“Since Nvidia has clearly demonstrated the superiority of its Pascal architecture in performance and energy efficiency to AMD’s Polaris, I have wondered if Apple would switch to Nvidia GPUs for its Macs,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “It now appears that such a transition is underway, although it may not be until sometime in 2017 that consumers will be able to buy a Mac with Nvidia inside.”
“Bloomberg has reported that Nvidia posted several jobs for software engineers to develop specifically for the Apple Mac. Apple’s proprietary Metal graphics APIs, as well as OS X (now referred to by Apple simply as macOS) are specifically mentioned in the job postings,” Hibben writes. “There can be no doubt that Nvidia is hiring software engineers to develop graphics drivers for the Mac.”
“Most likely, the new postings indicate that the effort is fairly new and any products featuring Nvidia graphics processors would probably not reach consumers before next year,” Hibben writes. “It’s been widely assumed that AMD would be in expected refreshes of desktop and notebook Macs. A Mac Pro refresh has been long overdue, as has a refresh of the MacBook Pros. Many have wondered why it’s taking so long for Apple to update the hardware in these still very important product lines and have pointed to this delay as a sign of stagnation. I think it is perplexing that a company with Apple’s resources would not be able to upgrade the Mac product lines with the latest CPU and GPU offerings as soon as they become available. I certainly don’t buy the Apple stagnation hypothesis. One possible explanation is that Apple had been expecting Polaris to be available for its iMac and MacBook Pros… Chances are that when Polaris notebook GPUs become available, that’s when we’ll see the new Macs.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: An Apple-NVIDIA partnership has a bright, and mutually-beneficial, future indeed!
SEE ALSO:
Job listing suggests NVIDIA is working with Apple on future Macs – September 23, 2016