Macs Getting ATI Radeon HD4000 series GPUs [ATI Radeon HD4870 for Mac Pro Computers and HD4850 for iMac Systems]

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.