Apple Dropping NVIDIA for Future Macs?

[Lokheed]

The reason they probably didn't drop them right away was that Apple initially believed Nvidia, that the problem only affected a very limited number of laptops.

But now, the installed base of hundreds of thousands of macbook pros with the 8600m have been aging, and Apple is probably getting a huge and growing wave of users who are having the problem (since it reportedly takes some time to develop in most cases).

Apple would not have known just how extensive this problem was until time passed and tens of thousands of macbook pros showed up with the problem.

Therefore, it makes perfect sense that Apple would have not decided until now to drop Nvidia.

No, not quite. The answer is far simpler than that: Time. It takes time to make changes. You think a company the size of Apple can dream up a new piece of hardware and change-over in a couple of weeks? It takes times to iron out the legals and then finally change the production line. Anyone who thinks it's as easy as ordering a few thousands crates of new components and then slapping them in is deluded or pleasantly naive... or a pleasant naive

 

[gkarris]

I don't care if Apple drops NVIDIA as long as it picks up ATI. But Intel? Noooooo! If Apple really does drop NVIDIA for INTEL, then I may have to drop Apple.

That's what a bunch of people were saying when Apple dropped PPC...

 

[fuziwuzi]

dell has alot of ati gpus in their lappies. nvidia has really done themselves an injustice by producing so many sub par gpus for most of the major laptop producers. it's not surprising they are ditching them.

 

[typeoserv]

yea.. please go back to intel or go to ati.

the only reason i havent bought a new macbook is because of nvidia
(bad reason i know, but id had nothing but probs with their chipsets & cards)

 

[krye]

Booooo!

I'd take a potentially defective Nvidia chip over an Intel chip any day.

 

[Edensuko]

Meh

If Apple drops Nvidia i Hope it is because ATI has better options for them. I do hope Arrandale Chips do well but I rather have an actuall gpu. I know this chip is supposed to "learn" how to handle graphics and new tecnologies by software, thats something that has me worried, will it tax itself with its own software therefore it may limit its own capabilities.

Dunno, ill play safe and wait for a bit.

 

[Warbrain]

I just don't see Apple doing this. They invested time and money into switching to nVidia to switch so quickly. Look how long we suffered with IBM making the G5 processors before the switch to Intel.

This, like others said, has to be because of the lawsuit. Apple wants to use the best they can get and if nVidia limits what they can get then they'll switch back to Intel or, like they have before, manufacture their own logic boards and offer different video cards.

 

[gkarris]

If Apple drops Nvidia i Hope it is because ATI has better options for them. I do hope Arrandale Chips do well but I rather have an actuall gpu. I know this chip is supposed to "learn" how to handle graphics and new tecnologies by software, thats something that has me worried, will it tax itself with its own software therefore it may limit its own capabilities.

Dunno, ill play safe and wait for a bit.

Yes, but ATI is owned by AMD and Apple uses Intel...

 

[OceanView]

If this is true, I'm glad I bought the current MBP.
Hopefully they will get it all worked out in the next year.

 

[Warbrain]

Yes, but ATI is owned by AMD and Apple uses Intel...

Doesn't mean anything. ATI still makes things for Intel motherboards, processors, etc. because AMD/ATI knows that they can't survive and compete against Intel if they were to establish their own ecosystem.

 

[Shake 'n' Bake]

I doesn't make sense for Apple to drop nVidia now for a few reasons:

1. All Macs come standard with an nVidia GPU and many of them only have nVidia GPU options.

2. Open CL mostly supports nVidia GPUs.

3. ATi is an AMD brand and Apple uses Intel chips.

4. Intel integrated GPUs (if you can call them that) suck, though Apple has switched to them before.

 

[ddTaylor]

Isn't it clear that Apple will pick the cheapest parts to keep their profits margins so obscenely high? (LCD panels, 1394 chipsets, Macbook plastics, ....)

I could not agree more...well said.

D

 

[parapup]

People seem to be equating Nvidia to GPU - while that is generally true, in Apple's case they are using complete NVidia solution - the IO and memory controllers, Ethernet, GPU and what not. So Apple could still show them the door for chipset and keep their options open for the GPU part as Nvidia seems to be doing OK and historically they have had the fastest GPUs for longer times. Also all of the OpenCL investments would mean that Apple is better off at least offering an Nvidia GPU as an option.

But on the other hand, the current situation is that however much you want Apple to provide high end NVidia GPUs in the cramped laptop and iMacs that has not worked out too well. There were far too many issues with the Nvidia chipsets and GPUs as we know from the 8600 fiasco. On the chipset side even today people upgrading to 1.7 firmware are finding that lots of perfectly fine SATA-II hard disk upgrades are screwing up with data errors. Nvidia is not exactly known for stable chipsets as much as Intel is. As the article mentions - Dell and HP both have reduced Nvidia presence - all of HP's business laptops are having ATI GPUs and Intel chipsets.

