One of the reasons why modern Mac laptops are able to attain such great graphics performance while maintaining excellent battery life is because Apple switched over to NVIDIA chipsets that marry their own superior mobile GPUs with Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors.
Unfortunately, Apple’s reliance on NVIDIA chipsets is also the reason why Mac laptops didn’t jump to the new Core i series of Intel CPUs last year, as Intel has been fighting it out with NVIDIA in court, trying to push the graphics maker out of the Intel-compatible chipset business.
Looks like they were successful. NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says that his company will be permanently exiting the chipset business to focus on SoCs (or systems on a chip).
Where does this leave Apple and future MacBooks? It’s unknown, although recent rumors have suggested that Cupertino may avail itself of Intel’s next-generation Sandy Bridge processors, which integrate a GPU right on the die to keep power requirements low.
Unfortunately, that GPU isn’t really up to the snuff of even the GeForce 320M inside most Macs. Given how GPU-dependent OS X is, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple just decided to go back to a combination of integrated and dedicated GPUs on stock Intel motherboards from here on out.
