X-bit labs

NVIDIA Unveils GeForce Go 6800, the NV41M.

Category: Mobile

by Anton Shilov

[ 11/09/2004 | 03:50 AM ]

NVIDIA Corp. unveiled Monday its latest mobile graphics chip GeForce Go 6800 that shares architecture with the company’s premier desktop graphics family and brings new performance heights to the segment of desktop replacement notebooks.

The GeForce Go 6800 is a specially-designed code-named NV41M flavour of the desktop GeForce 6800 graphics processor made using 0.13 micron process technology at IBM’s East Fishkill facility. The new mobile chip aimed at DTR laptops has 12 pixel pipelines, 5 vertex pipelines and features either 128- or 256-bit DDR or GDDR3 memory interface. NVIDIA will ship a number of the GeForce 6800 Go versions: with GPU clock-speeds vary from 275MHz to 450MHz and memory frequencies differ from 400MHz to 600MHz.

The NVIDIA GeForce 6800-series of chips unveiled in mid-April are the company’s flagship products in the GeForce 6-series of graphics processors. The new series of NVIDIA’s graphics processors is the company’s second generation lineup of DirectX 9.0-compatible offerings that greatly leverage the feature-set of NVIDIA GeForce FX graphics chips and brings important additional capabilities, such as Shader Model 3.0, as well as great performance improvements over the previous generation hardware.

The GeForce Go 6800 builds-in PureVideo, a logic intended to boost performance and quality of video on notebooks. It is unclear, however, whether PureVideo has anything to do with NVIDIA’s highly-acclaimed GeForce 6 programmable video processor. Additionally, NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 features PowerMizer 5.0 technology to reduce power consumption of the GPU; however, actual power consumption figures are unclear. NVIDIA’s NV41M, unlike the original NV40 chip, features native PCI Express interconnection.

“The first GeForce Go 6800 notebooks available for sale today deliver Futuremark 3DMark03 scores in the range of 7500 to well over 9000, several thousand points over the best consumer notebook scores ever recorded,” NVIDIA said in its statement.

Earlier this year ATI Technologies, NVIDIA’s arch-rival, released its MOBILITY RADEON 9800 graphics technology based on the RADEON X800 micro-architecture. While the MOBILITY RADEON 9800 is likely to offer lower performance compared to the GeForce Go 6800, ATI is reportedly preparing its code-named M28 product – a more powerful iteration of mobile RADEON X800 product. According to brief M28 vs NV41M tests by AnandTech, ATI’s offering may offer superior performance compared to NVIDIA’s mobile product in a number of cases.

Both latest graphics architectures from the two leading VPU designers – ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corp. – are intended for notebooks with PCI Express x16 bus. Nevertheless, both use their own interfaces: NVIDIA MXM and ATI AXIOM.

The GeForce Go 6800 is available now for consumers in notebooks from Sager, Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Voodoo PC, Prostar, MV, and others. Other manufacturers are expected to announce GeForce Go 6800 based notebooks shortly.