People also seem to forget that Intel's next gen GPU is going to be a GPU-in-CPU design which is supposed to be better - not only that, it includes provision for having a discrete GPU with option to switch back and forth at run time.

But if those weren't compelling enough reasons - Nvidia still has no license to design and manufacture a Nehalem compatible chipset and Apple would have to have a pretty good reason to stick with current chipset (there isn't one as far as I can see) or Nvidia would have to be offering x86 compatible CPU-on-GPU that is at least as good as or better than Intel's offerings. Very unlikely.

Based on this I think it is safe to say we will see Intel based chipset in Apple offerings and I for one welcome it. One can guess that ATI GPUs will make a come back in the laptops (45nm 4xxx series comes to mind) but Nvidia GPUs will be offered as an option in desktops and Mac Pro given that Intel is unlikely to have an GPU offering that beats ATI or Nvidia in the near future at least.

"Can of Whoop Ass" - back to Nvidia!

 

[pcorajr]

With all the technology being built into SL to take advantage of the GPU i find this to be not likely to happen.

My personal opinion.. Apple would be stupid to go back to producing machines with inferior GPU's, ATI has crap available now.... makes this very very unlikely... end of story.

 

[badNameErr]

Wow. First Dell, now Apple?

NVIDIA is being spanked hard if this is true.

 

[MikhailT]

I just don't see Apple doing this. They invested time and money into switching to nVidia to switch so quickly. Look how long we suffered with IBM making the G5 processors before the switch to Intel.

This, like others said, has to be because of the lawsuit. Apple wants to use the best they can get and if nVidia limits what they can get then they'll switch back to Intel or, like they have before, manufacture their own logic boards and offer different video cards.

It is not just that simple. Apple probably have more than enough reasons to justify dropping nVidia. The lawsuits, the crappy gpus, the huge lie that nVidia told Apple about the failure rate and the fact that newer mobile gpus as well as their desktop gpus are rehashed from previous generations.

Repairing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of MBP by replacing the GPUs costs a lot of money for Apple, it is not just the cost of mobile GPU, the money has to be spent for labor, workers and as well as harming their reputation for quality hardware parts. All of that is not going to be fixed or paid by nVidia. Most of it comes out of Apple's pocket.

As for OpenCL, nobody realizes that OpenCL is an open standard, ATi can easily write the drivers for SL without any reduction of benefits that nVidia would provide.

ATI has been improving a lot lately with their integrated and discrete graphics, I don't see any major loss by switching to ATi graphics except that it all depends on what Apple does with the next logic board. Are they going to switch to Intel or make their own logic boards?

I would think since Apple has enough of the engineering team to do their own stuff (PA Semi doesn't hurt either), they might want to do their own logic boards and implement more innovate features that none others have done. Imagine Apple along with PA Semi, building in h.264 de/encode accelerator onto the logic board that would be much faster than using the onboard graphics but it might be pointless if OpenCL can be used instead with the GPU. All depends on whether or not dedicated h.264 card is faster than a GPU.

Anything is possible with Apple, they are used to switching platforms. They did well with Intel and nVidia. why not?

 

[rufwork]

No, not quite. The answer is far simpler than that: Time. It takes time to make changes.

Chicken dinner.

Wonder if this is why there's such a limited set of cards (one? the 9400M?) supported by Snow Leopard's featureset.

 

[Warbrain]

I would think since Apple has enough of the engineering team to do their own stuff (PA Semi doesn't hurt either), they might want to do their own logic boards and implement more innovate features that none others have done. Imagine Apple along with PA Semi, building in h.264 de/encode accelerator onto the logic board that would be much faster than using the onboard graphics but it might be pointless if OpenCL can be used instead with the GPU. All depends on whether or not dedicated h.264 card is faster than a GPU.

Anything is possible with Apple, they are used to switching platforms. They did well with Intel and nVidia. why not?

This isn't as great of a platform change as was going from the 680x0 to the PPC or the PPC to Intel. This is an architecture change that can be performed with relative ease unlike a major architecture change requiring FAT or Universal binaries. I believe they'll move to their own logic board designs - they've done this in the past - while using Intel chips and offering ATI and nVidia GPUs. As for integrated graphics - maybe we'll see the end of that. Integrated graphics are getting better with each revision but by making their own boards Apple would most likely not use them.

 

[munkees]

OpenCL currently runs on

NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130.

ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870

I cannot see Apple dropping NVIDIA at the moment, unless they are moving to newer ATI, as for intel, Apple will not take that step backwards. Does not make sense to make nearly all mobile platforms have common parts to ditch them, Apple choice to make MacBooks into MacBook pros is cost savings, due to large quantities of chip that will be used, also better performance than the integrated intel. MacBooks pros now share more common parts can be manufactured with out too much tool changes, this equal better production to market, major saving. current Macbook pros carry GeForce 9400M and GeForce 9600M. Also the MacBook carries an GeForce 9400M

Another reason why Apple has moved all iMacs and mac minis to graphic chips that support OpenCL for when Snow Leopard is released. Apple been building it product range for Snow Leopard.

