Possibly wonderful news concerning Nvidia and Intel dispute. Nvidia in next MBA?

[Scottsdale]

I read an article about Intel possibly settling antitrust issues, and could lead to Nvidia back in the GPU game for Macs with future Intel CPUs. The article specifically mentions Apple too.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/07/19/intel.to.get.mild.regulation.in.ftc.lawsuit/

This would be WONDERFUL news. Perhaps Apple had some knowledge of this and was hopeful this would be worked out before introducing new MBPs a few months ago. It took a long time for that update; I hope that was the issue and not the damned iPad. Apple definitely seems to want to stick with Nvidia when it comes to the "MacFive" computers - 13" MBP, MBA, MB, Mm, and 21.5" iMac.

I look forward to a possible Core i7-6x0LM with an Nvidia 320m... Maybe 2011 will bring new Intel processors with Nvidia chipsets in new MBAs. That would be amazing!

 

[soph]

I read an article about Intel possibly settling antitrust issues, and could lead to Nvidia back in the GPU game for Macs with future Intel CPUs. The article specifically mentions Apple too.

[...]

I look forward to a possible Core i7-6x0LM with an Nvidia 320m... Maybe 2011 will bring new Intel processors with Nvidia chipsets in new MBAs. That would be amazing!

Yay, me too!

 

[thinkdesign]

what this has slightly in common...

... with the DigiTimes rumor, is a whiff of the Air getting a 2nd moment of prioritisation. The DigiTimes rumor referred to as getting something new that would spread to other Apple... presumably other notebook products.

A settlement of the Intel/Nvidia chipwars (with Air as first Apple product to benefit) sounds a little small to fit what the end of the DT rumor was saying. So these 2 rumors don't seem to closely match up.

But they DO have something in common.... suggesting no mere small "spec-bump", but rather Apple doing a bigger revision next, and not waiting until Jan. 2011 (or even later, if they were to stockpile enough Core duo chips before Intel stops selling 'em).


Sooner is better (for this customer)!

S: what do U think of looking at sales rumors to guess the timing? iDisk recently claimed in the "how's the Air selling?" thread (without citing any source) that the Air sells 600,000 units annually. The DigiTimes rumor says Apple thinks they can sell 400,000 by year's end. The later they start selling, the harder it is to sell 400k by 12/31/2010.

I just read some 2008 blogs on how the original Air sold fast at first. So granted, the more they improve the design, the more possible it is to debut it late and zoom to 400,000 units by end of year. Especially if they prioritise it enough to do some TV ads. But if they debut as late as Nov. 1, they still have to move 200,000 units a month to get to 400k in 2010.

Does any of this (and the general zeitgeist of Air info) suggest earlier rather than later to you, or at least suggest it arrives at least before November's Black Friday?

 

[Hellhammer]

Has it been confirmed that this is only a licensing issue, nothing hardware related? The reason I'm thinking is because Nehalem integrates Northbridge into the CPU and thus the memory controller is integrated into the CPU. Before Northbridge was integrated into the IGP e.g. 9400M or it was a separate chip so NVidia was able to do what ever they wanted with RAM but now it's inside the CPU and thus I'm afraid that it could be hardware issue as well. I'm not sure but I haven't found any info about this.

Anyway, Sandy Bridge's IGP will be a huge upgrade so I don't think there is need for NVidia IGPs anymore, they just add extra cost. Another interesting thing is that ASUS showed X58 based motherboard with integrated ATI Radeon 5xxx based GPU that had its own GDDR3 memory in Computex 2010. This would solve all these issues and is more and more making me think that it's a hardware issue as well