AMD has announced that its line of HD 4800 video cards is being used inside of some of Apple's iMac and Mac Pro computers. Apple has been using NVIDIA video cards and GPUs in many of its systems, but they GPUs have been failing in many of its computers.

AMD says that its GPUs complement Snow Leopard's fully OpenCL Verison 1.0 implementation. The specification is a key enabler of ATI Stream technology that allows developers to balance application workloads across the GPU and the CPU.

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 is available in the Mac Pro video card and the Radeon HD 4850 is available in the iMac computer. “Software developers can better serve end-users through open standards and OpenCL, a major component of Snow Leopard, that enables AMD’s ATI Stream technology to accelerate mainstream applications through the processing the power of a GPU,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Products Group. “Whether you’re enjoying HD multimedia content or playing the newest games, the ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 and ATI Radeon™ HD 4850 in the latest Mac Pro and iMac help ATI Stream-enabled applications run faster.”