Intel comments on chips in new MacBook, Nvidia win

Updated with correction about Intel processors.

Nvidia in, Intel out? Not quite. Intel is still very much a player in the silicon that powers the newest MacBooks.

That said, Intel did get bumped by Nvidia in graphics. The new Apple MacBook and MacBook Air both now come with the Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics chip, which Apple CEO Steve Jobs said delivers "five times the graphics performance." Jobs didn't mention Intel integrated graphics by name (used in the older MacBook Air and MacBook), but that was the yardstick.

Apple's Steve Jobs talks about new Nvidia 9400M graphics chip Tuesday.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

For the record, the Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics processor comes with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory. The chip features 16 parallel processing cores that deliver 54 GFLOPs of processing power, Nvidia said. GFLOPS stands for Giga (billion) Floating Point Operations per Second.

Intel commented on the development Tuesday. "Intel continues to have a strong relationship with Apple. Graphics is a competitive market and we compete for all new business. Intel's technology is integrated throughout Apple's product line but we didn't win this particular design," said an Intel spokesperson.

"We believe our products offer significant performance and value to our customer and we will work hard to win back the business," she added.

But new Intel processors did make a debut in the refresh of the MacBook Air. Instead of the Small-Form-Factor (SFF) 65-nanometer Merom chips, Apple has gone with the more advanced 45-nanometer Penryn SSF processor. Penryn chips typically boast either 3MB or 6MB of cache memory versus the 2MB or 4MB that the older mobile processors offer. (Cache memory speeds performance.)

In the MacBook Air, for example, both the 1.6GHz and 1.86GHz processors sport 6MB of cache memory. This is indicative of a Penryn processor. And in the aluminum MacBook line, the 2.4GHz model comes with 3MB of cache memory, a Penryn chip. (Though it should be noted that Apple was already using Penryn processors in the previous MacBook line.)

"On the MacBook Air, it's the 45nm/Montevina/Penryn. What we call our 'small form factor' Core 2 Duo s series which is a small package size (compared with) the regular part," Intel said Tuesday.

(Correction: Montevina is a platform within the Penryn class of processors.)

For complete coverage of the Apple notebook news, see "Apple polishes up its MacBook line."

[kheechun]

"Instead of the 65-nanometer Penryn-class chips, Apple has gone with with the more advanced 45-nanometer Montevina processor (in some cases)"

Please note that Penryn processors are 45nm chips, Montevina is just a platform, not a processor. An apple cannot be compared with an orange.

[MaggieRed]

Intel is in fine position with Apple products. It doesn't have to be an all Intel component product, there are lots of equally good graphic chip providers.

In my opinion Intel showed grace and integrity with their comments.

[i_made_this]

I agree that Intel - still, a winner in Apple's line - showed grace and integrity with their comment that they'd work hard to "win back this business." Graceful comments aside, I don't really know what Intel "lost" - Intel's still very much "Inside" every Mac being built with their CPU's. This gives Intel another hardware, product cycle til they're ready to deliver to Apple the "Larrabee solution" - a theoretical date somewhere in the coming 12 to 24 months which Intel more or less shares with AMD's eta for their "Fusion" solution.

Ironically, the only vendor which has been notable in its absence (at least, so far) in the new Apple product line is AMD's very well-received ATI 3000+ and 4000+ series discrete cards. If you go through the ATI full product line pages, you'll see certain of these cards being built for Apple's higher end 3D / CAD / Animation applications - so, I guess, if it's a "serious" card that's required, I guess we have to wait to see if Apple will offer ATI's 3800 series as replacement for the Nvidia's 9000 series (and ATI's next gen 4800 series as replacement for Nvidia's similar next gen 200 series - since neither have been mentioned by Jobs, it's pretty baffling for graphics professionals to stick by Apple - at least, from what Apple has shown and Jobs has touted so far - let's see what they stick in the rest of their high end laptops and the total desktop line). Maybe Jobs can recapture the attention of the graphics professionals who were at one time strictly Apple users because Apple was the only game in town back then. But no longer. As it stands and was further confirmed by this week's mainstream laptop announcement, I gather that Apple has gone to the back of the vendor line for this important market segment..