Apple Hires AMD's Trinity Engineer John Bruno
Until recently, Bruno was system architect at AMD and responsible for "all aspects of the definition and delivery of the 2012 Comal platform that includes the Trinity Fusion APU," according to his LinkedIn profile.
The profile reveals that he joined Apple as a system architect, but there is no further information about his new responsibilities. His expertise is in the integration of the Trinity APU and covers a range of graphics chipset projects at AMD, including the 690G, 780G and 880G. According to Slashgear, Bruno was part of AMD's 10 percent job cut last November, that led some of them to take on SoC design roles at companies such as Samsung.
The Internet rumor mill is full of ideas what Bruno could be doing at Apple. One example could be that Apple would leverage him on the road to ditch Intel processors in its notebook and/or desktop computers. Bruno did not reply to our request for comment on his new job.
I see this as a gain from both sides if they ever wanna go for it. suck to kill hackintosh but hey.... if the cash does help AMD to stay more competitive to Intel, Why not.
Kudos to the employees of the Apple marketing engine. They are the best on the planet.
Then again, why not go Intel?
This isn't an AMD-Apple partnership, at least not from the article. It's simply ex-AMD exec goes to Apple.
Yeah, because history has shown us just how much apple execs, and large corporations in general, care about laws and rules.
True, that's not what the words of the article say. But what's interesting is considering the fact that Apple approached AMD for using their llano/APUs in the macbook air (and I would assume other laptops in their lineup), but AMD couldn't commit to the volume Apple was requesting. I wonder if AMD has more confidence in their trinity production (questionable, given recent literature on AMD), and Apple has approached them again.
Using the APU makes slight sense given Apple's "end-to-end" unification theme, and the fact that not all of Intel's Ivy Bridge processors will get the competent HD4000 gpu.
I would like it for AMD if this hiring of an ex-engineer at Apple meant that Apple wanted the competency in their company for integrating AMD processors. But as it stands, there's nothing to support that idea just yet.
Interesting news regardless.
This makes no sense. Why would Apple look to use AMD's APUs in portable devices? AMD hasn't even engineered any of their APUs to function outside of the desktop/laptop application. The CPU footprint is giant compared to the current (overpowered for iOS) ARM processors used, and is entirely outside of the pricepoint for mobile device processors. In addition, the entire iOS ecosystem is designed to run on Apple's ARM processors--a re-work of the hardware platform would essentially cause the ecosystem to go back to page 1. Plus Apple has a huge dedicated engineering group for ARM processor development for their iOS devices. While they currently sub-contract/purchase desktop/laptop processors from vendors.
If (IF) Apple is interested in working with AMD, it's almost certainly for their Air and regular Macbook lineup.
"2 year old tech in apple computers"? Huh? Apple is shipping out products with i5-3k CPUs. You are on crack.
Important note: Apple *DOES* own a CPU design company.
Why does AMD have to match an i7 in performance? I don't think people buy Macs for speed and performance, rather perceived stability, Mac OS and accompanying software, and sometimes status *eyeroll*. I mean give a typical Mac user an i5 and an i7 MB, strip off the Intel label, and they probably can't tell the difference.
What are you on? Do you check what the specifications are in Apple laptops? I own the 17" and I would like to see an equivalent laptop that has the 2820qm i7 was the best one at the time beside the 2920xm (overpriced extreme edition) less than 1" thin and has a 93 w/h battery and achieves 7-8 hours on a charge. Besides all the specifications mentioned, one that isn't aesthetically ugly either.
What about a laptop that exceeds 1880p resolution? Ok so Apple laptops are behind? No you troll
I'm not aware of a laptop, be it a Macbook, a Windows computer, a Linux computer, or anything else, that has an 1880p resolution display. However, you do have a point. Apple hasn't been using much outdated hardware for the time in at least several years, especially in Apple's top-end models. They are still more expensive than a similarly specced Windows/Linux computer, but they are modern nonetheless.
But the fact is that GPU Turbo clocks are all over the map, and in the 17W models (which are used in these kinds of Ultrathin-type designs) the base HD4000 clocks are crap (slightly more than half a 35W model) and the Turbo isn't as fast or reliable - thermal limits kick the crap out of the 17W parts when you push them hard. Whoops! Typical of them to hide everything behind marketing numbers.
So next time someone bashes Trinity for having "Too many GPU models" keep in mind that they differentiate by model number, if there's any significant difference in performance whether due to GPU clocks, memory clocks, cores, etc. Intel still has these deviations in performance, but they just don't care.
All AMD's APUs are is a chip with a CPU and a beefy GPU to back up the CPU. Mobile CPUs tend to already have GPUs, so that's that. This guy might help with the designs and such, but it's not like the APUs have some sort of architecture that separates them from any other CPU with an on-die GPU that uses the same CPU and GPU architecture(s). It's just a name for marketing to trumpet around, like how Apple doesn't want us referring to their Macs as PCs. The name might have come from the concept of letting the GPU act as an incredibly high performance FPU, but any GPU can do that if it's programmed for it.