Apple Threatened Intel to Abandon Their Chips If Power Consumption Wasn't Improved

Apple has reportedly threatened Intel to move away from using their processors in future ultra-portable notebook designs, such as the MacBook Air, if the chip giant doesn't do anything about decreasing the power consumption of their processors.

According to the Mac Rumors website, which cites Greg Welch, director of Intel's Ultrabook group, this threat was a real wake-up call for the company.

To make sure that it doesn't loses Apple's business, Intel has recently announced a sharp revision in its product roadmap and outlined that future mobile processors will be built to fit inside a 15W TDP.

This is a dramatic change when compared to today's mobile CPU as the regular voltage models usually have a thermal design power of 35W.

To put things in perspective, the 15W TDP announced is even lower than that of Intel's current ULV (ultra-low voltage) chips, which have a power draw of 18W.

To further improve on its processor designs, Intel also plans to introduce a configurable TPD technology in its upcoming Ivy Bridge and Haswell chips.

This will enable the CPUs to surpass their maximum TDP for small amounts of time by increasing their operating frequency in order to complete heavy tasks in less time, quickly returning to an idle state when the extra power is no longer needed.

Furthermore, the configurable TDP technology will also come with a special docked mode, which will allow the processor to exceed the system's TDP consistently when installed in a special dock with extra cooling.

According to the latest findings from IDC and Gartner, Apple commends about 5% of the global computer market share, but in the US this value has reached 10.7% in the second quarter of 2011, which represents a 11.6% growth over Q2 2010.