Nvidia's Kepler-Based GT600M Series: a New Milestone in Mobile Graphics [Photos]

Late last week we were invited to a meeting with Nvidia’s Igor Stanek and Dave Koblizek. Igor Stanek is senior product PR manager for EMEAI region and the main brain of all Tegra and GeForce M product PR campaigns in EMEAI. Dave Koblizek is NVIDIA PR manager for Central and Eastern Europe.

Igor Stanek is a very well-known industry expert that has a lot of experience with great companies like AMD and Nvidia. He was 7 years with the AMD green team and now he’s a different shade of green over at Nvidia.

We talked a lot about Nvidia’s up and coming GeForce M 600 series line. As most of you know, Nvidia has registered a record number of design wins with its new line of Kepler based GeForce mobile GPUs but, this year, something different happened.

Sure Nvidia had a successful mobile line last year. The GeForce 525M and 545M were very powerful chips, but the number of design wins was significantly lower than what they’ve managed this year.

GeForce GT 600M Series : 2x More Efficient ~ Around 11 Hours of Battery Life

The change is not just about performance. One of the main points Igor emphasized on was the fact the new GeForce mobile architecture is 2 times more efficient than the GeForce 500M series.

Dave and Igor had a very nice presentation that compared a two year-old mobile GTX 285 in a huge Clevo DTR notebook to a GeForce 460M and a new GeForce GT640M. Overall, Nvidia considers the 3D performance to be roughly equal between the three devices, but the battery life has increased tremendously.

We're talking an improvement from less than 2 hours of battery life for the Clevo huge notebook with the GeForce GTX 285 inside to around 11 hours of battery life in a modern UltraBook powered by Intel’s Ivy Bridge and an Nvidia GeForce GT640M.

Record Number of Design Wins

One of the reasons behind this high number of design wins of the GT600M series is not the negotiation talent of Nvidia’s managers, but the high efficiency of the architecture.

The mobile Kepler GPUs are so efficient that they offer good enough 3D performance for the mainstream notebooks, while having very low level of heat dissipation. This translates into less complex cooling systems in the new laptops that cost a lot less, resulting in a lower bill of materials (BOM) for the notebook manufacturer.

A smaller cooling system can also mean that the notebook chassis has to allocate much less space for it. Less space taken up by the cooling system means a smaller and a thinner notebook chassis.

This, combined with the fact that the low complexity and small size of the cooling system also reduce the total weight of the notebook, results in more significant advantages that the notebook manufacturers will use.

Being thinner and lighter, the Ivy Bridge notebook powered by a discrete graphic card with Nvidia’s Kepler-based mobile GPUs will fit more easily into different product lines that require a lighter weight and a slimmer profile, especially the new UltraBooks.

100 % Playability of New Games

One of the problems with the integrated graphics processing units (iGPU) is the fact that more than 66% of the current popular game titles are unplayable.

This is mostly a problem for Intel’s HD4000 iGPUs, but we can’t really say that AMD’s Llano based solutions can offer 3D performance to Nvidia’s new Kepler-based mobile GPUs.

It’s not that the games are not supported, as Intel often states in its presentations and spec sheets, lots of games are supported. But this definitely does not mean that the game is playable.

The term “playable” is defined in Nvidia’s marketing language by being able to achieve a sustained frame rate of at least 30 FPS with modest quality settings.

Nvidia’s new mobile GPUs, the entire line, can offer complete playability, no matter the game title.

Sure AMD’s new Trinity-based APUs will probably be a fierce competition for the low-end parts, but on the high-end, Nvidia will likely be a tough-to-beat contender.

Nvidia Optimus: An Unique Technology That the Competition Is Missing

Well, it’s not like AMD doesn’t have its “Dynamic Switchable Graphics” technology but, while Nvidia’s tech has complete application through the standard mobile driver that’s available for download on Nvidia’s site, AMD mostly relies on the notebook manufacturers to provide end-user implementation of their solution.

This means that Nvidia’s solution is updated more often by the GPU designer itself and it’s simply available on their main site. Also, a great number of Nvidia’s mobile GPU are supported while, on AMD’s official website, only the HD 6300 and HD 6400 series are officially supported.

The great achievement of Nvidia’s new Kepler mobile line has helped the GPU designer to get design wins from a lot of  notebook manufacturers including: SAMSUNG, HP, MSI, Acer, ASUS, Clevo, DELL, and others.

Nvidia’s really happy they got HP back on their green team as, last year, HP was most making notebooks using AMD’s GPUs.

70% to 500% faster than Intel’s HD4000

Nvidia’s new GT 600M mobile GPU line is so fast that even the lowest family member, the GT 620M can offer around 70% better performance than Intel’s HD4000 iGPU.

Here’s where we’ve asked Igor an inconvenient question: AMD’s APUs are usually two times faster than Intel’s iGPUs, does this mean that the GT620M will probably be slower than AMD’s new Trinity?

He answered by saying he’s confident that, no matter how good AMD’s iGPU is, it’s likely that it won’t beat a discrete mobile GPU with dedicated memory.

This remains to be seen, but we think that if AMD’s Trinity will be at least two times faster than Intel’s HD4000, it means that the AMD iGPU’s will be very close to Nvidia’s GT 640M.

This way, Trinity will likely be competing with the GT 630M, as the GT 640M was estimated to be around 240% the performance of Intel’s HD4000. GT 630M will obviously be close to 200% Intel HD4000 performance and thus close to AMD’s Trinity.

Ivy Bridge : A Good CPU Partner

Dave and Igor were very confident that AMD’s new APU will not pose any real threat to Nvidia’s new mobile GPU line especially since AMD’s APUs are really lacking behind Intel’s Ivy Bridge in raw CPU horsepower.

This is a chapter where we totally agree with Nvidia’s PR experts. Intel controls around 80% for the mobile market and it’s clear that having a huge number of Ivy Bridge design wins in this 80%-sized piece of the mobile pie is much better than the 100% of the design wins AMD is getting in its 20% of the mobile market.

There is yet one thing where AMD will have a superior offering: the price. An AMD APU will always be cheaper to implement by any notebook manufacturer than an Intel CPU plus a Nvidia GT620M GPU.

We’ve managed to snap some pictures of some of NVidia’s design wins.

All these notebooks were powered by Intel’s Ivy Bridge and Nvidia Kepler-based GPUs.

The first picture is of the recently announced MSI GE series gaming laptop.

Posted in: Hardware, Review