There’s an increasing groundswell of trust in AMD and their Ryzen chip. It’s great news, I’ve owned one for two years now and it’s fab.
The new XBox will feature a custom Ryzen of some form. Who’s next, Apple?
The new XBox will feature a custom Ryzen of some form. Who’s next, Apple?
Given that it's AMD, shouldn't that be "it's fabless"?
I've got a mix of Intel and AMD, and have had no loyalty back to when I replaced my Pentium 75 with a pre-unlocked AMD Duron from OcUK.
I'm so glad to see AMD not only raise its game exponentially, but also force Intel to compete. It's good for everyone.
My next purchase will probably be a Ryzen 5 2600, because the price drop ahead of the 3xxx has made them ridiculous value for money.
Definitely a good time to be a PC gamer.
Slightly frustrating that the integrated graphics 3x00G chips are basically Ryzen 2xxx chips though. I hope the g-range gets a refresh with proper Zen 2-based chips shortly.
WRT "who next", did you see the Chinese AMD custom Ryzen+Vega APU console last year, the Subor Z-Plus, with 8GB GDDR5 as shared system and graphics memory?
It's "fabless fab!"
There are modified Darwin kernels that allow Hackintosh to work on AMD processors. These kernels have some stability issues, but if hobbyist outsiders can get most of the way, I don't forsee it being a big hurdle for actual Apple engineers.
As I see it, as long as Apple is putting out x86 hardware, there’s no reason why it can’t be AMD x86 hardware.
(I’m also secretly hoping the ARM thing won’t actually happen, but that’s neither here nor there, and I’m probably wrong.)
I also have major concerns about raw performance at the high end, and I suspect ARM would come with even more software lockdown, although there's no reason that has to be the case.
I subscribe to the theory that the Air will move to ARM at some point. Adding this feature to XCode sounds like the sort of thing you would do to prepare the way for an architecture shift. Especially if you were still on the fence about that shift. Let's just get a feel of how viable this space is before committing to anything.
After dropping Gen 7's PPC, both the PS4 and the XB1 were customised AMD APU, and there's no great architectural rival.
I didn't?
> The Xbox had a customized Coppermine Pentium-III era processor from Intel.
The original xbox was a PC in a box, the CPU was not a customised part.
And yes, the CPU was customized:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/853/2
At the very least, half of the cache is disabled. They cherry-picked a feature from the Pentium III lineup that they wanted to keep while lowering the cache to Celeron levels. It's a deliberate modification to reduce cost while maintaining desired performance.
It's not detectably customized beyond that but it's not like it's a SKU you can buy off the shelf, either.
I'm not sure what they're waiting for exactly.
I'm hoping someone eventually just does the needful and sticks a thunderbolt chipset on a PCIE4 graphics card and makes it work somehow.
Secondly Apple might be waiting for their own chips to reach a point where they can be used in their laptops/desktops and jump on to that. It would be overkill to use ryzen as an interim.