GIGAOM
STACEY HIGGINBOTHAM
14 OCT.,08
Quick, think about what you do on your MacBook. In addition to web surfing and email, I bet a large number of you use it to organize photos, watch movies or online video, and maybe transfer files to your iPod. And those last three use cases are why Apple’s new line of MacBooks, unveiled today, include Nvidia’s graphics processors.
The more visual our computing and web surfing activities become, the more often we use the GPU rather than the CPU. This move to the GPU started a few years back, when software firms from Microsoft to Adobe starting using it to process imagery in programs ranging from Acrobat to PowerPoint. Last month, Adobe said that its Creative Suite software would run from the GPU rather than the CPU; web applications such as Google Earth, meanwhile, already tap into the GPU to render images. For Nvidia this means its chips are moving out of the creative, scientific and gaming niches and into everyday computing.