Apple going nVidia ! and Possible AMD PPC chips !
This was posted on one of the Mac OS rumor sites.........
In the past day or so, there's been a lot of attention focused on the press coverage of the HyperTransport Consortium, a body which is working to make the HyperTransport interchip communications technology (basically, a multi-purpose high-speed data bus with the ability to scale up to 12.8 GB/second - more than ten times Apple's current main bus performance on the PowerMac G4 and far beyond any of the other motherboard busses that can be replaced with HyperTransport) an industry standard. Apple just so happens to be very interested in HyperTransport for future Macs -- so much so that it has become a founding member of the Consortium. Since x86 processor maker AMD created HyperTransport, and is also a pet technology of graphics acceleration leader and chipset maker nVIDIA, speculation has run rampant that Apple may be working to open the door to more compatibility with a range of HyperTransport-connected chipsets -- perhaps even making use of AMD parts and (gasp!) AMD-manufactured PowerPC processors.
Although Apple has indeed been showing some interest in working with AMD, Rumors has been led to believe that so far these discussions have been largely general in nature, with HyperTransport being looked at as the gateway to future dealings between the companies. We're a lot more interested in the rumors going around about Apple and nVIDIA. After all, Apple has already made the PowerMac line powered by nVIDIA graphics cards across the entire standard model selection. Granted, you can get an ATi RADEON if you want, but given the neck-in-neck nature of the RADEON and the GeForce 2MX, we'll bet that only a few users, who for the most part probably only want the RADEON for compatibility with a particular application or system configuration, will actually be picking one up. If Apple goes ahead with the widely rumored move to nVIDIA's GeForce2GO accelerator in the Powerbook G4 Titanium revision due at the end of September (code-name Onyx, at least according to the grapevine consensus -- we've yet to see hard documentation that this is in fact the real codename Apple is using internally), that would make Apple's entire Pro lineup 100% nVIDIA-based. Granted nVIDIA is leading the computer industry in the performance arena these days and their prices are generally very competitive, but given those circumstances, we'd think that Apple must have some pretty compelling business relationship reasons for the move to leave behind ATi's long-standing close relationship with the company and more than three years of Apple offering only ATi accelerators with its computers.
nVIDIA's first system chipsets, the nFORCE series, focus largely on bang-for-the-buck and low cost. However, at present the only PowerPC processor we're sure will have HyperTransport support is the PPC 7500, a 64-bit "Book E" G5. So, correspondingly, we may not see a HyperTransport-based Mac until the G5 is ready - at present, that looks to be somewhere in the ballpark of mid-2002. This would mean that we'd also be waiting for an Apple and/or nVIDIA-built chipset that could cater to the mid-2002 high-end features: 1600Mbps Firewire, 10-Gigabit Ethernet, ATA-133, 8X AGP, etc. Thusly, unless Apple manages to get a more consumer-oriented processor ready for HyperTransport (perhaps the 7460 - the power-saving, lower-cost version of today's high-end G4?), we probably will never see a Mac built on today's nFORCE chipsets. Instead, the high end desktops will come first, with the iMac and portables following gradually over the course of 2002 and perhaps early 2003.
But sooner or later, we do expect Apple to move fully to HyperTransport-based mainboards...which in turn makes it very easy, not to mention cost-effective, to utilize nVIDIA's chipsets. So we don't need to have a lot of insider information to figure this one out; yes, Apple will probably use nVIDIA chipsets (no doubt with added chips for Apple-specific functionalities) in the future if they remain as competitive as they are today.
