And to back up its tough talk, Nvidia also announced that for its new , MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air laptops.

"The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M architecture delivers an ideal combination of visual computing horsepower and energy efficiency in a single, highly-integrated package that we're using to bring a whole new level of graphics performance to our MacBook users," David Moody, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Mac Product Marketing, said in a statement.

And that's one heck of a door-opener for Nvidia, according to Dan Olds, principal analyst with the Gabriel Consulting Group.

"I think they have an advantage right now," said Olds. "I don't see Apple using them if Nvidia didn't have compelling technical and economic merit. Apple knows what it's doing in notebook design and they have to satisfy a demanding audience. They wouldn't use the Nvidia part if it didn't provide significant value."

The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M is a single chip that has been designed for notebooks and smaller computing devices. The company reported that it has 16 parallel processing cores that deliver 54 Gflops of processing power. Nvidia also claims that the GPU delivers up to five times faster graphics performance than Intel's Centrino 2 chip.