nVidia and Intel about to settle chipset licensing dispute?

[dolphin842]

So it appears Intel and nVidia may settle their licensing dispute, potentially opening the door for nVidia-built chipsets that support i-series CPUs. Perhaps next year's MacBooks and Minis will see a decent speed boost as a result.

 

[ravenvii]

That would be a fantastic thing for us Apple fans.

Though it might be a bad thing for AMD - they stand to benefit enormously from a divided Intel and nVidia.

 

[jav6454]

That would be a fantastic thing for us Apple fans.

Though it might be a bad thing for AMD - they stand to benefit enormously from a divided Intel and nVidia.

Yes and no.

You see even if nVidia could pump iX compatible chipsets, AMD's Fusion platform is just around the corner with next gen GPUs that dwarf anything nVidia can throw right now. nVidia (ever since being kicked out the chipset business by Intel) has been focusing heavily on the Workstation (Tesla, Quadros) and high performance desktop (GeForce GTX) GPU series. However, thus far their efforts have been with not much success.

Yes, nVidia has the most powerful GPU right now, but not without some serious draw backs that made Apple question and not even include them with the Mac Pro. Those drawbacks (high power consumption, high temperatures and low yields) are not helping nVidia at all. Right now, the chips used in MacBook Pros are just revisions of the old G80, G84 and G92 chips. There is so much you can revise and rebrand before ATI throws in a killer. That killer was the HD5870. Now, true that is a desktop class GPU; however, the HD5870 didn't get a real mobile flavor. Instead the HD5770 was made the mobile HD5870, that's half the true performance.

That aside, from those chips does the HD6000s series arise which is also found in AMD's new Fusion platform. Just recall, Llano and Zacate. These entry level chipsets offer so much performance with Apple's liking of considerably reduced power consumption. If AMD can manage to produce a GPU stronger in the 6600 or 6500 series range into something that has the same power consumption proportions (albeit higher), then nVidia will be at a point where they can't compete.