ALTHOUGH EVERYONE EXPECTS the NV30 to be introduced at the first day of Comdex we can confirm that Nvidia will introduce one more interesting gadget. We can not say whether NV30 will be presented at the same time, but the NV28M, its new mobile chip, will be introduced at Monday 18th November at Comdex Fall 2002.
As you may know, NV28 is nothing more than a Geforce 4 with AGP 8X, while NV28M will be an AGP 8X version of Geforce 4 chip made to fit in a notebook. It was necessary for Nvidia to come up with something new in this mobile segment since it still works with DirectX 7 hardware -- Geforce 4 Go – to support games, but not as speedy as the Radeon mobility 9000 in most cases.
The NV28M will be a declocked version of the original chip working at 200 MHz for GPU and 200 MHz for the memory and will be based on a cut down version of the TI4200.
This will be the first time that Nvidia will use a desktop chip in notebooks. The key element of a notebook chip is low power consumption and low heath dissipation. We'll be interested to see what effect the NV28M will have on notebook battery life. The chip will be 35x35mm square, quite large for notebook use, and will need an additional chip called the "output chip modulator" to run notebook displays.Low Voltage Differential Signalling is not incorporated in NV28 chip and that's why these notebooks will need this additional semiconductor.
On the other hand we are quite sure that this chip will be the fastest possible notebook solution, and it will be fully DirectX 8 compatible putting some pressure on ATI's Radeon Mobility 9000.
News source: The Inq
