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NVIDIA Launches GeForce 700M Mobile GPUs With Improved Power Management

Posted by Unknown on from the now-with-fewer-burns dept.

MojoKid writes "Every year, AMD and NVIDIA re-brand their GPU product lines, regardless of whether the underlying hardware has changed. This annual maneuver is a sop to OEMs, who like yearly refreshes and higher numbers. The big introduction NVIDIA is making this year is what it calls GPU Boost 2.0. When NVIDIA launched the GTX Titan in February, it discussed a new iteration of GPU Boost technology that measured GPU temperature rather than estimating TDP. This new approach gave NVIDIA finer-grained control over clock speeds and thermal thresholds, thereby allowing for better dynamic overclocking. That technology is coming to the GeForce 700M mobile family. In notebooks, GPU Boost 2.0 is a combination of thermal and application monitoring. GPU Boost 2.0 is designed to reflect an important fact of 3D gaming — no two applications use the same amount of power. The variance can be significant, even within the same game. It's therefore possible for the GPU to adjust clocks dynamically in order to maximize frame rates. Put the two together, and NVIDIA believes it can substantially improve FPS speeds without compromising thermals or electrical safe operating margins."

35 comments

  1. Whats with the weird garbled text on slashdot? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's not every post... but it's nasty.

    1. Re:Whats with the weird garbled text on slashdot? by XiaoMing · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's not every post... but it's nasty.

      It's an april fools joke where they used the ROT13 "cypher" (replacement cypher where each letter is replaced by a letter 13 increments down the 26-letter english alphabet) on the posts. It's received quite a bit of "backlash" (bitching by people who can't be bothered to click twice to read the original post in english) which may explain why you're seeing this normal summary here.

    2. Re:Whats with the weird garbled text on slashdot? by GodWasAnAlien · · Score: 3, Informative

      Every year, The Slashdot editors go on vacation at the beginning of April.
      In place of news, scripts search the web for bad jokes, theonion articles or random text, and post them as news.

      Most readers take the day off, and hope that by the evening, the editors are sacked and the site is returned to normal.

    3. Re:Whats with the weird garbled text on slashdot? by ArchieBunker · · Score: 0

      April fools is the LEAST funny day on the internet. Most of the everyday Slashdot stories are jokes already with their blatant typos and flat out wrong headlines.

      --
      Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    4. Re:Whats with the weird garbled text on slashdot? by HaZardman27 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      bitching by people who can't be bothered to click twice to read the original post in english

      That'd be fine, if you could do it from the front page. Instead of being able to skim summaries and decide whether or not to go in and check out the comments (or even see if you want to read the article), you have to click to go to the story's page, thus leaving the front page, and then click for the translation. Or run a script that automatically deciphers the text. You can be an apologist for this worthless April Fool's joke if you'd like, but the fact of the matter is it actually made using the site more difficult, and wasn't even funny to begin with.

      --
      Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
    5. Re:Whats with the weird garbled text on slashdot? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can be an apologist for this worthless April Fool's joke if you'd like, but the fact of the matter is it actually made using the site more difficult, and wasn't even funny to begin with.

      Why does it matter? No one reads the april fool's stories anyway. (At least *I* thought the rot13 thing will go away after 4/1, and the original rot13 story was part of the joke.)

    6. Re:Whats with the weird garbled text on slashdot? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      oh shut the fuck up. Who gives a shit? It's one goddamn day of retarded levity that in a divided shit-talking world, everybody can have something in common.

      Maybe you need some new pretty pink panties, because yours are on too fucking tight.

  2. Oh, great... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    now it's rot26. When is this bullshit going to end?

    1. Re:Oh, great... by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 4, Funny

      My god, rot-26. I had to ROT-13 it twice in order to decode it! What ever heavens shall I do?

    2. Re:Oh, great... by XiaoMing · · Score: 3, Interesting

      now it's rot26. When is this bullshit going to end?

      Haha oh man I wish I had mod points right now. Although my favorite cyper is still the wrong-homekeys cypher. I nrbrt noyivr iy unyil I"m fonr yupinh.

  3. april fools by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    OMGponies

  4. Is It Over??! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Are you done trolling your own readers, editors? Is it safe to return now?

  5. Nvidia seems to screw you over: slower + worse by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 5, Informative
    the only useful point from TFA: The Bottom Line:
    The GT 730M and 735M aren't rebadged GT 600M parts, but they may actually be slower than the cards they are replacing. The GT 740M and 750M are rebadged GT 640/650 cards with higher core clocks and GPU Boost, but less memory bandwidth as well.

    So some worth buying, but not if you want something faster or with better memory access bandwidth.

    1. Re:Nvidia seems to screw you over: slower + worse by sl3xd · · Score: 2

      I've done enough testing of "new" power saving for mobile parts from Nvidia.. I had enough fun the three times the GeForce 8600M killed my laptop's motherboard. (With corresponding warranty replacement.).

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
    2. Re:Nvidia seems to screw you over: slower + worse by JLennox · · Score: 1

      A lot of laptops come with an nvidia and an Intel GPU. The Intel being used for desktop rendering to save juice. It would be cooler if nvidia worked in the direction of making laptops that utilize them to not need a competing companies chip to be efficient.

    3. Re:Nvidia seems to screw you over: slower + worse by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      Meh AMD has been doing the same thing, use the 48xx or 58xx if you want crazy framerates while being able to cook supper on the chips, the 6xx and 7xxx don't get the high framerates but also don't have the high heat.

