Apple MacBooks Ditching Intel Graphics For Nvidia?

The rumor mill is churning in overdrive ahead of Apple's MacBook event scheduled for Tuesday at the company's Cupertino, Calif. headquarters, with plenty of speculation that Apple will drop Intel's integrated graphics for Nvidia chipsets in its new family of notebooks.

Apple is notoriously mum about product details ahead of launches, but some sources say that in addition to the move onboard graphics made by Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia, the computer and consumer electronics maker may unveil its first sub-$1,000 notebook Tuesday. Whether that would be a re-priced older MacBook or a brand new product is the subject of some debate.

Major notebook players such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Lenovo already offer a wide variety of customizable laptops for less than $1,000, and even for as low as $500. Apple's current base model MacBook is priced at $1,099.

The rumor of a possible Apple move to Nvidia's graphics chipsets was first floated in late July by AppleInsider's Kasper Jade. That talk came just two weeks after Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel belatedly launched Centrino 2, its newest hardware platform for mobile PCs, after delays related in part to technical issues with integrated graphics. A hang-up in getting FCC certification of Centrino 2's WiMAX/WiFi module was named by Intel as another main reason for the delay.

Intel's Centrino 2 processors, including the chip giant's latest Penryn-class Core 2 Duo mobile CPUs, are all but certain to be in the new MacBooks, but AppleInsider on Friday said it now "can confirm" that Apple's newest 13-inch MacBooks "will abandon Intel's integrated graphics chipsets" for the mainboard chipsets from Nvidia's MCP79 mobile platform.

Nvidia's MCP79 motherboard graphics processor supports the 1066MHz Front Side Bus, DDR2-800 and optional DDR3-1333, as well as 20 PCI-E 2.0 lanes, SATA-II, Gigabit Ethernet, Nvidia's DriveCache memory accelerator, and HD Audio.

Apple and Nvidia were contacted Monday, but neither company would comment on the speculation about the new MacBooks. Jade's July report speculated that Apple could move away from third-party suppliers' motherboard graphics entirely and resume building its own proprietary chipsets, as the company did for its PowerPC-based Macs before striking a 2006 deal for Intel processors.

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