Since 2020, Apple Silicon has paved the way for open competition in the industry, and so far, AMD has managed to come close to the Cupertino giant. On the flip side, Intel has been left behind not only by Apple but also by AMD. AMD is following Apple’s route to combine the CPU, GPU, and unified memory, similar to what it does with its M series of chips. While AMD has not credited Apple for the approach, it did state that the chip would not have existed without the Cupertino-based company.
AMD acknowledges Apple’s influence, highlighting that users focus on performance over chip type with Ryzen AI Max chips
We have previously covered that the new Ryzen AI Max chips offer up to 16 CPU cores and 50 GPU cores, coupled with a whopping 128GB of unified memory. In comparison, according to AMD, the chip can render 3D graphics more than twice the speed of the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V. However, it denied that the idea of compiling the CPU, GPU, and memory came from Apple, claiming that they had been working on it way before the iPhone maker. Engadget explains how AMD did and did not credit Apple in its piece, stating:
You might think AMD was taking a bit of inspiration from Apple Silicon, with its powerful CPU cores, graphics and unified memory. But according to VP Joe Macri, AMD was building towards this long before Apple. “We were building APUs [chips combining CPUs and Radeon graphics] while Apple was using discrete GPUs. They were using our discrete GPUs. So I don’t credit Apple with coming up with the idea.”
On the other hand, Apple’s influence was quite strong, which allowed AMD to develop its new chip following the same approach as the M-lineup of chips.
Macri gives Apple credit for proving that you don’t need discrete graphics to sell people on powerful computers. “Many people in the PC industry said, well, if you want graphics, it’s gotta be discrete graphics because otherwise people will think it’s bad graphics,” he said.
Apple’s transition to its custom silicon proves that users can be satisfied with an all-in-one solution instead of offering the CPU, GPU, and memory separately. By the end of the day, the end user is only concerned about the performance of the machine rather than individual components, and this specific point potentially moved AMD and allowed it to follow Apple’s footsteps to develop the new Ryzen AI Max chips.
With the success of Apple Silicon, Macri was finally able to get approval to spend a “mind boggling” amount of money developing the Ryzen AI Max. “I always knew, because we were building APUs, and I’d been pushing for this big APU forever, that I could build a system that was smaller, faster, and I could give much higher performance at the same power,” he said.
AMD also compared its latest chip to Apple’s M4 and M4 Pro but left out the M4 Max for obvious reasons. Apple has been using the same circuitry since 2020 with the release of its M1 chip. The company has completed its transition to its custom silicon and has left Intel for good for its entire Mac lineup. AMD Ryzen AI Max laptops will be available starting in the first half of this year, and we will keep you posted on the latest, so stick around.
