News Apple buys San Jose semiconductor fab

Is it thought that Apple might move into the desktop GPU business? With AMD fading like an ageing Hollywood star who has had too many facelifts, we could do with Nvidia having a serious new competitor.

 

Can you imagine the price of an Apple branded graphics card?

There's having competition, and then there's a laughing stock.

 

Unless Apple buy into AMD gpu business - which has recently spun off

 

I really don't understand the mentality that AMD is struggling to keep up with GPUs. They're using a relatively old design that's easily holding up to nvidia. The only GPUs nvidia has that are noticeably better than AMD's offerings are the 980Ti and 750Ti, and the former is too expensive for the average person. Everything else, AMD is very competitive against.

 

AMD's old designs are inefficient and will only drop further behind, especially once Nvidia launches it's new architecture next year. The company is constantly losing money and doesn't have the resources to develop products that can really take the fight to Nvidia, this can lead to complacency at Nvidia, as they don't need to work so hard to maintain an edge over AMD. Customers would benefit from Nvidia having a well funded competitor to push the pace of innovation but, AMD cannot be that competitor.

 

They're not that inefficient compared to nvidia... The efficiency differences aren't that great.

The company is mostly losing money thanks to their CPU division. And again - they ARE making products competing with nvidia, but, as long as people like you think otherwise, where do you suspect AMD is supposed to get the funding?

 

Apple if they make a gpu will be exclusive to Apple it won't be sold to PC hardware enthusiasts. They have threatened it before. There iPad pro gpu is Faster than PS3 / Xbox 360 so they are not as far behind as people would think.

Would make development of the MacBook range a lot easier if they could design to requirements.

 

And these are significantly weaker than Intel's current run of integrated graphics (HD530). Why would they (Apple) want to downgrade their GPU performance which they are getting "for free" inside every Intel CPU they purchase for their desktop/laptop machines?

 

You do realise that AMD are releasing new architecture GPUs next year too? This design should be a step up in efficiency, changes which will have been made because NVIDIA veered off in this direction.
The hold up has been because 14/16nm GPUs will be possible by then because the process will be able to carry the complex GPU structures at the required size and all the work for 20nm had to be abandoned.
In fact I've been wondering if AMD's will be first to market because they're going to be using GFs Fishkill lab in the US and don't have the Chinese new year to contend with.

 

Because they could code there own gpu to the hardware software config on the systems similar to how current consoles are. With there Metal API they already have a way to do it also.

In 2 years they have gone from early PlayStation performance to above PS3 or Xbox 360 performance at that rate of development they will surpass what the Intel gpu can do.

 

Apple could actually achieve what AMD wanted for several years: a unified CPU and GPU (not just HSA). With explicit software control and optimizations, their research budget; it could (finally) really happen.

 

I doubt it takes a massive amount of R&D to move performance from 20 years behind to 10 years behind when the technology to do so is pretty readily available.

Now to get from 10 years behind to current performance levels, that's where the real spending lies, and it's where Apple probably know that there's just no point.

 

Agree with Bindi on this, Apple for mobile wants to be the creator of there own hardware. Including CPU and gpu. They already use highly modified for both. If they can get to the point where they can unify those 2 they could gain massive performance leads in mobile.

To surpass the Intel gpu which lets be honest is at least 5 years behind performance wise of the top end gpus if not further than that. Is not that big a ask and that's Apples goal. They want to be the creator of there own destiny in hardware and with software mirrored.

They would not need to gain much if they hit ps4 levels off performance in the next 2 years that would likely be enough for there goals of leaving AMD, Nvidia behind and having a full all in one solution. That they could fit in the IPhone / IPad and MacBook range.