Will MacBooks ever get Calpella?

[ThomasJL]

When people say they are "waiting for Nehalem," what most of those people mean by that is that they are waiting for the Calpella chipset (due in Q3 2009). We will not get the significant benefits of the Nehalem processor without the Calpella chipset.

The latest MacBooks and MacBook Pros have an Nvidia chipset because Apple decided not to use Intel's Montevina chipset. Would you guess that will Apple stick with Nvidia for chipsets, and therefore never have Calpella?

This may be a real shame, as it would deny us the full benefits of the Nehalem processor. Is that correct?

 

[ThomasJL]

Anyone?

 

[PeterQC]

As far as I know, the Penryn's Nvidia platform has everything the Montevina has, plus the fast 9400m integrated GPU.

The performance all come from the processors (CPU) and the graphic card (GPU).

Penryn and Nehalem (Sandy Bridge?) are the code names of an architecture family used by the processor. Currently we have Penryn processor in our Macs, and we will surely have Nehalem processors when they come out Q3 2009 or later.

Montevina and Capella are mobiles platforms designed to be used for notebooks. This is a sort of all-in-one solution from Intel, which include many chipsets that have no real effect to the performance. In short, those chipsets are things like the bluetooth and wifi devices. Nvidia with the Macbooks platform just used chipsets that are as goods as the one from Intel's platform.

I'm sure Apple will stick with Nvidia platform. We will get the benifices from Nehalem anyway, since they're Processors, which are independant from the platform.


*Based on my own knowledge, not everything might be right, so take it with a grain of salt*

 

[jav6454]

When people say they are "waiting for Nehalem," what most of those people mean by that is that they are waiting for the Calpella chipset (due in Q3 2009). We will not get the significant benefits of the Nehalem processor without the Calpella chipset.

The latest MacBooks and MacBook Pros have an Nvidia chipset because Apple decided not to use Intel's Montevina chipset. Would you guess that will Apple stick with Nvidia for chipsets, and therefore never have Calpella?

This may be a real shame, as it would deny us the full benefits of the Nehalem processor. Is that correct?

Most likely Apple will keep the nVidia chipset if nVidia can deliver a x58 board for MacBook lines to be able to handle QPI and new processor sockets. Calpella is Nehalem, Sandy Bridge is another processor like Penryn waiting to come out in 2012 for high end desktops.

Apple won't deny Nehalem, they might embrace it as soon as MSWF'09 with the Mac Pro, and thats a maybe.