CES: nVidia, AMD Mobile GPU Battle Begins

nVidia s new mobile graphics processors in GeForce 100M series include GeForce G105M, GeForce G110M and GeForce GT130M. The graphics card manufacturer has increased the number of cores from 8 to 32 processing cores for GPU-accelerated tasks.

nVidia's new GPUs are enhancement over previous GeForce 9000M series GPUs, but aren t too different. The company states that in 3DMark Vantage test, G105M is 55 percent faster than previous GeForce 9200M GE in the mainstream GPU segment. While G110M outperforms 9300M GS by 35 percent in mainstream segment and finally the Creative Consumer segment has GT 130M beating 9600M GT by 17 percent.

On the other hand, AMD has introduced RV770 chip-based Mobility Radeon HD 4800-series GPU with 800 stream processors supporting both GDDR3 and GDDR5 memory standards at 256-bit memory interface. The RV770 chip is the same which powers the Radeon HD 4870 graphics. The Mobility Radeon HD 4800 series GPU promises memory bandwidth of whopping 89.6GB/s with GDDR3 or GDDR5 memory. The clock speeds for this GPU has been reduced for the company expects to keep the Thermal Design Power rating under 75W for notebooks.

AMD claims Mobility Radeon HD 4600, HD 4500 and HD 4300 have GPUs similar to AMD s corresponding desktop offerings. AMD boasts of manually or automatically usable feature that allows switch back and forth between integrated and discrete graphics without rebooting the system. AMD further states that this feature works on Intel integrated graphics.

AMD Mobility Radeon HD 4000-series and nVidia s GeForce G100M series GPU equipped notebooks will start shipping in March onwards.