Intel Santa Rosa mobile platform

Nvidia's GeForce 8M-series:

On top of Intel’s announcements today, Nvidia has also announced its performance, mainstream and value GPU solutions for notebooks, which are designed for use in notebooks based around Intel’s Santa Rosa platform. This follows on from the launch of the company’s mainstream desktop GPUs based on G84 and G86, which we had a look at in the middle of last month.

In the performance and mainstream sectors, there will be five new discrete GPUs – two in the performance sector and three in the mainstream segment. Interestingly, Nvidia has dropped the GeForce Go brand this time around, and instead, the newly announced mobile GPUs will use the GeForce brand with an M after the product series to identify it as a mobile part.

The new chips being launched in the performance today are the GeForce 8600M GT and 8600M GS, while the new mainstream parts are the GeForce 8400M GT, 8400M GS and 8400M G.

Only the top-end performance product, GeForce 8600M GT, will have a similar set of features to a fully-operational G84 chip. In other words, it is the only chip in Nvidia's current mobile product stack with all 32 stream processors open. GeForce 8600M GS, 8400M GT and 8400M GS will all feature 16 stream processors, while the bottom end of the mainstream (GeForce 8400M G) will feature only eight stream processors.

We’ve compiled a handy comparison table below:

Since all of the new notebook GPUs are based on very similar technology to the desktop GeForce 8600, 8500, 8400 and 8300 series, they all feature Nvidia’s second generation PureVideo engine and also feature the bitstream and AES128 decryptor too. We covered this in some detail during our GeForce 8600-series launch coverage, so there is no need for us to cover that ground again.

In addition to these features, Nvidia has also beefed up its PowerMizer mobile graphics technology, which enables better battery life while not compromising performance when it is needed. This has been updated to version 7.0 with the GeForce 8M series of graphics processing units. The GPU switches between various power states (which are not explicitly defined by Nvidia) depending on activity.

For example, if you are reading the Internet, or creating an Excel spreadsheet, you’re not going to need all of the GPU’s power. In this situation, Nvidia’s technology allows parts of the GPU to be dynamically clock-gated, which essentially shuts down portions of the GPU that are not in use. It also allows the portions of the GPU to be adaptively clocked depending on the demand for graphics horsepower.

Like Intel, Nvidia has also implemented power saving technology into its display output too. This is known as SmartDimmer 2.0, and dynamically adjusts the notebook display’s backlight depending on the application. Unlike Intel though, Nvidia hasn’t really gone into detail on how much battery life this technology saves. To some extent though, it’s largely dependent on the specifications of each panel, which is obviously controlled by the notebook manufacturers.

All of these chips can be implemented by notebook manufacturers either directly onto the mainboard, or using an MXM adapter. One compulsory feature on these new GPUs, which is very welcome, is that all of the chips must have a digital output (either DVI or HDMI) with HDCP compliancy. This is obviously because many notebooks that use Nvidia’s graphics chips are likely to use either an HD DVD or a Blu-ray drive for high definition video playback when you’re either on the move (using the notebook’s display), or when you’re at home on your HDTV.

There is no support for DisplayPort at this time, but we did talk to Nvidia about where it sees this new display interface going. Rene Haas, General Manager in Nvidia’s Notebook GPU business unit, told us that DisplayPort is likely to make its way into Nvidia’s next-generation of graphics products. He didn’t specify whether this was going to be on both notebook and desktop GPUs, but typically if one supports it, the other is more than likely to follow suit.

Nvidia sees DisplayPort as a broad alternative to HDMI despite initially thinking that demand would only come from enterprise markets. However, display manufacturers have shown a lot of interest in using DisplayPort in consumer devices too, so this is why Nvidia looks set to adopt the new display interface in the future.

Thoughts...

There are a number of interesting things being launched today, but unfortunately Turbo Memory – the technology that we’re most interested in – isn’t being implemented into the notebooks that have been in the offices over the last couple of weeks. The notebook market is growing year on year at a much faster rate than the desktop market – current expectations from market research firms suggests that notebook shipments will overtake desktop shipments sometime in 2011.

That is not to say that the desktop market is shrinking though – it’s just not growing at the same rate as the notebook market. Over the coming weeks and months, we’re planning to have a look at some of the more gaming-orientated notebooks based around Intel’s Santa Rosa platform, which are very likely to come with an Nvidia GeForce 8M-series graphics processing unit or, of course, one of ATI’s upcoming mobile products based around the R600 family of GPUs.

You can read some more Santa Rosa coverage over on our sister site, TrustedReviews.