Apple may be switching its GPU supplier for iMacs away from Nvidia and back to AMD. The latest generation of the iMac has graphics acceleration powered by Nvidia and only started shipping in late November. However a new job advertisement on Apple’s website suggests it may already be thinking about flipping back to using AMD Radeon GPUs within the popular all-in-one.
The latest iMac, with Nvidia graphics is said to offer “up to 60 percent faster graphics performance than the previous generation”, which is a great figure for Apple salesmen to quote. However, according to AppleBitch, Apple is now looking for “a Hardware Systems Electrical Engineer to work on electrical & system design integration of the iMac computer system”. The advertisement calls for experience in “AMD and/or Nvidia GPUs.” Currently the range of Apple computers use graphics acceleration from all three major vendors; the latest iMac uses Nvidia, the Mac mini uses integrated Intel graphics and the Mac Pro uses ATI GPUs. Interestingly the job advertisement has now been removed.
Nvidia is a Zombie?!
In related news it looks like Nvidia is suffering from a short-selling attack on the US stock market. A report on the Motley Fool yesterday said short selling of Nvidia shares has increased by 64 per cent. Short sellers are basically betting upon a firm’s decline and the subsequent share price drop.
The Fool reports that some analysts think “NVIDIA is a zombie: it's dead, but it just doesn't know it.” This is mainly due to the PC market decline. Yet the firm has had good results recently with record levels of both sales and profits growth. I think the markets must remember that Nvidia has created successful mobile offerings such as the Tegra SoCs and headlining supercomputing components before writing it off due to the state of the desktop PC market.
