Apple wants custom-designed Arrandale CPUs for their notebook line
11:16 am, December 8th, 2009, John Brownlee
Apple likes Intel’s desktop line of Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs well enough to put them in their iMacs, so it makes sense that they would want to avail themselves of Intel’s three new Core i5 and i7 mobile CPUs (codenamed Arrandale) for any forthcoming refresh of the MacBook line. But things may not be that simple.
One way the Arrandale line of processors differs from previous Intel mobile CPUs is that the chips include mandatory integrated graphics. According to the Bright Side of News, Apple’s not interested in that: even the most inexpensive Macs now contain NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPUs, which offer far superior performance to integrated graphics solutions.
Apple’s right. In its current form, Arrandales really aren’t the right chips for MacBooks and MacBook Pros at all. Intel is aiming Arrandale at the ultra-thin notebook market, where chassis space is at a premium. It’s a system-on-a-chip combining memory controller, integrated graphics, DMI links and a PCI Express controller for external graphics. That would make it a great fit for a machine like the MacBook Air, but less suitable for the MacBook line… especially the Pro, which is aimed at mobile photo and video professionals, and who need discrete graphics..
On their part, Apple has apparently asked Intel to build custom versions of their Arrandale processors for the upcoming refresh of the MacBook line. That’s a tall order, but Apple’s convinced Intel to custom design a chip for them before: namely, the Merom Core 2 Duo Processor that drove the original MacBook Air. My guess Intel will be more than happy to do Apple the favor again.
Posted by John Brownlee in Hardware, MacBook Pro, Macbook, News | Comment on this article
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One thing to consider is also that intel GPUs so far don’t support OpenCL on Mac OS. This means that while current 9400m systems can present at least a small speedup, future systems based on Arrandales would leave a blind spot in Apple’s long term pursuit of multicore and GPGPU support.
psj, on December 9th, 2009 at 2:12 am