Macs Getting ATI Radeon HD4000 series GPUs

Parent company to ATI, AMD have just announced that its line of ATi
Radeon HD 4800 series GPUs will be used in Apple's upcoming iMac and Mac
Pro computers. The high-performance HD4870 graphic card will be
available in the Mac Pro systems while the more mainstream-oriented
HD4850 graphic card will be featured in the iMac computers.

Apple's new computers will feature the latest Mac OSX Snow Leopard
operating system and will be fully compliant with the OpenCL 1.0
framework. This will allow programs running on Snow Leopard to use ATI's
Stream technology which facilitates the use of the graphic card's
formidable processing power for other processor-intensive computing
processes such as video conversion.

The HD4850 and HD4870 GPUs, by providing high-performance GPU solution
in a more affordable package, had allowed ATI earlier this year to
recapture some of the market share they had lost to their biggest
competitor, NVIDIA.

In fact, earlier Mac systems from Apple had featured the nVidia 9400
series graphics which suffered from a higher-than-normal failure rate.
So adding the HD4850 and HD4870 chipsets only sounds like a good idea to us.