Misunderstanding? AMD executive accidentally hints that Apple will adopt Fusion platform

Imagine it: CPU and GPU functions on a single chip. This is what AMD's Fusion platform is used for in the creation of accelerated processing units (or APUs). In a presentation to financial analysts, senior vice president and CSO Emilio Ghilardi highlighted on one of his slides the fact that his company and Apple have a close partnership and, (conveniently), in the same image appears the AMD slogan, “The future is fusion”, and a small letter “Courtesy of Apple”. You can have ideas, right?

Slide demonstrating partnership between Apple and AMD

Of course, this generated a spectacular buzz: “Run to the mountains! Apple will abandon Intel! All applications will have to be recompiled! Macs with stickers AMD Inside! Mac OS X will undergo another brain transplant !! NUTELLA IS OVER !!"

Too much noise for nothing: the slide shows iMacs and Macs Pro? Just machines that can be configured with ATI Radeon HD GPUs! AMD itself dispelled the misunderstanding by stating through a spokesman that Ghilardi's presentation should not be seen as a sign that there will be Macs or iGadgets with Fusion chips in the near future. Apple, as always, just smiled and looked like a sphinx.

Anyway, it was still a shock. Ghilardi's presentation can be seen here (PDF; 4.2MB), in case you wanted tips on how at the use PowerPoint / Keynote.

(via GigaOM)