NVIDIA’s Mobile Past
NVIDIA NV17M Mobile Chipset Preview
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It was exactly one year ago, at the Fall 200 Comdex, that NVIDIA first announced their GeForce2Go mobile graphics chipset. It was to be the fastest and most powerful graphics chip to hit the mobile market. In fact, the GeForce2Go won the COMDEX “Best of Show” award.The chipset started shipping in February of this year, and laptops based around this graphics chipset were produced. However, finding one was turning out to be quite difficult. In fact, even as NVIDIA is announcing the next in the line of mobile graphics chipsets, finding a GeForce2Go powered laptop is still somewhat difficult. Toshiba’s Satellite line and Dell’s Inspiron line were a couple of the few laptops to integrate the chipset and have them available. NVIDIA claims that the sales of these laptops were very successful to both home and business customers.
The original GeForce2Go chipset ran at a clock speed of 100 MHz and memory speed of 200 MHz. This is actually below most retail GeForce 2 MX cards. This is obviously due to the need to keep the power consumption level on laptops low. Battery life is everything in the mobile market.
In August of this year, NVIDIA introduced the first professional-level mobile graphics chipset: the Quadro2Go. This ran at a higher clock and memory speed and was much more powerful than the original GeForce2Go. This product is still in final stages of implementation, but I was told that both Dell and Fujitsu-Seimens will have demo laptops available on the floor at COMDEX today. I will surely be checking this out for you!