I on the other hand will have a 2 year old iMac when snow leopard is released, me thinks time to upgrade to a new max pimped out iMac, hopefully will have quad cores, and 1GB mem for graphics (OpenCL and quicktime really wants 1GB video memory for max performance, don't have link of hand but did read about it with OpenCL).

 

[MikhailT]

OpenCL currently runs on

NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130.

ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870

I cannot see Apple dropping NVIDIA at the moment, unless they are moving to newer ATI, as for intel, Apple will not take that step backwards. Does not make sense to make nearly all mobile platforms have common parts to ditch them, Apple choice to make MacBooks into MacBook pros is cost savings, due to large quantities of chip that will be used, also better performance than the integrated intel. MacBooks pros now share more common parts can be manufactured with out too much tool changes, this equal better production to market, major saving. current Macbook pros carry GeForce 9400M and GeForce 9600M. Also the MacBook carries an GeForce 9400M

Another reason why Apple has moved all iMacs and mac minis to graphic chips that support OpenCL for when Snow Leopard is released. Apple been building it product range for Snow Leopard.

I on the other hand will have a 2 year old iMac when snow leopard is released, me thinks time to upgrade to a new max pimped out iMac, hopefully will have quad cores, and 1GB mem for graphics (OpenCL and quicktime really wants 1GB video memory for max performance, don't have link of hand but did read about it with OpenCL).

Why is everybody fixated on the OpenCL thing? It is a non-issue, the drivers can be delivered via software update for any new cards that Apple might consider using in the next hardware refresh. It is an open standard that can be written by any manufacturer that can build the cards for Apple.

Dropping nVidia does not mean Apple is going to drop support for all of the previous nVidia cards in their OS.

Stop worrying about OpenCL, it has nothing to do with preventing Apple from dropping nVidia.

 

[ezekielrage_99]

It wouldn't surprise me if we saw Intel chipsets but using nVidia graphics cards. Unless Apple is using this as a hollow threat to ensure nVidia picks up its game...

 

[Wotan31]

No way they're going to release new products with significantly *worse* performance than older products. I.e. they ain't gonna go back to intel IGP.

More likely, they'll switch to intel northbridge and use ATI for the GPU. That would make the most sense, and quite frankly I would prefer it. ATI chipsets are superior these days anyways - Nvidia has simply taken old chips and relabeled them for 2 years now. Time for something new and fresh (and not defective).

Nvidia tried to screw everyone with their defective products, they deserve to get left out in the cold by Apple.

HP did the same thing already. All the hp consumer line laptops that previously had Nvidia GPU have now transitioned over to ATI GPU's and intel northbridge for the current models.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16)

It doesn't seem like this would be a smart move. Nvidia is pretty much the standard in high end graphics cards. I hope this proves to be false.

Yeah... but in the mid-range, which is what Apple uses, ATI is the big winner

I was referring to Snow Leopard.

If apple decides to adopt ATI graphics cards, I'm sure they could release a point update that introduces the same support for ATI cards.

I doesn't make sense for Apple to drop nVidia now for a few reasons:

1. All Macs come standard with an nVidia GPU and many of them only have nVidia GPU options.

Of 4 mac's I have been responsible for purchasing, 3 have an ATI GPU and 1 has an Intel GPU. Not a single one has an nVidia GPU.

2. Open CL mostly supports nVidia GPUs.

Actually... no.
http://ati.amd.com/technology/streamcomputing/opencl.html

3. ATi is an AMD brand and Apple uses Intel chips.

nVidia is an nVidia brand, and Apple uses Intel chips. What's your point?

4. Intel integrated GPUs (if you can call them that) suck, though Apple has switched to them before.

Yeah, but you haven't convinced me that Apple can't use ATI or even design their own.

Personally, I hope that Apple switches to an ATI GPU, and puts it in every-single-MBP. and get rid of the friggin black bezel.

 

[Sehnsucht]

Apple Dropping NVIDIA for Future Macs?

Perhaps, but I call bulls**t on the notion of going back to Intel IGPs. If they did, my reaction would be something like this:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=29348005

ATI has always had a better selection of Mac-compatible graphics cards. If Apple does indeed drop NVIDIA, they sure as hell better go ATI, *not* those s**t-tacular Intel IGPs...

Personally, I hope that Apple switches to an ATI GPU, and puts it in every-single-MBP. and get rid of the friggin black bezel.

Complaining about the black bezel is *so* six months ago. Complaining about the existence of the 13" MacBook "Pro" is the new thing.

 

[jaw04005]

"The shift from Intel to NVIDIA chipsets, however, was responsible for notable gains in the low-end graphics processing power in the new MacBooks and iMacs which will also be leveraged in Apple's upcoming Snow Leopard operating system."

New MacBooks maybe, but the NVIDIA chipset in the iMac is for the most part irrelevant. In fact, both the integrated 9400M in the mid-level and discrete GT120 in the high-end are actually a step backward compared to the previous generation's HD 2600 Pro and 8800 GS.