Tuesday’s event in Cupertino, California, home of Apple Computers, brought to light the innovations to Apple’s MacBook and MacBook pro series of notebooks have in store for us. One of the most important, and which is common to the new iterations of both portable computer series, is the replacement of Mobile Intel with the new Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphic chips. According to Steve Jobs himself, they’re 5 times faster than what Apple have been using in the past for their MacBooks.

The 9400M, which is being manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, features 16 streaming processors, which will improve gaming performance, the implementation of Hybrid SLI (Scalable Link Interface), which allows the mobile graphics chip to be paired with an external graphics card to share the processing load and thus gain more speed. The chip also supports Nvidia’s CUDA parallel processing language as well as the Apple-developed OpenCL (Open Computing Language). It is manufactured using a 65nm process.

Nvidia are assuring customers that the new 9400M does not suffer from the weak die and packaging issues that the previous 8400M chip had, and which caused the recall of several hundred laptops that sported them. "We've updated the materials we're using to manufacture our chips," said Bill Henry, director of notebook marketing at Nvidia. He went on to mention that the Apple announcement is only "first in a string of announcements" and "most of the top OEMs have designs in the works."

Intel, despite not providing chips for the new MacBooks, says they’re not out of the loop with Apple. "Intel's technology is integrated throughout Apple's product line [and though] we didn't win this particular design," said an Intel spokesman "Intel continues to have a strong relationship with Apple. Graphics is a competitive market and we compete for all new business," he added.

Intel continue, however, to provide the CPUs for the new MacBooks, for instance Apple’s choice of CPU for the MacBook Air is Intel’s 45nm SSF Penryn CPU, which replaces the older 65nm SFF Merom, which was previously used. The Penryn CPUs offer better performance, due in part to higher cache memory, as they come with either 3MB or 6MB shared L2 cache.

Other new features of the new series of the MacBook and MacBook Pro are a new manufacturing process for the casing, which is cut from a single piece of aluminum; a larger, glass trackpad with gesture support; higher storage (120 GB hard disk or a 128 GB solid state drive); and a Mini DisplayPort connector.

The prices for the new line of Nvidia-Equipped Apple Notebooks, which have already hit stores, are as follows: $1999 and $2499 for the 9400M and 9600M GPU-equipped MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs, and $1599 for the new MacBook.