Nvidia's past drives reports about Apple
A report claiming that Nvidia has been ousted from Apple laptop designs has gained prominence quickly because the graphics chip supplier is still dogged by past problems.
"The word is that Nvidia is out of Apple designs," according to a June 26 report from technology Web site SemiAccurate. The report has been cited widely with varying degrees of credence given to it.
"When I say out, I mean on the Nehalem-based Macs," Charlie Demerjian, the author of the report, said in a phone interview Monday, referring to future laptops from Apple that will be based on Intel's new Nehalem Core i series of chips.
Nvidia, not surprisingly, doesn't see it that way. "These rumors are baseless," an Nvidia spokesman said Monday. Apple had no comment.
Nvidia graphics processors are currently used widely in Apple MacBooks. And Apple has been touting a new technology in its upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system called OpenCL, which takes "the power of graphics processors" and makes it available to Snow Leopard for everyday computing tasks.
However, lurking below this push to tap into the compute power of the graphics processor lie past issues with Nvidia chips. A May 29 Apple knowledge-base article (Article: TS2377) couches frustration with Nvidia in diplomatic language, according to Demerjian. The article updates a similar notice Apple published in October of last year.
"Nvidia assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected," according to the Apple May 29 statement. "However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected."
"The 8600M referred to in the Apple support page...had a particular material set," Nvidia said Monday, repeating a statement it has made several times in the past. "That particular combination of material set is no longer being used by Nvidia."
In a May 20 disclosure as part of a Form 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Nvidia said that some notebooks still have problems associated with its graphics chips.
And past statements from not only Apple but the world's largest PC makers lend weight to the tenor of SemiAccurate's assertions about Nvidia's chip problems, if not necessarily to the accuracy of the report's claims about Nvidia's future at Apple. Hewlett-Packard said last year that it had been grappling with Nvidia chip issues since November 2007. And Dell made a similar statement last year.
Writing about the SemiAccurate report, Broadpoint AmTech analyst Doug Freedman said Monday: "If the reports are indeed true...Although negative at the margins, this shortfall could be offset by new product ramps." Freedman cited upcoming products--that will offset any negative impact--such as Nvidia's Tegra chip for smartphones and its Ion chipsets for laptops and Netbooks.
Brooke Crothers has been an editor at large at CNET News, an analyst at IDC Japan, and an editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, among other endeavors, including co-manager of an after-school math-and-reading center. He writes for the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
Nothing to see here Yawn......
nVidia is developing an Intel 5-series competitor with Integrated graphics. Intel contends that the nVidia/Intel license agreement doesn't cover this. nVidia disagrees. But ignoring the legal issue, the nVidia product makes no sense in my view, even if the nVidia's graphics is significantly better: (1) If a user wants better graphics, it is best to simply get a discrete solution which connects to processor via PCIe; (2) in a laptop, the addition of a second integrated graphics adds to the power significantly; and, (3) it will be very difficult for nVidia to make money with such a product, because its die size would be 2-3x of an Intel 5-series (due to added graphics) and to be performance competitive, it would need the addition of some graphics memory directly connected to the chipset.
On the positive side, in the high-end mobile and desktop systems, there is still a market for nVidia's and AMD/ATI's discrete graphics products. Also, there will still be a sizable market for nVidia's ION integrated chipset for Core 2 for the next 12 to 18 months.
anyone serious about GPU powered apps would not think twice about any Intel graphics offering, and the integration with the CPU could lower clock speed potential (based on the logic that less circuitry on the CPU die = higher overclock, like CPUs with smaller L2 cache overclock higher typically)
That's my second Nvidia card, after years of ATI-only. I have been impressed by their cards since they debuted the DX10 shaders.
1. Apple is a big proponent of OpenCL, if the GPU sucks, OpenCL is useless
2. Intel integrated graphics suck
3. AMD/ATi doesn't make an IGP for Intel CPUs
4. Apple needs a low power consumption GPU for laptops[Mac Mini], so switching to discreet cards is not an option
- by Helixxis July 7, 2009 8:26 PM PDT
- It's important to remember that this rumor was started by Charlie Demerjian, a former 'reporter' for the Inquirer. Charlie constantly creates rumors about nVidia because he's mad the company stopped sending him free graphics cards because he broke a non-disclosure agreement. Virtually nothing Charlie writes ever turns out to be true. Charlie even said nVidia was going to be out of all Macs days before the Apple convention where it was announced that nVidia chips would be in ALL Macs.
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- by FatFingeredFreddy July 9, 2009 12:42 PM PDT
- It's amazing to me how much press his "article" has gotten. Even I know this guy is a rumor starting hater with a grudge. Pretty irresponsible journalism across the board IMO. People should know the source of what they report on, and lending credence to the original speculations, by reporting on this rumor as if it were a news article, is irresponsible.
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(10 Comments)Charlie has a long history of lying and making up negative news about nVidia. It's best to just ignore all articles that originate from him.