It’s no question that Apple is hard at work developing the next iteration of MacBook Pros which is expected to arrive sometime early next year. However, computer manufacturers are hinting the next generation of MacBook Pros could be powered by Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPU.
TUAW reports that computer manufacturers such as Acer, Gateway and Lenovo are pushing laptops with a very interesting part: Intel’s I7-2630QM. This is the product name for the chip maker’s mobile Quadcore processor running at 2.0+ GHz. While it’s no secret it’ll be powering quite a few Windows based laptops, manufacturers are keeping quite until Intel’s official launch of the new Sandy Bridge architecture in CES this coming January.
Sandy Bridge is a new kind of CPU architecture based on a 32 nanometer manufacturing process. It will most likely be packaged alongside a HM65 chipset which is part of the Huron River platform. The new Sandy Bridge processors will integrate graphics and a memory controller on a single die which is more energy efficient.
Apple could take advantage of the lack of need for a separate GPU to keep laptops like the MacBook Air thin while still delivering more run-time albeit at the cost of improved graphics performance. As for the quad-core version line of sandy Bridge CPUs, Apple would likely introduce them on the high end MacBook Pro and iMac while using dual-core processors with dedicated GPUs for the rest of the MacBook family.
