NVIDIA GeForce 500 Series Goes Mobile with New GT 540M GPU

Since just about enough time has passed since the official debut of NVIDIA's GeForce 500 series, we were sort of expecting the launch of the mobile version as well, and it looks like the GPU manufacturer has decided not to keep us waiting for too long and released the GT 540M graphics module for notebooks, set to become available in China first (probably because that's where virtually every notebook in the world is manufactured these days).

According to Engadget, the new GPU will be manufactured using a 40nm process and will feature 96 processor cores, as well as an 128-bit memory interface, which, up to this point, makes it fairly similar to its predecessor, the 400M series.

However, NVIDIA has pushed up the graphics clock, which now reaches 672 Mhz, while the processor clock has also been improved, reaching 1344 Mhz.

The card also delivers up to 1.5GB of memory, reaching up to 900 Mhz clock frequency and, depending on the specific notebook model and OEM preferences, featuring either GDDR5 or SDDR3 memory.

Similar to its desktop counterparts from the 500 series (we're using the plural here because it's already pretty much common knowledge that the second 500 series card, the GTX 570, is launching tommorow), the GT 540M packs a series of advanced technologies, such as NVIDIA Optimus, PhysX, 3D Vision, 3DTV Play, CUDA, and Verde drivers, all meant to keep notebooks optimized and delivering a very good level of efficiency at all times.

Of course, we're eagerly waiting for the first laptops featuring this new graphics processing chip to make their way onto the market, but it's quite likely that we won't see them this Christmas (unless you're living in China, where Acer will already out portable computing systems featuring this enhanced graphics architecture by the year's end), so a Q1, 2010 release is a whole lot more likely.