Rumor: No more nVIDIA Chips on the future Mac?

A rumor that appeared on the SemiAccurate website says that in the next Mac computers to be produced in the next two years, no more nVIDIA chips will be found. The chips, according to the rumor reported on the website, wouldn’t guarantee the quality standard that Apple requires on their products.

In particular, there would be two reasons for this: first, the lawsuit from Intel against nVIDIA. According to Intel, nVIDIA was never authorized to design chipsets with an integrated memory controller, and that could prevent nVIDIA from manufacturing Nehalem -based chipsets, which are currently present on the Mac Pro line, and are expected to be launched on the portable lines as well. The second reason is the malfunctioning of a few graphic cards which hit a few number of MacBook Pro users, and that forced Apple to give a special extended warranty.

Of course, this isn’t good news for end-users, especially on the low-end range: the introduction of nVIDIA chipsets on the entry-level MacBooks and iMacs have brought these computers to rather decent video performances, especially when compared to the integrated Intel solution, which is still not compatible with some videogames. Also, nVIDIA was the first one to be prepared for the OpenCL, the technology integrated in Snow Leopard, that would divert part of the workload from the CPU to the GPU.

We think that if the rumors are true, it could be a big issue. We’re hoping they’re not.