Apple dumping Intel chipsets for NVIDIA's in new MacBooks
Chance Furlong
Apple dumping Intel chipsets for NVIDIA's in new MacBooks
By Kasper Jade & Aidan Malley
Published: 05:45 PM EST
Apple will announce as part of its special media event Tuesday a new
family of MacBooks that will abandoned Intel's integrated graphics
chipsets for those part of NVIDIA's new mobile platform, AppleInsider
can confirm.
People familiar with the matter say, at a minimum, the 13 inch systems
will adopt chipsets from NVIDIA's MCP79 platform, as was predicted
earlier this week by technology journalist Ryan Shrout.
Word of the switch validates claims first published by AppleInsider
earlier this summer, speficially that Apple would drop Intel's stock
designs for the first time since the transition to x86 processors in
2006. At the time, Apple was understood to be making the switch to give
Macs a more distinct and technically superior design compared to most
other notebooks, whose size and performance are dictated by Intel's
reference components.
Kept uncharacteristically secret by NVIDIA for most of the year, the
MCP79 platform is so far considered a substitute for Intel's Centrino 2
"Montevina" platform, offering support for the same 1066MHz front side
bus, optional DDR3 memory and PCI Express 2.0 interfaces.
Several advantages may tip the balance in favor of the new platform,
however. From a physical design perspective, one of the most important
factors is NVIDIA's consolidation of all the controller features into a
single chip rather than the two necessary for Intel's current
architecture. This reduces the total footprint needed for the mainboard
in normally tight notebook enclosures.
It will also sport proprietary NVIDIA features such as DriveCache, which
uses flash storage to speed up loading times, and Hybrid SLI, which
switches from discrete to integrated graphics to increase battery life
in low demand situations. It's not known whether Apple will make use of
any or all of these technologies, however.
The greatest leap, though, will come from NVIDIA's expertise in graphics.
MCP79 is believed to use a new set of GeForce 9300 and 9400 series
integrated mainboard graphics processors. Regardless of which variant
Apple uses, both are expected to support the latest visual effects and
will theoretically blow past the performance of not just the Intel GMA
X3100 video on Apple's current MacBooks but also the GMA 4500MHD found
on newer notebooks using Intel's reference hardware.
While the performance may not compete with most dedicated mobile
graphics hardware, the update potentially addresses a common complaint
of sluggish video performance with Apple's 13 inch systems. These entry
level portables are often excluded from the requirements for certain
demanding games and are even ruled out entirely from Apple's own Final
Cut Studio 2 suite, which depends on faster video acceleration to drive
visually intensive apps such as Color and Motion.
Moving to NVIDIA's higher quality integrated graphics would also line up
with Apple's plans for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the next-generation
operating system aimed for release next summer. NVIDIA has already
touted support for Apple's proposed OpenCL parallel computing standard,
a feature of Snow Leopard, in its recent integrated graphics chipsets.
The use of NVIDIA's higher performance integrated video chipset would
give Apple's new line of entry level MacBooks both improved general
hardware acceleration via OpenCL, as well as making the systems more
viable as basic gaming machines. Existing MacBooks can't even run the EA
games Steve Jobs promoted at Macworld a year ago.
AppleInsider is working to confirm whether or not Apple's radical change
in its portables' underpinnings will extend past the standard 13-inch
models. However, it's believed Shrout may have valid insight into the
directions for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro as well. His claim would
give the ultraportable model a low-voltage version of MCP79 that detunes
the graphics performance and otherwise takes steps to reduce power
consumption.
The MacBook Pro may actually see a relatively modest gain compared to
the smaller systems; as it already uses much faster dedicated graphics
and is rumored to receive the GeForce 9600M graphics chip.
Apple is expected to make the full extent of NVIDIA's role clear at its
notebook event next week.
Separately, Digg founder Kevin Rose is claiming in a yet-to-be-shown
live Diggnation episode that the new 13 inch MacBooks will include Blu
Ray at some level. Rose previously claimed that Blu-ray support was
coming via Mac OS X 10.5.6. Apple is a member of the Blu Ray Disc
Association but has yet to officially support the optical drive format.
Again, additional expectations for the new notebooks can be found in a
series of reports spanning back to April, when AppleInsider first
reported on Apple's plans to makeover its MacBook and MacBook Pro
families with new aluminum enclosures that take other designs cues from
the MacBook Air and the most recent black and aluminum iMacs.
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