“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
