Apple to Use NVIDIA Chipsets in New MacBooks

Despite the fact that Apple has had to admit that the NVIDIA GPUs in some of its MacBooks have the same sorts of issues experienced by other OEMS, such as Dell and HP, the bad experience hasn't caused the two companies to split. Rather, it now appears that Apple is getting even closer to NVIDIA.

AppleInsider says it can confirm that at its Oct. 14th notebook event, Apple is set to announce that while continuing to use Intel CPUs (natch), it will move away from Intel chipsets to NVIDIA chipsets for its new MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

The notebooks will use NVIDIA's MCP79 platform.

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.

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.

The chipset will support Hybrid SLI, which I've written about previously. Hybrid SLI uses an integrated low-power GPU coupled with a higher-performance discrete GPU to reduce power consumption when the uber-GPU is not needed.

It will also have DriveCache, which uses flash storage to speed up loading times.

At the same event, Apple is expected to speak about "the Brick," which is expected to be a new manufacturing process.

Finally, Kevin Rose at a London event said that the new MacBooks will have Blu-ray drives. It's always been obvious that Apple would have to eventually include Blu-ray drives in its notebooks, so a move in this direction, while still unconfirmed, looks likely --- at least at sometime in the future.

We'll find out in a couple of days.