NVidia to Stop Chipset Development – Future MacBook with NVidia Chipset

While a persisting rumor indicates that the future MacBook could use a NVidia chipset, much more powerful than the Intel GMA currently available, another rumor announces than NVidia might stop chipset development next year. This might be linked to several parameters:
- With the Nehalem, Intel completely modified its controller architecture on motherboard, especially for memory management now directly supervised by the CPU. If performance wise it is a huge gain, in term of design and manufacturing it is more difficult to carry out.
- AMD pursues a similar strategy, and the acquisition of ATI, make it difficult to justify for NVidia to develop AMD-specific dedicated chipset, aka nForce.
- Last but not least, the emerging and promising GPGPU might make the current field of GPU completely modified. NVidia will need very powerful chips to make the difference with Intel, a performance level which has nothing to do with the one available from chipset.
If the NVidia chipset in future MacBook is not confirmed yet, it also makes sense if one consider that the Nehalem will required deep modifications on the motherboard and architecture. So, in 2009, Intel might be the only source of graphical chipset for Apple, or one could now imagine for which purpose Apple acquired recently a chips/chipset design company.