The long legal battle between Intel and NVIDIA that has held Apple’s MacBook line of notebooks back from using Intel’s latest Core series processors has finally been resolved, with the chip and graphics maker having just announced a six year cross-licensing deal worth $1.5 billion
Don’t expect the deal to lead to integrated NVIDIA chipsets in future Sandy Bridge based MacBooks, though: NVIDIA says they have no intention of re-entering the chipset market. However, the licensing agreement does give Intel access to NVIDIA’s technologies, which means that Intel might be able to improve their own integrated graphics solutions.
Given how GPU-intensive OS X is, Intel integrating NVIDIA GPU technologies into their existing chipsets might be the next best possible solution for future MacBooks, after NVIDIA continuing to produce their own chipsets.
Either way, though, it appears that we’ve seen the last of the NVIDIA 320m as the base-line GPU in every MacBook: future Apple laptops equal to or smaller than 13 inches will use Sandy Bridge processors with integrated graphics.