DailyTech - NVIDIA Announces Five New Notebook GPUs Built on 40nm Process

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Hardware NVIDIA Announces Five New Notebook GPUs Built on 40nm Process
Jansen Ng (Blog) - June 18, 2009 8:22 AM

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24 comment(s) - last by Jackattak.. on Jun 19 at 2:24 PM

Now it's up to the laptop OEMs to decide if they want them

NVIDIA has announced five new GPUs for the lucrative notebook PC market. The GTS 260M, GTS 250M, GT 240M, GT 230M and G210M are built on TSMC's 40nm process, leading to lower power consumption and heat produced. Lower production costs are also possible once the manufacturing line has matured and yields improve.

Archrival ATI announced the Radeon HD 4860 and 4830 in March, making them the first 40nm mobile GPU chips. The firm also launched Radeon HD 4770 video cards at the end of April. Those cards use ATI's RV740 GPU, making them the first desktop chips to be built on a 40nm process by TSMC.

In a bid to catch up to its competitor, NVIDIA has designed the new chips based on the GT200 architecture to support DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1. DirectX 10.1 is an important feature going forward as it is the foundation for DirectX 11, which was designed as a superset of DirectX 10.1. DirectX 11 support will be very important, as many game developers are looking to support it due to the huge public demand for Windows 7.

The new chips are also notable for being the first from NVIDIA to support GDDR5, which are almost twice as efficient as the older GDDR3 at the same memory bit width. ATI has been using GDDR5 since the introduction of the Radeon 4870 in the summer, and has plans to expand its use to lower cost products as well.

Interestingly, the chips are packaged as MXM 3 modules, using the standardized interconnect to the PCI Express bus. The standard length, width, and electrical pinout of MXM 3 means that notebooks using these chips may be removable, and can be upgraded when higher performing GPUs are available. However, this will be up to the individual OEMs.

NVIDIA's nomenclature for its mobile GPU parts is fairly simple. Chips prefaced with "G" are mainstream value parts, "GT" chips are for the mainstream performance market, "GTS" chips are high performance parts, and "GTX" cards are enthusiast level (AKA pricey).

The new mobile chips will avoid the rebranding controversy surrounding the GTX 260M and GTX280M mobile GPUs, which are essentially GeForce 9800 GTX+ chips.

Pricing and availability were not provided by NVIDIA. However, these chips will be sold almost exclusively to notebook OEMs, and designs are already underway for the back-to-school season in the third quarter.

GPU	G 210M	GT 230M	GT 240M	GTS 250M	GTS 260M
GPU clock	625MHz	500MHz	550MHz	500MHz	550MHz
Processor cores	16	48	48	96	96
Processor clock	1.5GHz	1.1GHz	1.21GHz	1.25GHz	1.375GHz
Memory	512MB GDDR3	1GB GDDR3	1GB GDDR5	1GB GDDR5	1GB GDDR5
Memory clock	800MHz	800MHz	800MHz	1.6GHz	1.8GHz
Memory interface	64-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Architecture	GT200	GT200	GT200	GT200	GT200
Peak GFLOPS	72	158	174	360	396
TDP (W)	14	23	23	28	38

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What's the pull of the 260 vs. the 250?

By JMS3072 on 6/18/2009 9:01:58 AM , Rating: 5

It takes 35% more power and heat to put in about a 10% increase in performance on EXACTLY the same hardware, plus the added monetary cost! Why would ANYONE choose the 260 over the 250? Someone buying hardware at this pricepoint should know enough to be able to OC a 250 to 260 levels, and someone looking for top performance will give these GPUs a miss and go straight to the 280!

RE: What's the pull of the 260 vs. the 250?

By dagamer34 on 6/18/2009 10:08:28 AM , Rating: 5

Why do people by fugly laptops that include them? No one will ever know.

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RE: What's the pull of the 260 vs. the 250?

By WoWCow on 6/18/2009 10:27:33 AM , Rating: 2

It would appear the GTS250m would be the choice to pick in a laptop for Q3 for on the go gaming.

Unless AMD produces new products similar to the 4650m/4670m to nVidia's "9600m GT/GTM120" (AKA 8600m updated & revised.)

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RE: What's the pull of the 260 vs. the 250?

By noirsoft on 6/18/2009 1:27:13 PM , Rating: 3

Because some people will want the absolute best performance? And, in many larger laptops, the increase in power requirements wont' be significant compared to the rest of the system.

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RE: What's the pull of the 260 vs. the 250?

By Totally on 6/18/2009 11:31:24 PM , Rating: 2

but look at the power draw, before I looked at anything else i went straight there, that alone put the 260 out of the running. I care about performance but I actually would like to be using my laptop more than I am charging it.

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All of course

By MrPoletski on 6/18/2009 8:54:37 AM , Rating: 3

With a fully suitable chip package.

Because GPU's failing due to heat distorting the chip package is a mistake no GPU vendor would ever make.

RE: All of course

By WoWCow on 6/18/2009 10:18:49 AM , Rating: 2

Yeah, I'm still running on one of those faulty chips in my vostro 1400 (been running for over a year and a half now!).

Disappointed Dell and nVidia is never going to replace them with a new one... =/

Dell offered only an extended limited warranty in which they will replace this faulty one with a "refurbished" piece in the event it fails.

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RE: All of course

By Jackattak on 6/19/2009 2:17:53 PM , Rating: 2

Not sure on the Vostro, but I have the XPS M1530, originally purchased with the nVidia 8600M-GT, and I was able to swap the GPU for an 8800M-GT 512MB through Dell when I called and complained about heat issues.

