In the second part of last year, there were rumors suggesting that Apple would be interested in using AMD processors in its future MacBook Airs, and here they were true. AMD Llano Fusion platform would have followed to be used in the new MacBook Airs that were to be launched last year, but Intel won the battle against those from AMD because the latter company failed to offer the chips on time and with an acceptable yield rate for Apple. AMD's chips came with a processor and a graphics card, they would have offered everything Intel offers, but probably at a lower price and with slightly weaker performance.
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 makes very good graphics cards, but its processors do not offer as good performance as those from Intel, but they are much cheaper. Apple would have liked to use AMD's components, but unfortunately this did not happen because AMD failed to build its prototypes properly. I gave up on AMD processors many years ago and to be honest I don't really want to go back to them in the near future. Would you have bought a MacBook Air with an AMD processor?
