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New Apple MacBooks Have India Inside
Samir Makwana, Oct 21, 2008 0802 hrs ISTThe NVIDIA GeForce 9400M chipset that powers the new MacBooks was Made in India
The new MacBooks powered by the GeForce 9400M have a little known Indian connection -- the GeForce 9400M (where M stands for Mobile) was created and developed entirely by NVIDIA's Bangalore-based Research & Development Center. After Apple's new MacBook announcement, NVIDIA announced their GeForce 9400M GPU for the mobile platform.
At NVIDIA's Bangalore based R&D Center, a group of 100 people worked on the GeForce 9400M from April 2007. Sridhar Manthani, Senior Director told us that a "group of 70 engineers was involved in designing the chip architecture, research and development, and prototyping. Testing with software was carried out in symphony with the US team." After the NVIDIA C55 motherboard chipset, this is another chip carrying the Made-in-India tag.
When NVIDIA went to Apple for sharing their new plans for desktop graphics, Apple in turn told them to bring the same technology for the mobile platform. After many months of hard work, NVIDIA finally came up with the GeForce 9400M GPU chip. At the launch of the new MacBooks, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, claimed that "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M delivers five times faster graphics than the Intel integrated graphics that we're currently using."
The 9400M is built on a 65nm process and reportedly delivers a five-fold improvement to graphics performance than Intel Centrino 2, the new Montevina-based platform (compared at 1024x768 resolution). The 9400 is a single-chip solution that combines features found in the Intel LGA-775 chipset with a GPU. 70 per cent of the chip's die consists of the GPU bits and the remaining 30 per cent is the chipset. With 16 parallel processing cores -- visible from the chipset image -- this chip promises 54 Gigaflops of performance.
The 9400M chip supports Intel's latest Core 2 Duo--Core 2 Extreme processors with 1333MHz bus speed. The system can also boost the memory bus speed to 1066MHz with support for DDR2 (800 MHz) and DDR3 (1333MHz). The 9400's integrated GPU runs at a core clock speed of 580MHz and 1.4GHz Shader clock for the 16 Shader processors that eventually increases the memory bandwidth to 21GB/sec.
"We got insights from our OEM partners about the integrated chip expectations. A system ideally should be power-efficient in both situations -- power consumed when the GPU is idle, and power consumed when GPU is active. To provide the best, we combined the southbridge and the northbridge for reducing the footprint for the motherboard," said Manthani. Thus the 65nm 9400M outperforms the 65nm Intel G45 (the GMA X4500 that has 130nm built ICH10) chipset in terms of graphics performance and power consumption.
Fabricated at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC); NVIDIA has used a new bump technology for the chips's packaging in order to effect better power management and offer maximum performance. The process and the package also go a long way to ensure that the chip does not overheat or fail due to excessive heating -- vital when talking notebooks.
Will NVIDIA follow in the footprints of Intel-AMD for shifting to smaller die-shrink process? Manthani told us that "the 40nm process opens up more gates and the power consumption goes down. However, the cost of producing as well as cost of possession (for consumers) shoots up. Also, the defect intensity goes up. Thus, it's challenging and a costly affair for shifting to a 40nm process." However, NVIDIA will be taking chances and, as reported earlier, TSMC said that NVIDIA has planned to go ahead with the 40nm manufacturing of high-end parts (GTX 270 and GTX 290).
While working with Apple, NVIDIA made a futuristic step of making OpenCL supportable with 9400M -- the chip already has CUDA support and is PhysX ready. As per an NVIDIA spokesperson, CUDA and OpenCL share similar libraries. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in an interview with CNet said, "Apple knows a lot about CUDA." But Apple's implementation "won't be called CUDA, but it will be called something else." Nvidia had released CUDA SDK for Mac back in February.
As reported earlier, Apple's next Mac OS X Snow Leopard will feature OpenCL support, which has also been proposed as an open standard. So, will OpenCL work in symphony with CUDA to exploit gigaflops of processing power made available through CPU/GPU? Will Snow Leopard with its multi-core support be able to use 9400's integrated GPU for additional processing tasks.
The chip also features Hybrid SLI, which enables using motherboard/chipset based GPU with a discrete GPU where GeForce Boost peps graphics performance while HybridPower provides power management. Do note that while the 9400 platform supports Hybrid SLI, which will be offered only in new MacBooks Pros.
Transcoding high-definition movies and watching high-definition content could be less power-consuming over the 9400M chip. Since this supports H.264, the conversion of high-def content (i.e. Blu-ray) could be done faster at the cost of relatively less power as the chip targets the mobile platform. Apple has made the best of 9400M by including DisplayPort on the new MacBooks thus the high-definition display can be taken to larger screens like their own Cinema Displays.