I still have no clue whether this was a mistake by Dell (sent me the wrong GPU) or their SOP for dealing with the issues on the XPS M1530, but the 8800M-GT 512MB has proven to be (surprisingly enough) much cooler in my laptop.

I am a certified Dell tech and was able to perform the swap myself with little effort, and that was my first time performing a GPU swap on a XPS M1530.

A replacement fan also came with the replacement GPU so please keep it in mind that the new fan could've also leant itself to better cooling, although as far as I could tell it was the exact same fan.

Call Dell if you're still under warranty.

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nvidia junk

By SPOOOK on 6/18/2009 5:43:03 PM , Rating: 3

nvidia and dell needs to have a class action lawsuit on the bad faulty chips in the laptops repeat all nvidia laptop chips are bad if you use the notebook long enough it will fail i had 2 dell notbooks fail with this nvidia chips in it
nvidia owes me 5 thousand dollars for thir bad chips people
i beg you help put nvidia out of bunesses help make this company go broke i will never buy any nvidia products stay away from nvidia

RE: nvidia junk

By Chocobollz on 6/19/2009 1:36:40 AM , Rating: 2

Can't said it better! :-)

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RE: nvidia junk

By Jackattak on 6/19/2009 2:20:15 PM , Rating: 2

FUD.

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DX 10.1...

By haukionkannel on 6/18/2009 12:15:14 PM , Rating: 2

So this means that Nvidia will have DX10.1 in mobile format and DX10 in desktop options... This seems to be interesting...
... an error, or can we expect to see DX10.1 upgrade before real DX11 products?

RE: DX 10.1...

By strikeback03 on 6/18/2009 3:53:02 PM , Rating: 2

Unless I missed some desktop parts, it also means Nvidia has a range of mobile parts based on GT200 available before they can say the same on desktop. Still have the range of renamed cards occupying the midrange there.

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RE: DX 10.1...

By inperfectdarkness on 6/18/2009 11:56:16 PM , Rating: 2

the enthusiast level mobile cards are older tech. :(

my 260m gtx is > than these, but it's nice to see nvidia "attempt" to clean up some of the crap that is still floating around the market. i mean, you can still find 7x00, 8x00, and 9x00 series mobile cards being sold in new laptops. anyone with 1/2 a brain will jump on these in a heartbeat (unless they're a gaming freak like me).

i'm really hoping that nvidia will release an updated 280m gtx that's ACTUALLY BASED on the gt200 series; that has gddr5, and that fits into 15.4" chassis where the 260m gtx currently fits.

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TSMC's 40nm process

By mamisano on 6/18/2009 9:11:53 AM , Rating: 2

I was wondering, if ATI was first to use TSMC's 40nm, does Nvidia benefit at all from this? What I mean is, if a problem is detected with the 40nm process when producing ATI chips, does that fix get applied to the 40nm process when producing Nvidia chips? I know the chips are entirely different but is there anything that is standard between them when using TSMC's 40nm process?

RE: TSMC's 40nm process

By Targon on 6/18/2009 9:20:25 AM , Rating: 3

I expect that as TSMC gains experience at each new process node that it WOULD extend to any other chips they produce. At the same time though, there are design issues at play that would give AMD/ATI an advantage going forwards.

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Effecitve memory speeds

By nafhan on 6/18/2009 9:40:31 AM , Rating: 3

The memory speeds on the chart look kind of funny.
I'm going to go ahead and guess based on which ones are GDDR3 and GDDR5 that the "effective" speeds are (in order):
1.6 Ghz 1.6 Ghz 3.2 Ghz 3.2 Ghz 3.6 Ghz

Does the 240 have GDDR3 or 5? If it's GDDR3, the effective speed would be 1.6 Ghz

That seems to happen a lot when I look at graphics cards on Newegg. Some vendors list the actual speed for GDDR5 some list double the speed (as if it was GDDR3) and some list the effective speed. So, you'll end up with something like 900, 1800 and 3600 Mhz for the same GPU with the same memory from different vendors. I'm sure that throws some people off.

RE: Effecitve memory speeds

By Chocobollz on 6/19/2009 1:33:51 AM , Rating: 2

Yeah, I'm wondering too. Why don't they listed the speed in something like " 2x800 MHz DDR3 " (for a 1.6 GHz effective speed) or something like that. That way, everyone will understand that the base speed is 800 MHz while the effective speed is multiplied by 2 times. I've been doing it for ages myself when I saving my graphics card's benchmark results. I keep it in that standard. For a dual-channel RAM, I would make it read as a " 1x2 DDR2-PC26400 1 GB" or something like that. It makes me easier to read the specs later!

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Nonsense

By mindless1 on 6/18/09, Rating: 0

RE: Nonsense

By Jackattak on 6/19/2009 2:24:20 PM , Rating: 5

Living up to your screen name, I see.

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laptop GPUs

By jay401 on 6/18/2009 9:42:17 AM , Rating: 2

The bad part about laptop GPUs is how long it takes new ones with a decent amount of cores to work their way into mainstream laptops, and how much places like Dell charge to upgrade to one when you're building a new laptop.

RE: laptop GPUs

By Jackattak on 6/19/2009 2:23:12 PM , Rating: 2

I won't argue with the Dell pricing, most certainly. The "jump" on my XPS M1530 to the middle-of-the-road nVidia 8600M-GT 256MB was $150 in late 2007 when I purchased the laptop.

Luckily (see my post below on another comment) the GPU was faulty with heat issues and I wound-up with a replacement 8800M-GT 512MB and have never looked back.

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