Apple's Upcoming MacBook's to Use NVIDIA Chipsets & GPUs

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

After countless rumors, Apple's October 14th press event is official, and there's no question that it will be new MacBook's they'll be showing off, and little else. Both MacBook lines are to be not only refreshed, but overhauled. The most popular rumor is that the new notebooks will feature an aluminum chassis, which will increase durability and weight. It's also supposed to retail for a lot less than current offerings, potentially opening the doors for much wider adoption.

In late July, we linked to a story that claimed Intel chipsets on Apple's notebooks were soon going to be a thing of the past, and NVIDIA was of course the replacement on everyone's mind. Ryan at PC Perspective followed-up to an editorial he wrote around the same time and stresses that the notebooks next week will feature NVIDIA chipsets and GPUs.

This is one rumor I'm led to believe, and I trust Ryan's confidence. To me, this is only a good thing. While NVIDIA chipsets tend to use more power (wattage) than Intel's, their offerings in the IGP department are far better (especially on non-Windows machines). This is also the kind of announcement that NVIDIA must be simply dying to make, especially after a long summer of fairly unappealing press.

There are a couple other interesting points that lead me to the same conclusion that have come up since our July editorial. First, NVIDIA has been pushing OpenCL support on their integrated graphics solutions, a standard that Apple helped create. Because NVIDIA's IGP chipsets would allow for OpenCL acceleration Apple would gain support for the programming technology across all of their platforms.

Source: PC Perspective
​

 

[Kougar]

Dell has already done it. Their Latitude E6400 offers the G4500XHD or whatever it's called, there's about a dozen varients on that IGP already. But that's the low end... any sort of upgrade on the E6400 and they switch to an NVIDIA IGP chipset, one which supports Hybrid SLI.

While NVIDIA chipsets tend to use more power (wattage) than Intel's, their offerings in the IGP department are far better

This was exactly what I was thinking, NVIDIA chipsets have higher leakage and draw more power. But then I read something at Dailytech that pretty much mollified my dislike of idea of having an NVIDIA chipset in a laptop when I was concerned about battery life... Apparently NVIDIA's IGP only use a single chip for the chipset, not a northbridge/southbridge combo like Intel. So ignoring that the motherboard can be smaller and less complex, there might actually be some power savings there. Or in the very least two Intel chips vs 1 NVIDIA chip, the savings should offset the increased power draw.