Will Apple's decision to use Nividia chips in its new MacBooks be a catalyst for change?
With all the hoopla surrounding Apple's choice of Nvidia graphics in its new MacBooks fading, it remains to be seen if Nvidia's GeForce 9400M has legs.
Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q708 may presage other designs with Nvidia GeForce 9400M
(Credit: Toshiba)Intel has a successful integrated graphics franchise and is the leader in laptop graphics. Before I get slammed, let me be clear that I'm not talking about performance. I'm referring to market share. Many laptop suppliers--particularly in the low-cost and ultraportable segments--default to Intel graphics because it offers adequate performance, reasonable power efficiency, and it's cheap (if not free).
The question is, can Nvidia's GeForce 9400M change the industry practice of opting for Intel simply because its solution is adequate and cheap? And, is Apple signaling a sea change? The first indications are that the 9400M offers improvement over Intel's graphics, according to CNET Reviews. (Games and photo editing applications like Photoshop are two obvious areas where Nvidia will beat Intel's newest GM45 integrated graphics.)
And Apple was getting plenty of feedback apparently. Nvidia's recent statement in a conference call may be representative of what other PC makers are hearing from their customers. Apple was getting "a lot of feedback...from the Apple community" who were demanding better graphics, according to Bill Henry, director of notebook marketing at Nvidia.
Nvidia's one-chip 9400M is truly an integrated solution and thereby a direct Intel competitor. In addition to the graphics-dedicated transistors that make up about 70 percent of the die (chip) area, the 9400M chipset includes a memory controller, PCI Express, USB ports, SATA ports, high-definition audio, and legacy support. Importantly, Nvidia said it has maintained the same power envelope of Intel graphics.
But it's not clear whether this will change the dynamics of the market. Whether, for example, the largest vendors that now use Intel integrated graphics in ultraportables will opt for Nvidia as Apple did with its Air. There is a formidable list of vendors that use Intel's GM45. Hewlett-Packard (EliteBook 2530p), Dell (Latitude E4200), Sony (Vaio VGN-TT190UBX), and Toshiba (R600-S4202).
Or maybe a market shift will happen elsewhere. Toshiba has offered a glimpse of what some may do. The high-end Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q708 ($4,199) was announced last week, packing an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300, a 128GB solid state drive, and integrated GeForce 9400M graphics paired with two Nvidia GeForce 9800M GTS graphics chips.
The beauty of this design is that a user can switch between the power-sipping 9400M when doing undemanding tasks and the powerhouse 9800 GTS graphics when playing games.
And reports claim that new designs from HP, Dell, and Asus will use the 9400M.
But the jury's out. We'll have to wait to see what other PC makers elect to do over the coming months and whether putting Nvidia graphics in ultraportables and other laptop designs is a new imperative.
Toshiba's 18.4-inch Qosmio G55 laptop uses a quad-core processor--but not the Intel or AMD variety.
Toshiba SpursEngine processor is offered with the Qosmio G55 laptop
(Credit: Toshiba)The "Quad-Core HD Processor" used in the Qosmio G55--due mid-July--is based on the SpursEngine which is derived from the Cell Broadband Engine, a multicore chip architecture jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The Cell architecture, in turn, is derived from IBM's Power Architecture. Today, IBM uses the Cell processor in a line of blade servers.
The four processing elements inside the chip have a clock frequency of 1.5GHz, while boasting a relatively low power envelope of 10 to 20 watts. Typical mobile Intel processors have a power envelope of 35 watts.
The SpursEngine can deliver up to 48 GFlops (billion Floating point operations per second) or 12GFlops per processing element. Every element has 256KB of integrated memory, according to Toshiba. And the processor excels at high-definition video encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 (MPEG-4) streams.
Click photo for gallery on Toshiba's new notebook lineup.
(Credit: Toshiba)(Update: the Qosmio G55's main processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo--it will be offered with a "Montevina" Centrino 2 processor --while the graphics chip is an Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT. The SpursEngine is a co-processor that accelerates certain multimedia tasks.)
As discussed in an earlier CNET Crave post, Toshiba is touting the Cell processor's special features. The Japanese company says that the processor achieves what many high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) from the likes of Nvidia and AMD now feature: transcoding acceleration. Transcoding, or converting--movies, for example--from one format to another, can be extremely time consuming, sometimes taking hours.
A typical 1GB movie can be converted--or transcoded--in less time with the help of the SpursEngine processor: what might ordinarily take an hour can be done in as little as ten minutes, the company said in a statement. This is a feature that Nvidia is also promoting aggressively on its newest GTX 280 graphics processor announced Monday. In short, offloading multimedia-intensive tasks to a specialized processor (like an Nvidia GPU or Toshiba SpursEngine) can speed up many common tasks dramatically.
Toshiba is touting other uses too. The processor allows the user to pause, fast-forward, and rewind a movie "just by moving your hands." Toshiba calls it "gesture control."
And this is what Toshiba says about a "Face Navigation" feature. "Find that face--or that unforgettable scene in home movies and Hollywood films...The new Toshiba Face Navigation feature captures facial expressions so you can quickly locate the part of the video you want to see."
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