Nvidia NV31M details emerge

Aside from the NV30 and NV30 Ultra there will be two more cards - NV31 and NV34 - and we know that NV31 will have its mobile brother simply called NV31M.

NV31M was taped out back in early November and first samples showed around Yule, with early chips having a glitch or two, as you'd expect.

The chip will work at 250MHz for the core and 250 for the memory and just like the NV30 will dissipate quite a lot of power. We reckon that Nvidia will try to save as much power from that chip implementing its Power miser marchitecture but we are not aware of any details at press time. The laptop card will need to be developed around a 10 layers PCB that is not cheap.

Unlike the rumours going around suggest, this chip will be fully DirectX 9.0 compliant and will have support for Pixel and vertex shader 2.0, one of the most important things for DirectX 9 compatibility.

Performance wise, it will get around 7500 in 3dmark 2001 SE -- that should be enough for it to catch up with Mobility Radeon 9000 but bear in mind that ATI is about to announce a new R300 based mobile chip, codenamed M10.

Taiwanese ODMs already have their chips and planning their designs, and we can expect Dell to be one of the first to announce a laptop based on this technology.

Nvidia will probably use SnoBIT 2003 in Hangover, Germany to announce the mobile morsel. µ