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Nvidia's 600M mobile Kepler is for Ultrabooks

by on27 March 2012

nvidia

Ultrabook is not "ultra" without Kepler


Nvidia has high hopes for its Geforce 600M mobile lineup based on Kepler GPUs as these will end up in many Ivy Bridge notebooks and certainly some Ultrabooks as well. Since Kepler is quite an efficient little chip and ultrabooks are getting more and more popular, it is no wonder that Nvidia wants to brag about a lot of design wins and take a piece of that cake. 

As we already wrote, the Geforce 600M lineup has three GPUs that will be based on Kepler architecture, the GT 640M, GT 650M and the GTX 660M (and GT 640M LE that will be available in both Fermi and Kepler flavors). In addition to the upcoming Ivy Bridge platform, some Keplers will show up with Sandy Bridge as well, including one seen in Acer's Aspire M3-581TB Ultrabook.

Since Nvidia claims that GTX 600M Kepler chips have twice the performance per Watt when compared to old 500M series it is no wonder that they can squeeze it inside an ultra thin notebook chassis. For example, according to Nvidia, you can get double the performance of the 500M series GPU at half the TDP. 

Nvidia's Optimus tech will also play a great part in that story. It can switch off the GPU and leave Intel's integrated GPU to deal with low performance tasks, saving precious battery time in the process.

Of course, we doubt the GTX 660M will end up in Ultrabooks as this one was already seen in Lenovo's IdeaPad Y580 15-inch (1920x1080) standard non-ultrabook notebook, but the GT 640M will certainly have lower enough TDP to go into ultrabooks.

We were told that Nvidia has scored some more OEMs in addition to the Alienware, Clevo, Asus, Toshiba and MSI that has been with Nvidia during 2011 and we guess that Samsung and Lenovo are probably one of those new players.

It will certainly be interesting to see the full lineup of Kepler chips paired up with Ivy Bridge platform once these finally show up on retail/e-tail shelves as well as some reviews.

 

Last modified on 27 March 2012
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