      I figure the "ZOMFG its all gotta be mobile like teh iPhone yo!" bubble will pop like every other bubble and things will go back to normal but until then I have a feeling both AMD and Nvidia are gonna be so busy playing low power limbo to see how long they can go that pretty much everything but the top tier cards will be crap. I mean sure using less power is fine but not if it makes my games look shitty or stutter.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    4. Re:Nvidia seems to screw you over: slower + worse by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 1

      I wonder if the low power multi-dsp-line chips would be more useful for GPU-processing of data as streams, even if they might not be so great for frame-rates and gaming. Perhaps they're good for flops/watt usage ratio or something? Or is that restricted to such a small subset of users (CFD = computational fluid dynamics?) that it's not useful at all?

    5. Re:Nvidia seems to screw you over: slower + worse by Shrubbman · · Score: 2

      Well current Intel video hardware is part of the CPU itself nowadays (at least for Core i3/i5/i7 parts, lower end parts I'd have to double check). There's nothing Nivida can do that would make running two chips (their GPU and Intel's CPU/GPU combo chip) more power efficient than only running only one of those two when only one's needed.

    6. Re:Nvidia seems to screw you over: slower + worse by kthreadd · · Score: 1

      Maybe you want something that uses less power. Speed is not the only factor.

    7. Re:Nvidia seems to screw you over: slower + worse by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      I'm sorry but you lost me, are you talking about the chips in TFA or some other chips? Because i have never heard a GPU referred to as a "multi-dsp-line chip" so you might as well have said "I wonder if the fleegal will be a good flimjam" for all the sense that sentence made.

      Now if you are asking if some funky job you have can be done on a GP-GPU like the newer Nvidia and AMD chips? While I'm no expert in the new chips, especially the new Nvidia designs, preferring AMD, from the look of what I have seen it comes down to whether your code can be broken down in a way that will fit the new arch well. For a nice read on how at least AMD is doing it here you go it even has a code sample to show the difference between the old and new arches.

      But the reason the older cards are faster than the new cards basically comes down to this: The old cards were great at graphics and ONLY graphics, but since mobile is hot and in mobile weaker chips with longer battery life is the order of the day what these new designs do is allow more of the load to be taken by the GPU. Now if all you wanted to do is game this is bad as you now have a weaker chip since its no longer focused totally on gaming, but it will be useful for more tasks besides just gaming as it will become easier with each rev to write agnostic code and have the APU split the load in such a way as to give you the quickest performance.

      So I can see what they are going for, even though I love to game my GPU is gaming maybe 25% of the time at most, the rest of the time its just blowing power. the new chips will be shut down all the parts you don't need on the fly to drop power usage and on those jobs where the GPU could do it quicker it'll fire it back up, run the code, and then go back into a low power state.

      Since I don't know anything about how CFD code is laid out you'll have to look a little deeper into the designs but the nice thing is since both are going Open-CL you will only have to write the code once and then run it on any of the new chips by either company. If you are not a gamer and just want to see if your code will run faster on a GP-GPU I'd suggest an HD7750, those are a good midrange/ upper midrange on performance and can be had for around $70 or so if you shop around. It would probably be the absolute cheapest you could get and still have enough performance to really see if it'll give your program a kick in the pants.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    8. Re:Nvidia seems to screw you over: slower + worse by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      they don't need competing companies chip to be efficient.. but sometimes you get the competing chip wanted you it or not.

      of course the solution "should" be that the built in chip would be effective enough. but intel promises every year that in two years you will not need nvidia - and they have been promising that for about a decade now.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    9. Re:Nvidia seems to screw you over: slower + worse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hah, the second time mine died it was just out of extended warranty. I had to open the laptop up and use a heat gun on the chip.

  6. Mining by dindi · · Score: 2

    But the question is: can it mine bitcoins better than AMDs? :) ... sorry, i was missing the daily bitcoin article today ...

    1. Re:Mining by slashmydots · · Score: 2

      way ahead of you (weeks sadly) and no it cannot. Doesn't matter though, as a Radeon 5830 @ 240W can get about 315MH/s and the new ASICs can go 2W, 4,500MH/s. That's almost 2000x more efficient or something.

    2. Re:Mining by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The whole kepler desktop/laptop consumer range is completely and utterly useless at DirectCompute/OpenCL/Cuda, it's the weakest compute core Nvidia has ever designed because they want to sell overpriced server cards that aren't so completely crap for $2000...

      And this is why nvidia will be bankrupt within 4 years..

  7. I hate Hate HATE April fools day on Slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It leads to 3 full days (due to the people in different time zones posting on the day before and the day after) where the site is totally ruined for me as no real articles get posted (or if they are real, I can't enjoy reading them because I am constantly looking for the April fool's twist!)

  8. Finally, Hollywood is vindicated by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 2

    A million stupid ass Hollywood movies have finally been vindicated. At long last, a software hack will be able to set the laptop on fire.

  9. The 730 kicks ass by slashmydots · · Score: 0

    How old is this story? There are already benchmarks out as of like 4 weeks ago. I even have favorited a laptop with a 730M for sale as of 3 weeks ago. The 730M is supposed to absolutely crush everything before it, even the 540M. It's so much better at video playback, it's not even funny. I know this because my company needed a laptop to play 20MBps videos and our A8 Llano laptop and NVS140 laptop weren't even close.

  10. Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is posted in April 1, so this is a fucking joke or not?

  11. flops per watt comsumtion by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I know. I also made a comment earlier about flops per kw for the boards, and if perhaps these boards may even be better for those who might want to use the GPUs for stream processing of datasets. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3604443&cid=43334661

  12. I wish they'd bring VGX to Mobile by John.Banister · · Score: 1

    I like Windows better when it's in a virtual environment, but the software that makes me want Windows at all is graphics processor intensive.