The Apple of semiconductors
As far as graphics goes, the consumer notebook market offers easily the most growth potential. Of those notebooks, the vast majority are sold with only integrated graphics, which is why Intel remains the biggest player in the graphics market despite not having a discrete offering (yet).
With this launch it's clear that NVIDIA is planning to steal share from Intel primarily, but also AMD, in the notebook IGP market. The interesting thing is that NVIDIA's traditional customer base - gamers - require more graphics grunt than even the 9400M can provide, so NVIDIA is in fact trying to redefine itself from being a gaming brand into a creative one.
Suddenly all the banging on about CUDA and Adobe Creative Suite 4 starts to make more sense; NVIDIA wants to be the brand of choice for graphic designers and technology poseurs. It wants to be the Apple of the semiconductor world.
NVIDIA wants to be the brand of choice for graphic designers and technology poseurs
Of course NVIDIA wouldn't put it that way. To find out how it would attended a presentation on the 9400M hosted by the aforementioned GM of notebook graphics at NVIDIA, Rene Haas. He started by stressing that one of the key clever things about the 9400M is that it's a "high end" GPU and both the Northbridge and Southbridge combined into one manageable monthly sum.
Haas said this means that as well as offering five times greater performance than the best IGP Intel has to offer - the GM45 - it takes up half the space and uses no more power. When asked how much extra we'll have to pay for all this IGP meaty goodness, Haas said "There really is no price premium [over the GM45]."
