PC市场要自救，AMD Inside替代Intel Inside是唯一出路？

Two years ago, Apple finally accepted AMD's products, mostly thanks to affordability, and decided to power its most powerful workstation with two Radeon professional graphics processors. Professional graphics is a high-margin business, and AMD definitely bit the bullet here.

However, Apple was able to create a highly-affordable workstation solution that delivered a price-performance ratio that was unmatched by any other workstation on the market. This was an excellent win for AMD, and over the next two years, Apple adopted AMD's GPUs in its prestigious 5K iMac and more recently, the 15" MacBook Pro with Retina Display. As far as I'm concerned, the graphics of Apple's Macs are now only powered by Intel's integrated chips and AMD's discrete chips. This is a cheaper combination, but having the two processors as separate units is a major cost disadvantage.

Semi-Custom Macs

A semi-custom processor is a solution that AMD provides for customers who want an entirely unique, fully-customizable chip for any kind of application, ranging from workstations to gaming consoles. Sony and Microsoft were the first to utilize this feature with the PS4 and Xbox One, and the resulting solution allowed these companies to generate a powerful, efficient, and highly cost-effective solution on a single die. There was no other company in the world who could offer this single-die solution in a cost-effective manner because Intel's graphics were far too inferior for gaming consoles, and Nvidia doesn't offer a compelling CPU solution that could match Intel's or AMD's x86 processors. Surely, Intel and Nvidia could create an amazing solution with two separate processors, but the cost would be through the rooof with the high margins that both companies demand.

With a semi-custom solution, Apple could go to AMD, pay an upfront R&D fee, and tell AMD exactly what it needs for whatever kind of Mac it intends on creating. Currently, with AMD's inferior products, such a solution at Apple's high standards would be impossible. However, with AMD's future ground-up architecture, Zen, coupled with technologies such as High-Bandwidth Memory, HSA and its high-performance graphics chips, AMD could provide Apple with a very compelling all-in-one solution. Furthermore, since AMD is struggling to survive and will be in dire need of any design win by the time Zen comes out, I have a feeling that the chipmaker will be very interested in sacrificing its already-low margins to help the world's most valuable company create a powerful, low-cost solution to entice more consumers.

Conclusion

After years of shunning AMD, Apple changed its mind and is now using Radeon GPUs as its discrete graphics solution instead of Nvidia's costly chips. This was a vital decision for Apple in order to maintain its impressive margins while creating cost-effective solutions. AMD's graphics solutions are years ahead of Intel's, and as the only other x86 chipmaker in the world, it can theoretically replace some Intel chips with a smooth transition, which would be far more favorable to the complex transition that ARM chips would pose. Furthermore, AMD provides a unique semi-custom business that would allow Apple to obtain completely customized processors, which could lower costs dramatically in the same way that the semi-custom business helped create the powerful, yet highly affordable PS4 and Xbox One.