Apple ‘almost’ had AMD in 2011 Macbook Air

According to an upcoming profile of AMD, Forbes said that the companies range of Fusion APU processors were almost included in the 2011 revision of the Macbook Air.

AMD lost out to Intel however due to late delivery and reports of high failure rates.

“AMD struggled with its new fabless model while trying to crank out “fusion” processors that combined a CPU and a GPU in a single part. On paper the idea was promising. A notebook processor dubbed “Llano” got a close look from Apple for an update to the ultralight MacBook Air, scheduled for launch in mid-2011.

But AMD couldn’t get early working samples of Llano to Apple on time, one former employee says. Several former AMD employees disagree on just how close AMD came. “We had it,” one says. But too many of the Llano parts were faulty. AMD lost the deal.”

AMD also tried approaching Apple to use Brazos in the Apple TV hardware, but Apple bosses were uninterested in the proposal offered.

Brian Caulfield speaks about the yield issues on Fusion chips which were planned for the Macbook Air. SemiAccurate also published an article on the subject in November 2011.

Kitguru says: AMD will be more than a little annoyed that this never came to fruition. It would have boosted their revenue stream significantly in the last year.

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