Apple switching to Intel graphics for MacBooks
Will Sandy Bridge be a bridge too far? Having owned a trio of Intel graphics “powered” Macs over the years, it’s hard to take chipzilla’s performance claims at face value and thereupon see such a move by Apple as anything more than a political necessity for them.
News.com, citing unnamed sources, reports that Apple has decided to build upcoming — likely the third or fourth quarter at the earliest — 13-inch and smaller MacBooks around Intel’s soon-to-be-real Sandy Bridge CPU + graphical processing unit (GPU) solution.
“I’d say…we can expect (about) 2x the performance of [that latest] graphics,” said Anand Shimpi, Anandtech, which has done a preview of Sandy Bridge’s graphics performance. “At that level of performance, I don’t see a need for discrete [standalone Nvidia or Advanced Micro Devices] graphics at the very low end.”
The available political option
Anand is a respected and skeptical guy, and I take him at his word. However, we’re not talking about the “the very low end,” we’re talking about Macs, which carry a premium price and premium reputation for value.
Part of that equation is OpenCL, a software framework built into OS X that allows apps to exploit the brute processing power of a Mac’s GPU to perform intensive tasks usually handled by the processor. Currently, Intel doesn’t support OpenCL — alpha driver support is brewing — though nVidia does.
The rub here is that nVidia doesn’t have a license to produce discrete graphics controllers for Intel’s newest CPUs and litigation over the issue hasn’t yet been resolved.
Also, AMD/ATI’s low-cost portable processor + GPU solutions aren’t yet ready for prime time let alone the low-end of Apple’s portable line.
So, Sandy Bridge graphics alone inside the MacBook and MacBook Air? If the past is any guide, Intel’s solution will be late and deliver only a fraction of the promised performance…
What’s your take?
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December 11th, 2010
re: “The rub here is that nVidia doesn’t have a license to produce discrete graphics controllers for Intel’s newest CPUs and litigation over the issue hasn’t yet been resolved.”
nVidia doesn’t need a license; they are free to produce all the PCIe based GPUs they want. The above statement reflects a mis-understanding of the current Intel Architecture. The external interfaces are PCIe, DMI and FDI; there is no longer an FSB and this generation drops QPI in the desktop and mobile parts (it’s still present as an processor to processor interconnect in the server parts.)
Unless nVidia wants to try to force Intel to bring out a high speed bus GPUs via PCIe is their only option. And Apples free to use nVidia parts connected to the PCIe lanes all they want.
December 13th, 2010
How do you even create a graphics card? The specifications of modern day computers, gadgets, and technology is mind boggling! To think that an atomic bomb is nothing more than just…energy…wow. (no pun intended).