Additional Information on the GeForce 9400M

NVidia invited us to a press conference to further describe of its new technologies and solutions for notebooks and desktop. Of course the new GeForce 9400M was the key product, especially since apple decided to use it instead of corresponding products from Intel.
Hereafter is a summary of what we learned, and keep in mind that during most the conference, Apple partnership was mentioned during all the conference, and that Apple hardware were used for demo while PC models, such as Sony ones, were often used as reference for low performance level…
Let’s start wit the famous chips/chipset GeForce 9400M:

It replaces both Northbridge and Southbridge components usually found in motherboard, in a much reduced space. As indicated by NVidia, the GeForce 9400M is not really a chipset in its design, but rather a GPU to which components from chipset have been added:

On this image, the red squared box is the GPU part including the 16 core unit, while the components on the sides provide the support and the management for:
- DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller
- 12 USB 2.0 ports
- Ethernet Gigabit
- 6 SATA II ports...
The GeForce 9400M does not include a Firewire controller. When asked, Rene Hass mentioned that during the design of this chips, this function was not part of the feature list. The GeForce 9400M drains around 12W, figures similar to those obtained from Intel’s solutions.
Later on, the high performance level of the GeForce 9400M was demoed “in action” and compared to Intel IGP-based hardware thanks to game, but also with Photoshop CS4.
When discussing about the Hybrid SLI technology already present in the MacBook Pro by associating the GeForce 9400M and the GeForce 9600M, not much details were unveiled, as NVidia components being already inside, most of the management has to be provided by the OS, in other words by Apple. However, from what we could collect, Snow Leopard will indeed change the way users could benefit from the dual GPU components, and one could in the future use the 9400m to manage the video display, while the GF 9600M will be used by OpenCL to speed up some dedicated process.
Despite rumors of NVidia dropping chipset development (maybe as it was intended to be in the past), the company indicated to be continuing in the direction of the GF 9400M project, to better compete with Intel, as it is a rather juicy business, especially considering that the market of notebooks will soon overtake the one hold by desktop hardware.