NVIDIA took the wraps off its new integrated 9300 and 9400 chipsets today, the day after Apple launched new Macbook Pros that actually use the new 9400 design. That, apparently, is one of the benefits of being Apple—you get to announce other companies' products before the company does. Apple, however, tends to focus more on style than nitty-gritty technical details; if you want concrete data on what the new chipsets bring to the table, today's unveiling is for you.
GPU capabilities, supported RAM standards,
PureVideoHD
The 9400 bears a certain resemblance to the AMD-flavored GeForce 8300 chipset that was introduced earlier this year, but there are two differences between them. Most obviously, of course, this is an Intel chipset (though it's possible we might see an AMD version at some point), and it supports the 1333MHz bus speeds and memory ratios of the latest C2D processors, all while hanging an additional PCIe 2.0 x1 slot off the chip.
DisplayPort (DP) support is also new to the 9300/9400, as is the possibility of a mini-ITX form factor. The first round of 9400 boards out the door are all mATX or ATX designs, but NVIDIA has confirmed that mini-ITX boards are an option should manufacturers choose to go that route. The mini-ITX option should improve NVIDIA's competitive status in that product segment; the only NVIDIA-based mini-ITX boards currently available are based on the minimalist (and, frankly, unappealing) GeForce 7050 integrated GPU family.
As for the board's integrated graphics, both of the new chipsets carry GPUs that are significantly stronger than anything NVIDIA has previously shipped in this market segment. There appears to be some confusion on this point, as several websites have reported that the 8300's mGPU has 16 streaming processors. I took this question direclty to NVIDIA's technical staff, and received confirmation that this is not the case; the AMD-based 8300 mGPU has eight streaming processors, a 500MHz core clock, and a 1.5GHz shader clock. The 9400, in contrast, runs a 580MHz core (an increase of 16 percent), slower shaders (down by 9.3 percent), but offers double the SPs, as well as support for DDR3-1333, which increases overall memory bandwidth.
DDR3 prices, by the way, have dropped significantly over the year. DDR2 is still quite a bit cheaper—1GB of Kingston DDR2-800 is around $20 on average at NewEgg, as compared to $43 for 1GB of Kingston DDR3-1333—but the gap between the two technologies is slowly shrinking.
Supported peripherals and ports.
Sadly, there's no Llama socket.
The improvements to the 9400 extend beyond 3D performance; the new chipset supports dual-link DVI for resolutions up to 2560x1600, can output to two digital displays simultaneously (the 8300 had a single digital display limitation) and retains the lossless LCPM audio support that the company debuted on its AMD platform.
The only feature of the 8300 mGPU that the 9300/9400 family lacks is support for NVIDIA's HybridPower technology. Hybrid SLI (the pairing of an integrated and a discrete GPU for increased performance) is available on the new chipset, but it lacks the ability to shut the discrete GPU off and run entirely on the integrated solution. (Clarifying note: The 8300 is capable of running two displays concurrently, so long as one of them is analog. The 9400 family does away with this limitation).
As far as generational improvements go, it doesn't get much better than this. Designing an Intel chipset meant extra work to begin with, since Intel solutions still require a separate memory controller where AMD boards do not, but NVIDIA clearly did more than respin the 8300, slap an MC on it, and call it good. If the board's performance lives up to its feature set, NVIDIA could be set to chew into some of Intel's daunting OEM market share.
Why NVIDIA?
Armed with this additional technical information on the 9400 chipset family, we can cast an eye towards determining why Apple prominently ditched Intel platforms yesterday in favor of NVIDIA-built solutions. If you haven't heard the news, the folks in Cupertino announced yesterday that upcoming versions of the Macbook, Macbook Air, and Macbook Pro would use the mobile version of the 9400, known as the 9400M. The 9600 GT will also be available on certain Macbook Pro models in a Hybrid SLI configuration. Intel recently released its own updated mobile platform, so why would Apple be moving away from its erstwhile chipset partner? Feature differences definitely aren't the answer—line the 9400 family up against the G45 Express, and you'll find that the two are nearly identical, save for the capabilities and performance of their respective integrated GPUs.
This is normally the point where I'd spend a few paragraphs excoriating the performance and compatibility of whatever garbage Intel was attempting to force-feed enthusiasts who didn't know they should avoid the company's GPU solutions, but this is Apple we're discussing, not Dell or HP. Apple's disdain for gamers is equalled by, and may possibly exceed, it's disdain for the media,. Besides, gamers can be satisfied simply by offering non-Intel alternatives. Better integrated gaming performance is, I think, no more than a tiny blip on Apple's radar, if it registers at all. NVIDIA integrated solutions support one major feature Intel can't match: CUDA.
NVIDIA has focused on its Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) development suite through all of 2008; the company never misses an opportunity to discuss how GPUs can perform certain tasks once relegated to the CPU in 1/100 the time while using 1/10 the power. NVIDIA is scarcely alone in pushing this selling point; Cell processors are available as add-in cards, AMD has its Torrenza initiative (as well as its own GPU computing architecture), and Intel built programmable FCPGAs into its SoC design, Tolapai, but Apple may have been listening to NVIDIA in particular. Snow Leopard, it's rumored, will include increased multi-core support, and may just be capable of using the 9400M's integrated GPU for additional processing tasks.
Apple may have had other reasons for swapping chipset vendors, as reviews show that the new GeForce 9300 positively whallops the G45 Express when decoding 1080p MPEG-2 content, and squeaks past it when processing 1080p encoded in H.264. NVIDIA itself, meanwhile, makes much of Adobe Photoshop CS4's GPU-accelerated capabilities, and recommends reviewers compare the G45 to the 9300/9400 in CS4. Even if Apple has no interest in getting Snow Leopard to use CUDA as a means of offloading tasks to the GPU, it seems safe to bet that the various CUDA-enabled functionalities NVIDIA has shown off, such as GPU-assisted video encoding, are what caught the company's eye.
If I'm right, and Apple's decision to go Green has something to do with NVIDIA's integrated hardware in general and CUDA in particular, hopefully it'll send a message to Intel. Ever since it debuted integrated video on the i810 Pentium 3 chipset, "Intel graphics" has been a synonym for "barely acceptable." This has become painfully obvious in recent years, as NVIDIA and ATI have fought for supremecy in a market where Intel's technology doesn't even qualify for also-ran status. Apple, as I've previously stated, may not care about gaming, but the core technology within the IGP that makes for a better gaming experience overlaps significantly with the technology that allows CUDA to do what it does. One way or another, I suspect we'll see GPU-assisted technology and software popping up at Apple in the near future.
Conclusion:
NVIDIA sent us a media center for testing, but it arrived just two days ago, and I've been completely slammed since. We will, however, be taking a look (and comparing it to) some of the other HTPC-friendly chipsets on the market. Meanwhile, if you're looking for more information on the Apple announcements from yesterday, you can find details on the new Macbook and Macbook Pros, the Stevenote, the Macbook refresh in particular, (good-bye FireWire) and the updated Macbook Air in the appropriate spots. If, on the other hand, you want a full review of the 9300/9400 (the two are virtually identical), check Tech Report here.
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