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Nvidia announces 9400M integrated GPU

By Tim Conneally | Published October 15, 2008, 1:50 PM

Nvidia's GeForce 9400M, the integrated GPU featured in every new Apple notebook unveiled yesterday, has today been officially announced on its own.

The integrated 9400M supports Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors, and offers 16 CUDA parallel cores with 54 gigaflops of processing power. Nvidia claims its performance is five times better than Intel's GM45 Chipset in 3DMark Vantage bench tests.

It supports DP / VGA / HDMI / Single Link DVI output, and offers a maximum digital resolution of 2560x1600 and maximum VGA resolution of 2048x1536.

These integrated GPUs can be chained together with another Nvidia discrete GPU to substantially enhance graphical performance. Apple exploited this capability in its new MacBook Pro lines, teaming the 9400M with the 9600M in Nvidia's HybridPower configuration.

In that setup, the 9600M can be configured for on-demand graphics processing to reduce battery consumption and heat, or can be engaged full-time for various media applications. The 9600M GT offers 32 processor cores and a potential 103 gigaflops of power.

Unfortunately for users of the new MacBooks, however, switching between the GPUs' different configurations requires them to first log out -- an inconvenient additional step not necessary in other dual GPU notebooks.

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