Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove - Ashleigh Brilliant
|
|
|
Nvidia talks about its new GeForce 9400M
AFTER LETTING APPLE steal the glory yesterday, Nvidia has today confirmed its notebook-orientated mGPU, which will be used in new MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Airs and which Nvidia will soon be offering to several other OEMs.
GeForce 9400M, a Frankensteinian cross between a high-performance GPU and a motherboard chipset, will supposedly up the graphics ante for the anorexic laptops which are all the rage.
Intel G45's have been getting trounced by Nvidia’s integrated graphics for a while now in the desktop space, so its not really very surprising that the firm fancies its chances in the notebook market too.
And Apple was first in line with the endorsement, dumping its long favoured Intel integrated graphics chipset for the shiny new Nvidia 9400M instead.
The single chip design counts 16 parallel processing cores which Nvidia claim can pack a 54 gigaflops processing power punch. The firm also claims its new chipset has five times the power of Intel's Centrino technology for graphics (especially 3D), without having to up the power usage. So sure is Nvidia of this that the firm reckons users will even be able to watch a whole HD movie on a single battery charge.
Other features include a 128-bit memory interface, support for DDR2 800 or DDR3 1066 memory, 12 USB 2.0 ports, six 3GB/s SATA ports and Gigabit Ethernet.
Some have claimed that by using the 9400M, Mac will finally become a gaming machine, but that’s not especially accurate. Sure, it will be good enough to play the odd game on, but integrated graphics do not make for “gaming machines”. If anything, the big advantage lies in video processing and multimedia apps which will allow for GPU acceleration.
Nvidia knows that the notebook market is a fast growing one and that integrated, rather than discrete graphics make up most of the notebook market pie. Nvidia is hungry for pie, Intel’s pie, and its setting out to take it.
Senior Veep of Nvidia’s GPU business, Jeff Fisher, noted that the 9400M gave the firm the opportunity to “expand its market footprint from gamers and design professionals to the creative generation of users, as well as firmly establish us at the heart of the fastest growing PC market - the notebook PC."
When the INQ asked whether these new chipsets would smoke the new Macbooks as bad chips have done to the notebooks this past year, we were given a firm “no”. Apparently Nvidia knows “specifically what caused the failure of those chips” and has learned from previous mistakes.
The new chips purportedly don’t have the same material set which caused the problems before, although what the new material set is, Nvidia isn’t saying. µ
Tags: Nvidia
Share this:
Share
Let's see,,, Nvidia makes a bunch of bad graphics chips, and refuses to be open and honest about the bad chips. Now they say that these new "better" chips won't be bad like the other ones??? And you believe that????
Come on now!
At least Apple has been open and honest about the problem. Of all of the OEM's they have done the best to support their customers. Unlike HP. HP has been the worst. http://www.hplies.com HP has been lying to it's customers so much that I don't think they know how to tell the truth.
And I don't think that Nvidia knows how to tell the truth ether. I'd like to see Nvidia come clean and produce a list of all of the bad chips that they have produced.
Wayne Sallee
Wayne@WayneSallee.com
I thought NVidia was dead, thats what the Inquirer hacks have been saying as they gloated over faulty chip problems. LOL
Now stick it in a MiniMac and I will buy it the same day.
Have a great day.
I'd wished they'd stop doing them graphs with there GPU against intergrated GFX. Most people know it's going to blow it out the water upon adverage a PC buyer would have been giving advice to stay away from such things.

Or (and this is a big OR) in PC Worst they'd be nice and tell you it's crap (cough cough INTEL GFX). They also compare against AMD well yours is alot newier now nVidia and AMD's is about 8mnths to 1 year old plus it's a 2400HD chip if I'm correct not the best 1 in the world.

I'm expecting AMD/ATi to release there mobile 4000 series or something near this chip then the stress will get onto Nvidia's back and MAC's will be dying everywhere oh the horror.
LOL.

I thought Nvidia was out of the chipset business. Yet Apple dumps Intel, and completely supplants them across the board with Nvidia chipsets.

Can we get a comment from Charlie?...ROFL.

I can't believe you guys still pay this person for his sloppy commentary (putting in midly).
i wonder who would buy this peace of garbage.smaller=better at everything yay you just gatta fork over 2.5k and up for one only.with the same math my full tower + is from the dark ages.
They're probably using the same eutectic material as ATI now: those chips should be fine...

Unless some of the earliest 9400Ms still used the defective material, which is possible given that NVIDIA only recently started changing their manufacturing process.

But there might not be enough of them to record significant failure rates within a reasonable period of time, especially since all newly introduced chips will use the new material, therefore keeping global failure rates low enough.

Then again, maybe NVIDIA decided to do the right thing and just throw away all potentially defective chips on this series, but I wouldn't bet on it.