
At the end of 2011 (!), We published here a rumor entitled “Apple may be able to equip Macs with NVIDIA GPUs”. Back then, the Santa Clara company had lost space on Macs a few years ago to a competitor in neighboring Sunnyvale, both in California (United States): Advanced Micro Devices, better known by its acronym OMG.
For the rumor is back to the fore, this time thanks to job openings opened by NVIDIA – discovered by Bloomberg – which contain several references to work close to Apple. The descriptions even mention the Metal and OpenGL technologies, extensively used by Apple.
While the most obvious would be Apple using AMD’s Polaris GPUs in its next generation of MacBooks Pro, the rumor opens the door for it to adopt NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture instead – which, by the way, promises more performance with less power consumption and heat dissipation (which is great for laptops).
The re-entry of NVIDIA would not necessarily mean the end of Apple’s partnership with AMD, not least because Apple always gives preference to having multiple component suppliers in order to be able to tailor better purchase negotiations.
Although the path seems to be outlined, there is also the possibility that this will not happen in the launches expected for this year – but only in a few months, in the generations that will be launched in 2017. We will see.
[via AppleInsider]