14 DAY TRIAL // Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA continues to expand its line of notebook graphics chips with the introduction of a series of 5 new GPUs, designed to take advantage of the company's latest GT200 architecture. The innovation behind the new graphics processing units is that NVIDIA has now reached the 40nm manufacturing process and that it has taken the desktop GT200 architecture to users of notebook computer systems. In addition, according to NVIDIA, its latest GPU additions have brought them a considerable number of design wins, meaning that users are to expect an upcoming wave of new laptops built using the latest graphics processors.
With the launch of the five new GPUs, the company has kept its current branding policy, with G going for mainstream models, GT for performance, GTS for high performance and GTX for enthusiasts. Designed on the 40nm version of a refined GT200 architecture, the new line of GPUs includes the G210M, G 230M, GT 240M, GTS 250M and GTS 260M. According to NVIDIA, these new parts are to double the performance whilst consuming up to 50% less in idle power, compared to the G100M series of GPUs.
What's even more important, with the new models is that, for the first time, NVIDIA has finally adopted the GDDR5 memory and added support for DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1, upgrades that now place the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker on par with its main competitor, AMD.
As far as technical specifications go, the new GeForce 200M Series can deliver up to 396Gigaflops of performance, with the high-end GTS 260M. This GPU has been featured with 96 processor cores, a graphics clock speed of 550MHz, Shader clock of 1375Mhz, while the 1GB of GDDR5 memory, running on a 128bit interface, has been clocked to 1800MHz.
Following NVIDIA's announcement, we are to see more laptops being announced by several of its partners, new systems that are to be introduced before the end of the year.
