ATI has had a lot of success with its DirectX 11 desktop cards since they first launched in September of last year, and continued that trend by introducing mobile variants in January. Although not as fast as their desktop brethren, the mobile parts still provided superior performance to anything else out there.
NVIDIA struck back with their first desktop DirectX 11 parts at the beginning of April, trying to win market share despite lagging the graphics division of AMD by six months. The GTX 480 and 470 were the first cards to use GF100 GPUs utilizing the company's Fermi architecture, but mainstream Fermi variants have still not appeared on roadmaps.
Nevertheless, NVIDIA has a lot of extra capacity thanks to TSMC's resolution of manufacturing problems on their 40nm process. This will enable them to begin launching the first mobile GTX 480M parts with laptop OEM Clevo beginning in the middle of June.
The GTX 480M will use the same GF100 chip used in desktops, but "customized to fit into the notebook thermal budget". This is a very good thing since the desktop GTX 480 has a Thermal Design Power of 250 watts. Cutting the clock speeds and number of CUDA cores significantly reduces power consumption, while reducing the size of the memory interface to 256 bits allows a reduction in the amount of GDDR5 memory required.
The connectors used on a notebook will be up to OEMs, but the GPU has DVI/LVDS support up to 2048x1536, analog VGA support up to 2048x1536, and DisplayPort support up to 2560x1600. HDMI 1.4 is also supported, using the same LVDS connection.
Although NVIDIA's Optimus technology is supported for the GTX 480M, it may not be very popular with OEMs since it will most likely be paired with mobile Core i7 CPUs without any integrated graphics. However, the GTX 480M will be available in a MXM package as well for those users who wish to upgrade older mobile graphics cards.
Proprietary NVIDIA technologies like CUDA, PhysX, and 3D Vision are supported, but OpenCL and OpenGL 3.2 are supported as well. SLI support is also available for those OEMs that are willing to pair two of these monsters together.
Pricing has not yet been announced.
|
GeForce GTX 470 |
GeForce GTX 480 |
GeForce GTX 480M |
|
CUDA Cores |
448 |
480 |
352 |
|
Texture Units |
56 |
60 |
44 |
|
ROP Units |
40 |
48 |
32 |
|
Graphics Clock
(Fixed Function Units) |
607 MHz |
700 MHz |
425 MHz |
|
Processor Clock (CUDA Cores) |
1215 MHz |
1401 MHz |
850 MHz |
|
Memory Clock
(Clock rate / Data rate) |
837 MHz / 3348 MHz |
924 MHz / 3696 MHz |
600 MHz /2400 MHz |
|
Total Video Memory |
1280 MB |
1536 MB |
1024 MB |
|
Memory Interface |
320-bit |
384-bit |
256-bit |
|
Total Memory Bandwidth |
133.9 GB/s |
177.4 GB/s |
76.8 GB/s |
|
Texture Filtering Rate |
34.0 GigaTexels/sec |
42.0 GigaTexels/sec |
18.7 GigaTexels/sec |
|
Fabrication Process |
40 nm |
40 nm |
40 nm |
