As if there could be any doubt, the two machines will use GeForce 9400M on their mother boards; this news brings more question than answers.
- For mini Mac, this is excellent news. For the first time since the abandonment of the processors Power PC, it will be fitted with a video part worthy of its name and will be able to manage 30" screens, but also to decode videos HD with the GPU and thus consume much less CPU resources. However we can ask the question about Firewire on this machine. If Apple remains coherent, the Mac mini, just like MacBook, should lose these ports.
- For the iMac, the situation will be more complicated. One can be certain that the basic model will have that GeForce 9400 as the video card. There too, one can question the presence of Firewire. For the higher models, Apple will certainly follow MacBook Pro route and will integrate a faster second chip. Even though having two chips on an office machine is not so important on the level of power consumption, there is another very important gain.
NVidia have revealed that in the future, it will be possible to use the GeForce 9400M to manage the display while the second chip could be devoted to CUDA/Open CL to accelerate various calculations. In this context, the iMac equipped with two chips will bring an important gain in performances once Snow Leopard is released. To finish, one can suppose that Apple will also propose Firewire connections on the 24".
According to some sources, Apple might emphasis the capabilities of the new iMac and Mac mini for games. Some information let us think that the reason for the Mac mini to sport a discrete GPU would be to offer much better abilities for games. This could demonstrate that Apple finally understood that a computer at home is a digital hub for life and entertainment, not only restricted to video and photo but also games. With the forthcoming Open CL included in Snow Leopard we could finally uncover the true graphic potential of those new Macs.
