“A new generation of personal computers on the way from Apple Inc. may sport some of the most significant architectural changes since the Mac maker made the jump from PowerPC processors to those manufactured by Intel Corp.,” Kasper Jade reports for AppleInsider.
“As part of its move to Intel chips in early 2006, the Cupertino-based company largely abandoned its practice of using custom motherboard chipsets to support the primary CPU in its Macs. Instead, it began to rely on slightly tweaked versions of industry-standard chipsets offered by Intel to the broad range of PC manufacturers that develop Intel-powered systems,” Jade reports.
“However, with Apple striving to maintain Mac sales growth of more than two times the industry average, it’s again looking to differentiate the architecture of its personal computer systems through alternative technology that will afford it an advantage beyond the reach of its competition,” Jade reports.
“As such, people familiar with these plans say an upcoming generation of Macs, lead by a trio of redesigned notebooks, won’t adopt the Montevina chipset announced as part of Intel’s Centrino 2 mobile platform earlier this month. What’s more, those same people suggest the chipset employed by the new wave of Macs may have little or nothing to do with Intel at all,” Jade reports.
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: We are talking chipsets, not processors. Possibilities discussed in AppleInsider’s full article include Intel CPUs with Apple-designed proprietary chipsets and/or new relationship with AMD, NVidia or Via chipset makers.
Arnold Kim writes for MacRumors, “This does not mean that Apple will be moving away from Intel’s processors. The chipsets are simply the support chips required to interconnect the processor and the rest of the computer. Intel’s Montevina platform (now known as Centrino 2) consists of a Penryn processor, the Montevina chipset and wireless networking interface. Future laptops will continue to use Intel’s most recent Penryn processors which provide improved bus-speeds (1066MHz). To the customer, Apple’s decision to use 3rd party or custom chipsets is not of great significance, as all the chipsets should be functionally identical.”
Full article here.
“We are working to develop new products that contain technologies that our competition will not be able to match.” – Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer, July 21, 2008
If true, Apple will again start competing with one of its partners. There are all sorts of negatives that go along with that.
I’ll believe it when I seet it.
Read the article.
CHIPSET. Not PROCESSOR.
Apple will stick with Intel processors, but may produce some sort of custom chipset to augment them.
Apple has used custom chipsets at various times. Why not now?
The new chipsets (NOT CPUs) will differentiate Apple MacBooks because they will have amazing power management and “transition” to hybrid drives (if not full SSDs) which will blow everything else away. That’s why you have Snow Leopard! The big difference is that this new OS will have mostly under the hood features to match this new memory management system. Boots will be faster and much of the OS will be in solid state memory which will make things even SNAPPIER! If that’s possible… ;^) M$ Windoze can’t match it because it is so bloated, the amount of solid state memory would have be enormous to make a difference.
Also that’s why the margins will shrink initially. Because solid state memory is expensive! But costs will fall and margins will rise again. You heard it here first!
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Didn’t they already create their own chipset for the Mac Book Air?
I’m thinking they did, I could be wrong. If they did, I would say that Apple would likely move this direction as it will mean they have more control over the thinness of their systems and will also be able to keep hardware/software changes in house meaning better communication between the two and hopefully less bugs! It would also mean a cheaper chipset as you remove Intel’s profit margin.
If it’s true, providing Apple has the right team behind it, it could mean cheaper, thinner, more stable and speedier computers!
Apple will just design its own motherboards in order to use Intel and/or AMD processors. I think MacBooks and iMacs will use AMD and the Pro line will use Intel ones.
iPhones and other small devices will use PowerPC Chips!
@ Mac-nugget:
Reason #4:
It would allow them to cut costs.
Wouldn’t bother me a bit if they were going to move away from Intel – I’d still like to see the PPC get off of its backside and do a good CPU family for portable computing – but alas, I guess it’s just not going to happen.
Interesting (if unfortunate) as to how so many readers jumped their conclusions on CPUs as opposed to the supporting chipsets.
In general, I see & agree that this is most likely motivated by a “lock out the clones” effort through hardware, but the Oppenheimer comment suggests a bit more than just that: I suspect that there will be some OS X-based ‘hardware enhancements’ that will be very much tied into the process – – such as using Graphics card CPUs for hardware acceleration.
Thus, the key thing to remember is that the chipset may be “different” from standard in various Apple-specific ways, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t include 100% of the features of a chipset that Windows relies on…think of it proverbially as a “125%” chipset.
This would mean that the chipset still has 100% of all those things that are needed for Windows, which would allow the Apple hardware to still ‘dual boot’ back into Windows as a product feature…plus an extra 25% that Windows OS doesn’t looks for, but which OS X does.
And with that ‘extra 25%’ in the Apple-unique chipset:
1) Cloners get locked out via hardware-based security.
2) New Mac buyers get some ‘goodie’, such as hardware acceleration through GPUs, multi-touch or whatever.
-hh
I would not be surprised if Snow Leopard will not be installable on non-Mac machines. Good luck in making more ‘Mac’-clones. Good luck to those who bought a Mac-clone.
Apple’s got something up it’s sleeve, between PA Semi and Oppenheimer’s not-so-coy mentions of product transitions and cutting-edge features at price points competitors can’t match.
I can see some potential advantages in incorporating custom chips into Macs to accelerate or enable specific operations. Stuff like this: http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/mxo2/hardware/
But redesigning the entire chipset seems like an odd thing to do. Wasn’t one of the hallmark of Apple-custom chipsets really slow bus speeds and wimpy memory bandwidth? Or was that just a PowerPC problem?
At least Apple has a choice now with Intel available.
“After all, how can any other company compete with an Apple built personal Teleportation system like the iTele.”
Sorry iWant, but the iTelly has already been released and is a total flop.
“MacBook Air is the first step by Apple to make a customized laptop, something that doesn’t use off-the-shelf components “
It is everything you say except it’s built completely out of off the shelf components.
Why would Apple want to get into the chipset business? Do they think they can compete with Intel, AMD and Nvidia?
They can’t get it right assembling cookie cutter designs from Intel, what makes anyone think they would do a good job of their own chipset design?