NVIDIA-Powered Mac Mini: A Quasi-Certainty

There’s a new batch of NVIDIA-powered Mac-Mini news articles today in which various writers wonder if the rumor is true. We’ve started to discuss this last month on this site, but frankly, whether or not Apple will use an NVIDIA GPU is not even in question in our opinion, it’s pratically a certainty.

The real question is to know if the Mac Mini will be powered by an Atom or a Core Duo/Quad main processor. It is possible that Apple chooses a combination of NVIDIA GPU/Chipset with an ATOM CPU. That’s the Ion platform from NVIDIA. Ion compensates for the Atom’s inability to play high-resolution videos (as reported in most Netbooks and even the new Sony Vaio P.

However, Atom might prove too slow for many things that Apple customers might do, like video or audio encoding and the Mini has ample room to host a “normal” CPU. An Ion-based Mac Mini would likely require only 25% of the current Mac Mini volume. It’s really Apple’s call to guess what customers will do with the mini. In any case, I bet that NVIDIA will indeed power the new Mac Mini.