Macworld on the Mac of the Future

Macworld has published an interesting series of stories on the future of the Mac. Anand Lal Shimpi (of Anandtech fame) writes about the Mac of the future: the CPU. One aspect I found interesting was Apple’s desire for powerful Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), which they are using not just for games and 3D graphics, but for more powerful general purpose computing:

At the same time, Apple has seen the need to use powerful GPUs in its computers. You can’t buy a Mac today that doesn’t have a robust GPU of some sort. Even the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros pair their integrated graphics with an Nvidia GPU, just in case you need it. Thanks to the OpenCL spec, such GPUs can be used for more than just real-time graphics rendering, taking on general computing tasks as well.

So you have a company that seems no longer to care as much as it once did about Intel’s CPUs, but that increasingly cares a lot about GPUs. While I can’t imagine Apple dropping Intel altogether, these two factors make me wonder whether Apple will at least consider using CPUs from AMD in the next two years.

The GPU is the Graphical Processing Unit. They can be discrete, standalone chips (e.g. a Radeon in a current iMac), or integrated with the CPU (like Intel GMA graphics in, say, my older Macbook). Generally, the GPU is only used in 3D games and for some acceleration of perhaps videos playback.  But OpenCL is Apple’s effort to harness the power that goes into the modern graphics chip for general purpose computing.

In other interesting posts on the future of the Mac, John Siracusa writes about the future of MacOS X itself. John Gruber, of Daring Fireball (and with perhaps an odd portrait photo) addresses the issue of iOS overshadowing and replacing OS X. There’s a nice introduction and overview article to all of these posts, including others not mentioned directly here.

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