Nvidia's past drives reports about Apple

From CNET News.com: A report claiming that Nvidia has been ousted from Apple laptop designs has gained prominence quickly because the graphics chip supplier is still dogged by past problems.

"The word is that Nvidia is out of Apple designs," according to a June 26 report from technology Web site SemiAccurate. The report has been cited widely with varying degrees of credence given to it.

"When I say out, I mean on the Nehalem-based Macs," Charlie Demerjian, the author of the report, said in a phone interview Monday, referring to future laptops from Apple that will be based on Intel's new Nehalem Core i series of chips.

Nvidia, not surprisingly, doesn't see it that way. "These rumors are baseless," an Nvidia spokesman said Monday. Apple had no comment.

Nvidia graphics processors are currently used widely in Apple MacBooks. And Apple has been touting a new technology in its upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system called OpenCL, which takes "the power of graphics processors" and makes it available to Snow Leopard for everyday computing tasks.

However, lurking below this push to tap into the compute power of the graphics processor lie past issues with Nvidia chips. A May 29 Apple knowledge-base article (Article: TS2377) couches frustration with Nvidia in diplomatic language, according to Demerjian. The article updates a similar notice Apple published in October of last year.

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