On the whole, the 9400M seems like a promising technology that offers excellent graphics performance. The chips is an engineering win for India and something we can all be proud of.
Check out the official specifications of Nvidia GeForce 9400M here.
At NVIDIA's Bangalore based R&D Center, a group of 100 people worked on the GeForce 9400M from April 2007. Sridhar Manthani, Senior Director told us that a "group of 70 engineers was involved in designing the chip architecture, research and development, and prototyping. Testing with software was carried out in symphony with the US team." After the NVIDIA C55 motherboard chipset, this is another chip carrying the Made-in-India tag.
Genesis of the chip
When NVIDIA went to Apple for sharing their new plans for desktop graphics, Apple in turn told them to bring the same technology for the mobile platform. After many months of hard work, NVIDIA finally came up with the GeForce 9400M GPU chip. At the launch of the new MacBooks, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, claimed that "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M delivers five times faster graphics than the Intel integrated graphics that we're currently using."
The 9400M is built on a 65nm process and reportedly delivers a five-fold improvement to graphics performance than Intel Centrino 2, the new Montevina-based platform (compared at 1024x768 resolution). The 9400 is a single-chip solution that combines features found in the Intel LGA-775 chipset with a GPU. 70 per cent of the chip's die consists of the GPU bits and the remaining 30 per cent is the chipset. With 16 parallel processing cores -- visible from the chipset image -- this chip promises 54 Gigaflops of performance.
The 9400M chip supports Intel's latest Core 2 Duo--Core 2 Extreme processors with 1333MHz bus speed. The system can also boost the memory bus speed to 1066MHz with support for DDR2 (800 MHz) and DDR3 (1333MHz). The 9400's integrated GPU runs at a core clock speed of 580MHz and 1.4GHz Shader clock for the 16 Shader processors that eventually increases the memory bandwidth to 21GB/sec.
"We got insights from our OEM partners about the integrated chip expectations. A system ideally should be power-efficient in both situations -- power consumed when the GPU is idle, and power consumed when GPU is active. To provide the best, we combined the southbridge and the northbridge for reducing the footprint for the motherboard," said Manthani. Thus the 65nm 9400M outperforms the 65nm Intel G45 (the GMA X4500 that has 130nm built ICH10) chipset in terms of graphics performance and power consumption.
The incredible shrinking processor
Fabricated at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC); NVIDIA has used a new bump technology for the chips's packaging in order to effect better power management and offer maximum performance. The process and the package also go a long way to ensure that the chip does not overheat or fail due to excessive heating -- vital when talking notebooks.
Will NVIDIA follow in the footprints of Intel-AMD for shifting to smaller die-shrink process? Manthani told us that "the 40nm process opens up more gates and the power consumption goes down. However, the cost of producing as well as cost of possession (for consumers) shoots up. Also, the defect intensity goes up. Thus, it's challenging and a costly affair for shifting to a 40nm process." However, NVIDIA will be taking chances and, as reported earlier, TSMC said that NVIDIA has planned to go ahead with the 40nm manufacturing of high-end parts (GTX 270 and GTX 290).
While working with Apple, NVIDIA made a futuristic step of making OpenCL supportable with 9400M -- the chip already has CUDA support and is PhysX ready. As per an NVIDIA spokesperson, CUDA and OpenCL share similar libraries. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in an interview with CNet said, "Apple knows a lot about CUDA." But Apple's implementation "won't be called CUDA, but it will be called something else." Nvidia had released CUDA SDK for Mac back in February.
What will the 9400M bring to the MacBook?
As reported earlier, Apple's next Mac OS X Snow Leopard will feature OpenCL support, which has also been proposed as an open standard. So, will OpenCL work in symphony with CUDA to exploit gigaflops of processing power made available through CPU/GPU? Will Snow Leopard with its multi-core support be able to use 9400's integrated GPU for additional processing tasks.
The chip also features Hybrid SLI, which enables using motherboard/chipset based GPU with a discrete GPU where GeForce Boost peps graphics performance while HybridPower provides power management. Do note that while the 9400 platform supports Hybrid SLI, which will be offered only in new MacBooks Pros.
Transcoding high-definition movies and watching high-definition content could be less power-consuming over the 9400M chip. Since this supports H.264, the conversion of high-def content (i.e. Blu-ray) could be done faster at the cost of relatively less power as the chip targets the mobile platform. Apple has made the best of 9400M by including DisplayPort on the new MacBooks thus the high-definition display can be taken to larger screens like their own Cinema Displays.
On the whole, the 9400M seems like a promising technology that offers excellent graphics performance. The chips is an engineering win for India and something we can all be proud of.
Check out the official specifications of Nvidia GeForce 9400M here.
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periyasamy
,hosure, on Feb 10, 2010 01:07 PM
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