Apple MacBook 2016 and beyond: AMD to dominate GPU market share on Apple laptops

When it comes to raw power in high performance computing and gaming, NVIDIA is in a near-constant victory lap, as the company keeps churning out more powerful hardware every year. With this year’s release of the GTX 1070 and 1080, NVIDIA seems to be unstoppable on the front of desktop GPUs, as well as in the “desktop replacement” category of high-end laptops, with one notable exception:

AMD is one NVIDIA competitor who managed to gain considerable market share on Apple devices, a company whose priority is to deliver the perfect blend of performance, design and user experience.

The compromises required to achieve Apple’s objective, especially with regard to MacBook laptops, have followed a trend of thinness, which will likely continue into the next updates of the MacBook Pro, with Apple seemingly determined to apply many of the design elements used in the 2015 12 inch MacBook.

With NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang going on record last year, to express the company’s primary focus on PCs, gaming consoles and, as it turns out from this year’s Computex, virtual reality, it seems that the GPU giant’s interest in powering ultrabooks and similarly low-profile devices, including smartphones, has almost completely phased out.

AMD, on the other hand, has been hard at work, building graphic solutions for ultraportable PCs, like tablets and laptops, with excellent results, according to its most recent release of it Polaris architecture. AMD is also one of the very few chip manufacturers capable of building GPUs fitting the ultra-thin requirements of MacBooks, as well as other Mac products like the iMac, whose next iteration is rumored to feature Polaris architecture through the upcoming new AMD Fire Pro.

By this token, Apple MacBooks will provide graphic performance under an Intel/AMD duopoly, as NVIDIA concentrates its efforts on Windows 10 PCs, game consoles, and even Smart TVs.