Apple MacBook preparing for a switch to NVIDIA GPU in 2012MacBook which was introduced back in may 2006 has become quite a tend setter and has become quite popular around the world. The laptop was introduced as a successor to iBook. This laptop has achieved quite high sales figure since it was preferred equally for the consumer as well as education markets. Macbook has been getting more and more upgrades as time went by. Apple has joined hands with many computer and semiconductor IC giants to introduce very new cutting edge technologies in their laptop.

There has been a news being speculated around the gadget world that Apple will revert back to NVIDIA chipsets from its present AMD chipsets for the next generation of Macbooks. The advantage of NVIDIA chipset is that it offers discrete graphics other than the integrated type graphics which are featured in the new generation AMD’s and Intel’s processor.

The most ironic thing is that Apple has been using NVIDIA chipsets for their laptop and only after years of transition that they where able to integrate AMD chipset into their entire line up. Apple had to go through many hurdles and took lot of time and money to do this transformation. And once the whole process is done Apple is opting back for the previous chipset.

The thing is that discrete graphics are not much preferred by the manufactures now. This is because having a discrete graphics card option means that it will require additional space to integrate the graphics card. Since the newest trend is to make the laptops and Netbooks as thin and compact as possible the need for this additional space can be an issue. The integrated graphics technology has also been improving at a very fast rate.

The first generation of integrated graphics cards could not offer the expected performance. But as technology improved, integrated graphics chips from Intel and AMD improved very much and they are much preferred nowadays.

Macbooks always had a graphics issue right from their introduction. Critics have labeled their graphics performance as not up to the mark. This was because Apple had always tried to balance the CPU and GPU performance for their smallest computers and they were not quite able to achieve that balance. Intel’s strict restrictions prevented the addition of much improved graphics processors in to their integrated graphics solutions.

If that could have been allowed the graphics performance of the machines could have been much better. This made Apple to choose between two options. Either they can go with the not so high performing integrated graphics card option or they can use the old generation core2 processors that could still be paired with a third party graphics card.

The small laptops coming from Apples manufacturing units are all now fitted with the integrated graphics processor from Intel.

The integrated graphics technology which is improving considerably is able to provide the graphic requirements of the users of the small laptops. So now they come in complete Intel’s technology solution.

But for the bigger laptops where the graphics requirement is much more constringent Apple provides two options, either the discrete graphics or the integrated one. Those discrete graphics option will be reverting back to NVIDIA from AMD. Some time in the future when the integrated graphics card become much advanced they may even replace the discrete ones in the larger laptops.

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