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Killer Mobile Graphics — NVIDIA's GeForce 8800M

Posted by kdawson on from the confluence-of-many-streams dept.

MojoKid writes "Today NVIDIA unveiled the much-anticipated GeForce 8800M series of mobile graphics processors. The GeForce 8800M is powered by the new G92M GPU which is built on a 65nm manufacturing process and shares a lineage with the desktop-bound G92 GPU on which NVIDIA built their GeForce 8800 GT. The 8800M series will come in two flavors, a GTX and a GTS, with different configurations of stream processors, 64 for the GTS model and 96 for the high-end GTX."

6 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Alienware already has two 8800M GTX models by Zymergy · · Score: 5, Informative

    It appears Alienware will be using the GeForce 8800M GTX in their "m15x" and "m17x" models:
    http://www.alienware.com/intro_pages/m17x_m15x.aspx
    NVIDIA GeForce 8800M Link: http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8M.html

  2. Re:Effects on Battery Life? by futuresheep · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you're buying a laptop because it has this graphics chip, battery life is secondary to frames per second. The people that are buying these laptops buy them because they're suited for playing games anywhere while plugged in, not traveling and off site work.

  3. Re:Effects on Battery Life? by Zymergy · · Score: 4, Informative

    PowerMizer Mobile Technology page: http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_powermizer.html

    Maybe the NVIDIA Technical Brief will yield some answers: http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_26269.html (Warning, spawns a PDF)

    PowerMizer7.0 Power Management Techniques:
    Use of leading edge chip process
    CPU load balancing
    Intelligent GPU utilization management
    Revolutionary performance-per-watt design
    PCI Express power management
    Aggressive clock scaling
    Dedicated power management circuits
    Display brightness management
    Adaptive performance algorithms

    CPU Offload Example (from NVIDIA's Technical Brief)
    Figures 3 and 4 (see PDF) show CPU utilization when running a Blu-ray H.264 HD movie using the CPU and GPU, respectively. You can see that under the GPU video playback, 30% less CPU cycles are being used. This dramatic reduction in CPU usage means less power is being consumed by the processor, therefore system power consumption is reduced. resulting in longer battery life.
    Note: Testing was conducted on an Intel Centrino based platform with 2 GHz Core2 Duo processor, and a GeForce 8600M GS, running Intervideo WinDVD8 playing a Casino Royale H.264 Blu-ray disc.

  4. Passively cooled desktop cards? by Kris_J · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I need to upgrade an old PC that's built to be quiet, thus doesn't have a fan on the video card. Anyone know if these chips could be used to make a passively cooled desktop video card, and if they're likely to be?

    1. Re:Passively cooled desktop cards? by vipz · · Score: 5, Informative

      I believe the 8800GT on the desktop side of things uses the same G92 chip. Sparkle has already announced a passively cooled version of that: Press Release Pictures of a passively cooled Gainward card have also been floating around the net.

  5. Re:Unlikely. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, you got it the wrong way around.

    Apple was going 100% ATI, but then ATI leaked about how they'd got the contract to the press and Jobs was furious. He really HATES secrets getting let out (I've no idea why, it seems to be industry standard practice. But if you ever happen to enter a NDA with applie then you better honour it!)

    Anyway, Apple pulled the contract and shifted every mac they could to nvidia. However, for some reason they didn't shift imac despite shifting everything else. I have a vague suspicion it is to force apple developers to always code in a GPU independent way (basically to keep nividia honest) but as an imac owner, it is very annoying.