nvidiageforce9400m
Latest
GeForce 9400M to hit notebooks from five major vendors, mock Intel
Now that NVIDIA's GeForce 9400M has made its debut in Apple's new MacBooks, Technical Marketing Director Nick Stam says that five major notebook vendors are planning to ship systems with the chipset -- though we don't know if that includes Apple or not. Stam expects NVIDIA will carve out 30 percent of the integrated graphics market for itself, partly by improving other experiences besides games -- Google Earth, photo editing, day-to-day video encoding, and other activities performed by people who use keys besides W, A, S, and D. Frankly, we're just thankful we've evolved past the days when we needed a 19-inch monster to perform high-impact 3D tasks without sacrificing to the sinister gods of screen tearing.
NVIDIA GeForce 9400 M, 9600M GT get official in new MacBooks
As expected, Apple has tapped NVIDIA's new GeForce 9400 M as the base graphics for its new MacBook, MacBook Pro, and updated MacBook Air, which Steve Jobs himself says is five times faster than the current Intel integrated graphics they've been using. That's aided in no small part by the chipset's 16 parallel graphics cores, not to mention a generally beefier GPU that occupies a full 70% of the die area. If that's not enough for you, Apple is also throwing NVIDIA's 9600M GT into the MacBook Pro, which'll give you two GPUs and either 256MB or 512MB of memory. That power will unsurprisingly come at the expense of some battery life, however, with the 9600 cutting things back to four hours from the five hours you can expect with the discrete GPU switched off. In the Q&A after the announcement, Apple also confirmed that it'd be the first taking the chipset to market, but that anything further is up to NVIDIA. Expect to hear more about that tomorrow, when NVIDIA is supposedly making its own announcement.
