Apple+Nvidia: One last time around the block?

I’ve talked about the rumors (and now confirmation, sort of) that Nvidia is getting out of the chipset business. But they do seem to leave the door open on one last chipset for FSB-based CPUs (Atom, Core 2 Duo/Quad).

Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective has written an article about the state of Nvidia chipsets, and then posted a short follow-up based on Nvidia’s press release. Nvidia states that they will continue to work on FSB-based chipsets, which would include the Ion2 (MCP89) chipset. So what does this mean to Apple?

It mostly depends on when Intel launches Arrandale. If Intel launches Arrandale close to Ion2, Apple probably wouldn’t want to upgrade MBPs and iMacs to Ion2, then 3-4 months later revise them again to Arrandale + Discrete GPU. They’ve only done this once in modern memory, and that was revising the G5 iMac 3-4 months before it was switched over to Intel.

It would seem to be a foregone conclusion that the low end iMac, the Mini and the MacBook will get Ion2 because those units aren’t likely to see an upgrade to an Arrandale-based system before mid-2010 based Apple’s attempts to make them more affordable – they can milk the current design and just drop in an Ion2 where the 9400M used to be. This however would force Apple’s had to use a discrete GPU in their other products because of Arrandale’s poor performance (hopefully the GT240M). If they can get the drivers written correctly, being able to switch between the integrated GPU and the Nvidia GPU could help out battery life (without having to log out, thank you).

However, if Apple chooses not to migrate their products to Arrandale until around WWDC 2010, upgrading them to Ion in December 2009 is entirely likely – as that gives them a six month product cycle, which is typical (Apple computers are typically updated twice per year).

Finally, what else will MCP89 support? Do we see USB 3.0 or SATA 6Gb/s? We wont see Light Peak, but there are still other options out there for Nvidia to make the chipset stand out above the others. Oddly enough, were Intel to revise their SSDs to SATA 6Gb/s, they could quickly find a home inside Mac products hooked up to a MCP89 chipset.