Under the MacBook hood with NVIDIA
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Processors, Silicon, Hardware, Laptop, Apple on
Apple’s switch from basing its laptops on Intel chipsets to NVIDIA’s new 9400M series has raised more than a few eyebrows. There’s a good reason for that switch, as I discovered when I had a conversation with NVIDIA’s Rene Haas last week.
In the past mobile graphics chips have been a poor cousin to their desktop relations. Some may have the same product numbers, but a fraction of the power. With the advent of technologies like OpenGL and the rise of General Purpose GPU computing (GPGPU), laptop GPUs looked like they were being left far behind. Popular software is starting to take advantage of GPU computing, with companies like Adobe taking advantage of GPU programming to accelerate and smooth operations in its latest version of the CS imaging and design suite. You couldn’t get the smooth rotations and zooms in Photoshop CS4 without OpenGL - and if your chipset doesn’t support it, you’ll just get an error message.
Apple’s new machines aren’t just using the 9400M for OpenGL. There’s a lot more to the chips than GPUs (though the 16 GPU cores take up most of the silicon). The chips also include much of the core system hardware you usually find as separate chips. The result brings the Northbridge and Southbridge into the same package, using much less real estate and allowing motherboards to be less than 1/2 the size, and at the same time giving increased graphics performance for the same power footprint. Laptops get better gaming performance, and applications get better user interface effects.
The MacBook’s improved video performance has been noticed, and it’s down to the 9400M’s built-in HD video support. There’s hardware support for the H.264 HD video codec Apple uses for its iTunes movies, as well as support for many of the decryption techniques needed to work with DVDs and BluRay. While Apple may not support BluRay yet, Windows will with Vista’s SP2 release, and NVIDIA’s chips handle the AES encryption used on BluRay discs, as well as handling high-end features like BD-Live.
The MacBook Pro shows off another of NVIDIA’s features, Hybrid SLI, which lets hardware developers add a second GPU for more processing power when it’s needed - turning it off when it’s additional boost is unnecessary. The Pro has an additional 9600MGT which can be used for gaming or intensive image processing - using more power than when a single GPU is used for word processing or web browsing
So why is NVIDIA producing this new chip? The main reason is the size of the laptop market. New laptops will outsell desktops by a large margin by 2012, and users want the same performance in their bags as well as on their desks. Only a small proportion of notebooks have discrete GPUs, with most using integrated graphics. GPUs need to compete with integrated chipsets on price, form factor and performance, so this is where a new single chip solution comes in to play.
There an interesting caveat to this story, too. NVIDIA’s CUDA GPGPU framework has become an interesting tool for developers who want to work with massively parallel application programming on GPUs. In the past it’s been resistant to talking about other GPGPU frameworks - but the Apple relationship is changing that. Apple has announced that it wil be supporting the OpenCL GPGPU APIs in the Snow Leopard release of OS X, and as a result, NVIDIA will be supporting OpenCL access to its CUDA frameworks. Supercomputer performance in a laptop will be a very interesting side effect of the 9400M chips.
This isn’t an exclusive deal with Apple, either. There will be more laptop manufacturers switching to this approach in future - so we can look forward to a much better laptop experience with Windows and Linux in the future.
–Simon
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Loading ...Comment by Amnon G - October 27, 2008 on 8:24 pm
Was an OpenCL spec released? is there a draft of the API?
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