As we discussed yesterday with AMD’s latest round of GPU rebadges, both AMD and NVIDIA are locked into playing the OEM rebadge game in order to fulfill their OEM partner’s calendar driven schedules. OEMs want to do yearly updates (regardless of where the technical product cycle really is), so when the calendar doesn’t line up with the technology this is achieved through rebadges of existing products. In turn these OEMs put pressure on component suppliers to rebadge too, so that when consumers compare the specs of this year’s “new” model to last year’s model the former look newer. The end result is that both AMD and NVIDIA need to play this game or find themselves locked out of the OEM market.
In any case, the bulk of these rebadges coincide with CES, which is where the OEMs announce their calendar-refresh products. We often see the specs for these systems leak out a couple of months in advance – and accordingly see the product numbers for the rebadged components they contain – but it’s not until CES that AMD and NVIDIA publish the specs of these products. So we’ve known these products were coming, we just haven’t had any solid details about them until now.
Jumping right into things, this morning NVIDIA updated their GeForce product page with a link to a PDF with the specifications for two new mobile products: GeForce GT 730M and GeForce 710M. NVIDIA’s PDF doesn’t go into great detail – in particular they aren’t listing the clockspeeds at this time – but from the specs provided we can divine some more information about these first members of the 700M family.
| NVIDIA GeForce 700M Series GPU Specification Comparison | ||||
| NVIDIA GeForce GT 730M | NVIDIA GeForce 710M | |||
| Was | 640M? | 620M? | ||
| Stream Processors | 384? | 96? | ||
| Texture Units | 32? | 16? | ||
| ROPs | 16? | 4? | ||
| Core Clock | ? | ? | ||
| Boost Clock | ? | ? | ||
| Memory Clock | ? GDDR5 / DDR3 | ? DDR3 | ||
| Memory Bus Width | 128-bit? | 128-bit? | ||
| VRAM | ? | ? | ||
| Transistor Count | 1.17B | 585M | ||
| GPU | GK107 | GF117 | ||
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | ||
| Architecture | Kepler | Fermi | ||
For the time being we have a few unknowns and a few assumptions on our parts, but based on NVIDIA’s specs and naming scheme we are very confident about which GPUs are actually behind these products. The 730M is some kind of GK107 rebadge – almost certainly 640M – as evidenced by its support for Kepler family features such as TXAA, PCIe 3.0, and DisplayPort 1.2. We beiieve this to be 640M in particular based on the use of both GDDR5 and DDR3 and the product name, though a 650M rebadge is also a possibility due to the very similar features of those parts.
The other part on NVIDIA’s current 700M series list is the GeForce 710M. This we believe to be a GF117 rebadge – almost certainly 620M – as evidenced by its lack of support for Kepler family features such as PCIe 3.0, TXAA, or support for resolutions over 2560x1600. This means that yes, just like the 600M series, the 700M series will contain some last-generation Fermi parts too, so any hope of a unified mobile family have been dashed by this product. Like the 620M this is a DDR3-only part, and exists as NVIDIA’s entry-level part over Intel’s iGPUs.
It’s interesting to note that in lieu of clockspeeds (or really any other hard details) NVIDIA is listing something called the “GeForce Performance Score”, which is defined as the performance of the part relative to Intel’s HD4000 iGPU. The 730M and 710M are 4.8x and 3.0x respectively, and while NVIDIA is almost certainly being overgenerous in their performance estimations here, it does lend further proof to these being GK107 and GF117 rebadges.
Finally, although NVIDIA has only published information on the 730M and 710M so far, based on previous experience we believe that this is only the tip of the iceberg. In the coming weeks (if not days) we would expect to see more mobile rebadges, along with some kind of desktop rebadge. We’ll keep our eyes peeled, so until they stay tuned.
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