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Ruiz told an audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco that Apple will not want to be tied to just one chip provider.

'Everybody wants choice,' Ruiz said. 'Knowing Apple, why would they want to be held hostage like everyone else has been?'

Prior to switching to Intel, Apple did indeed have two chip suppliers - Freescale (formerly the semiconductor division of Motorola) and IBM. Since AMD and Intel processors are technologically compatible, Apple could deploy AMD hardware without having to make anything but minor alterations of its operating system software.

Apple declined to comment.

As far back as 2003 AMD claimed that it had held talks with Apple about becoming its chip supplier. Apple announced in 2005 that it would be using Intel processors in all its Macs, releasing the first models based on the new hardware in January of this year. All Macs now do run on Intel chips.