and 17-inch ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) models--got Intel's then-new "Arrandale" microprocessors (more popularly known as the Core i5 and Core i7 chips). Those CPUs took advantage of some of Intel's most up-to-date technologies--including a 32-nanometer manufacturing process, Hyper-Threading, and Turbo Boost. The 13-inch MacBook Pro ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), however, stuck with the older Core 2 Duo CPU.
The simple decision to stick with the Core 2 Duo indicated two things: first, that the Apple--Intel relationship might not be as cozy as it once was; and, second, that Apple really likes graphics processing units (GPUs). Those two points will drive much of Apple's hardware decision-making over the next two years.
Intel Inside?
Apple is the best kind of manufacturer a CPU vendor could partner with: Its products virtually market themselves. And being associated with the Apple brand is still a very good thing. The company is known as an early adopter of new technologies (at least those it believes in). The retail prices for its products are high enough to allow the company to use the best available hardware. Apple owns the hardware and software stack, so it can implement new features on a whim without waiting for slow software partners to catch up to market trends.
Though working with Apple can certainly be a pain, those benefits are apparently lucrative enough that Intel relaxed almost all of its usual marketing standards. Apple chooses where to put Intel's logos on its products. You won't always see a mention of specific Intel brands in Apple marketing. (Apple does include Intel model numbers in its tech specs.) For example, nVidia gets a mention on the box the Mac mini ships in, but Intel doesn't.
As far as I can tell, Apple's customers didn't mind when it used the Core 2 Duo in the 13-inch MacBook Pro (and, more recently, in the 11- and 13-inch MacBook Airs ). If those products sell just fine, Apple will probably no longer see the need to use Intel's latest and greatest products.
At the same time, Apple has seen the need to use powerful GPUs in its computers. You can't buy a Mac today that doesn't have a robust GPU of some sort. Even the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros pair their integrated graphics with an nVidia GPU, just in case you need it. Thanks to the OpenCL spec, such GPUs can be used for more than just real-time graphics rendering, taking on general computing tasks as well.
So you have a company that seems no longer to care as much as it once did about Intel's CPUs, but that increasingly cares a lot about GPUs. While I can't imagine Apple dropping Intel altogether, these two factors make me wonder whether Apple will at least consider using CPUs from AMD in the next two years.
The AMD Option
