Apple slated AMD chip for MacBook Air?

From CNET News.com: Here's one strictly for the rumor hopper: Apple was on the verge of coming out with a MacBook Air packing a processor from Advanced Micro Devices.

The reasoning put forward by chip-centric Web site Semiaccurate is that AMD offered better graphics horsepower. Today, the Air--and all the MacBooks--use Intel's Sandy Bridge processors.

"If you are wondering why the Air wasn't really revamped much this last time, it is because you are looking at plan B. Plan A was basically a low power [AMD] Llano in an Air shell, and that would have been a really tasty machine."

That an interesting statement, except for the last part about a "tasty machine." If that was really true, Apple would have found a way to use it.

But let me defer to this review by PC Magazine here, where an HP Pavilion dv6-6135dx was reviewed with AMD's A8-3500M Llano chip (1.5GHz and a maximum turbo speed of 2.4GHz).

They summarized it as having "good graphics performance [but] sluggish productivity performance."

The review continues. "The dv6-6135dx achieved an impressive 40 frames per second (fps) on our Crysis DirectX 10 (DX10) benchmark and 36.7fps on our Lost Planet 2 DX9 test. Granted, both results were obtained using medium quality settings at 1,024-by-768 resolution."

That's where the upbeat discussion ends, however. "The dv6-6135dx didn't fare as well on our productivity and multimedia tests. Its PCMark 7 score of 1,632 was more than 400 points below what we saw from the Core i5-powered Lenovo IdeaPad V570-1066A9U (2,066) and almost 300 points lower than the score from the Toshiba Satellite P755-S5215, which uses a Core i3 chip. It also trailed the pack on the CPU-intensive CineBench R11.5 benchmark with a score of 1.88."

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