Both Dailytech and AppleInsider are talking about some fresh insider news that Apple's next revision of laptops -- due in six to eight weeks, just ahead of the US back-to-school rush -- won't be using Intel chipsets.

Whilst the CPU will still be Intel based -- for now -- Apple are looking to differentiate their hardware from other more generic designs by changing the primary architecture of the new machine's motherboards. Will they move to Nvidia's nForce chipset, or one from VIA, or have they purloined some smarts from Dan Dobberpuhl's PA Semi team and designed their own? Could this be the "diffucult product transition" that both Jobs and Oppenheimer have been idly mentioning here & there these last few months?

"Apple will be unveiling new technologies that will hurt our profit margins but will send competitors reeling," said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's Chief Financial Officer, in a conference call with the DailyTech reporters.

To source the grand wiki:
Centrino - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It seems that the processor is Penryn and the Montevina is the chipset. I'm confused. Anyways its the case of fire bad tree pretty for me, as long as its fast, affordable and pretty im all in

You're right. I was under the assumption it was Montevina was the chip itself

No Montevina under the hood for macbooks i guess this means the rumor sites are saying.

Pure speculation my dear Brains
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The hottest tip on the rumor wires right now is that Apple does have really interesting Mac hardware on the way, as I’ve been known to suggest on a few occasions. Even Apple, at its conference call last week, was willing to acknowledge that it had a “future product transition” coming this quarter.

But the rumor circulating through the Intertubes this week goes further. It claims that Apple intends to use non-Intel silicon on its upcoming Macs. Not for the CPU, which will remain Intel, but for the rest of the chipset. While this rumor has slightly more credibility than it would if Apple had not recently purchased PA Semi or if AMD and VIA weren’t pumping out chipsets like crazy. And as AppleInsider notes, such a move could help Apple to differentiate based on silicon. Everyone else is using Montevina, and Apple could have something unique. It sounds like good judgment.

Except it’s a waste of time and money. Worse, it’s a losing strategy. After all, Apple doesn’t need to differentiate on silicon. Industrial design and software is enough. To read why, click through.
Read the rest of this entry »


Hardware is only as good as the software that’s running on it and the external case and interface that users interact with. Amazing silicon doesn’t do anything unless the platform built on top of it takes advantage of its capabilities. And the great news for Apple is that other PC-makers are all running Vista or XP, and Apple is the only company that offers a multi-touch trackpad. In the worst case, Apple’s computers are competitive for the best-designed on the market. At best, they’re ahead by an interstellar mile.

To a purist, a Mac that has the same hardware under the hood as a Dell is some kind of disappointment. But to the rest of the world, it’s the difference between a commodity PC and a Mac. The overall design and engineering of the Mac, not to mention the beauty of OS X, completely sets Apple apart, regardless of what’s going on beneath the surface. The experience is just so much better.

And that’s why I will be shocked if Apple uses a genuinely atypical chipset with its next generation of Macs. If the people using those Macs, myself included, can’t see the benefit of Apple using its own supporting chips, there’s no reason to use them — focus on getting the best value for the dollar and optimizing OS X performance on Intel’s standard hardware. Apple differentiates through industrial design and superior software. That’s true on the Mac, and it’s true on the iPhone and iPod, too. Sure, the iPhone has a powerful chip in it, but an equally powerful chip is in the BlackBerry Bold — no one’s going to mistake one for the other. The look of the iPhone sets it apart, but even more so, OS X Mobile is in a class all its own.

People don’t buy computer chips — they buy a great mobile or computing experience. And Apple will use the most stable, robust chipsets that already exist until and unless they come upon a software feature that won’t run well without something exotic on hand.

As it is, this rumor just doesn’t make sense. Don’t swallow it!
(July 28th, 2008, © Pete Mortensen)

I have no idea how using a non-Intel chipset would benefit Apple. Can someone enlighten me?

A custom chipset might make it cheaper and/or lower in power consumption.

Key word there is *might* - it would be a miracle if PA-Semi/Apple came along and managed to beat Intel's huge R&D. (would be awesome, but doubtful)

Differentiation. Apple have always preferred to do things differently, to make their products stand apart from everyone else. At the moment, all Intel based Macs are essentially a bog-standard Intel reference design with a couple of very minor tweaks to the architecture.

If they use an unusual or custom motherboard chipset (the stuff that links the CPU with the memory, the slots and the I/O) it's going to make it a lot harder to make work-alikes.

You could have just linked to the post instead of quoting the entire thing verbatin

Didst thou not see Oppenheimer's comment? He's admitted that whatever it is Apple have chosen will hurt Apple's revenue, but they consider it worth while anyway.

They're taking a gamble that whatever it is they have up their sleeve is so revolutionary, so full of wow-factor, that they're willing and prepared to lose big on it by shifting away from the "norm". Not the first time Apple have done this, by the by.

So they'd be making something different (and more difficult) simply for the fact of being different? That sounds stupid to me. Unless it has a significant financial improvement (cheaper), a performance/reliability improvement, or something Intel simply won't do, then Apple should leave the chip stuff to Intel for their notebooks and desktops.

No Intel means no Bootcamp, right?

They will still have an Intel CPU - for the computer to run bootcamp, the chipset would have to be Windows friendly, which may mean that if it's a non-standard chipset, Apple would have to write a bunch of chipset drivers to get bootcamp to work.

I guess Apple has always been about tight integration of hardware and software. Now we know that Snow Leopard is introducing Grand Central and OpenCL which suggests that processing will be shared among a variety of cores and the GPU. I can only speculate that they want a customised architecture to take advantage of their software innovations.

Um. Or something.

No, that's something that Apple are prepared to do, and have done in the past. But whatever it is they do, it won't slow things down or impact on the performance of Mac OS X -- if there are sufficient benefits to abandoning something that currently works well but is the same as everyone else, for something that still does what Apple want but much much better but happens to be unique, Apple will jump to the new thing faster than a hummingbrd can do a mid-air U-turn.

If one looks at trends in the IT world at large, we're heading towards lots of cores and the increased use of virtual machines. I would not be at all suprised to see Apple's "product transition" results in new Macs that cannot do Boot Camp -- if you want to run Windows, you have to do it in VM. But the new machines, when coupled with Grand Central, will be able to have 4, 8, 16 or 256 CPU and GPU cores and have the OS and its resident apps use all available computational grunt in the most efficient manner possible.

But when you get down to it, they will still be Macs, and will still run OS X and all the apps we're currently used to ... just faster and somehow different, and nicer.

I still fail to see why doing things differently, for the sake of being different (without advantages to the end user), is something Apple will want to do.

Why force people to use VMs? They can use Boot Camp and/or VMs. Allowing Boot Camp doesn't impact on Apple, so why piss off those users that enjoy Boot Camp and come out looking like arseholes for doing so?

I have no doubt that OS X will be great and keep on being great, but I don't see how moving away from Intel for chipsets (not CPUs, just chipsets) is going to do anything but distract Apple from using the microprocessor engineering talent on things where no-one else is focussing on (because they don't have the self-interest, where as Apple does), like the iPod and iPhone line ups.