Apple is turning the spotlight to notebooks at a press event tomorrow in Cupertino, California. And, following recent rumours of revolutionary new MacBook systems carved out of bricks of aluminium, the watching tech-world is expecting show-stopping new systems.
As is often the case in the run-up to an Apple event, the past few days have seen various rumours hitting the airwaves but one of particular interest has caught our attention. According to sources at AppleInsider.com, Apple's impending event will see the launch of a new family of MacBooks that drop Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) and Centrino 2 platform in favour of NVIDIA's MCP79.
The thought of Apple ditching a significant area of Intel technology in favour of an NVIDIA alternative comes as a surprise, even more so when you consider that Apple first released its MacBook in 2006 and has never strayed from the successful Intel chipset and CPU combination.
That could all change tomorrow, as the report claims that NVIDIA's MCP79 - a chipset that has been somewhat forgotten thanks to lengthy delays - will now be the platform of choice for a new range of MacBooks.
MCP79 has been doing the rounds since March 2008, when we managed to get an early look at a pair of J&W boards. NVIDIA's mobile variant is said to provide a 1,066 front-side bus, a memory-controller that can interface with either DDR2 or DDR3, and all the usual gubbins such as eSATA, NVIDIA's DriveCache and NVIDIA's VP3 video processor for the all-important decode of high-definition media.
The real Intel-kicking goodness, though, comes in the form of NVIDIA graphics. The MCP79 will provide integrated graphics based on NVIDIA's GeForce 9300 and GeForce 9400 series GPUs - either of which will, we feel, wipe the floor with Intel's recent GMA X4500HD.
If indeed true, a smaller MacBook with NVIDIA's new platform could pave the way for greatly-improved graphics performance in Apple's lower-end portable systems. Don't be surprised to see NVIDIA make a special appearance at Apple's event tomorrow, as we're still waiting for the MCP79 chipset to be officially launched and this seems a prime opportunity.
