Future Mac minis likely to sport the Intel G965 chipset
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Apr 4, 2006 at 12:31am
Since the Intel Mac mini’s release, there’s been grumbling—including my own in my March 21 review—about its integrated graphics chip.
The mini’s GMA950 graphics processor sports 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM that’s shared with the main memory. There’s quite a bit of debate about this, but, as I’ve mentioned, it seems to me to be a step down from the previous PowerPC Mac minis. The GMA950 uses “Dynamic Video Memory Technology” (DVMT) to support up to 224MB of video memory and system memory is allocated where it is needed dynamically.
A report at DigiTimes leads me to suspect that the next rev of the Mac mini will continue the integrated graphics chip trend with the Intel G965 chipset, which should pack considerably more oomph than its predecessor. The article says that Intel’s G965 will integrate the company’s fourth-generation Graphic Media Accelerator (GMA) graphics core and deliver a significant increase in 3D gaming and multimedia performance compared to Intel’s other chipsets with GMA 900/950 graphics processors, according to sources familiar with Intel’s product roadmap.
The G965 is one of the Broadwater chipsets supporting DDR2 800 memory that Intel has scheduled to launch in the second quarter of 2006, with the P965 and G965 series for the consumer market and the Q965 and Q963 for the business segment. Now I’m still not too keen on integraphed graphics chips myself, but I suspect they’ll be a mainstay of the Mac mini line from now on.
That and a digital video recorder? Thoughts? Write me at dsellers@macsimumnews.com
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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